The city is reviewing a letter from the Trump administration threatening to pull funding over guidelines regarding transgender students, officials said Friday — as Mayor Eric Adams continued railing against mixed-gender bathrooms.
City Hall was “reviewing the letter and our options,” spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak Altus said in a statement, adding the Adams administration was working toward making city public schools “places where every child feels safe” to learn and grow.
It came after Adams was asked during a campaign event about the Tuesday letter from the feds, and whether it was connected to his rant against allowing “little girls” to use the same bathrooms as boys.
Adams, while campaigning in the Bronx on Friday, claimed he had “no idea” what was in the missive from the feds — as he continued his tirade against co-ed bathrooms in response to socialist mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s pro-trans policies.
“I’m not quite sure why people think it’s all right for a young man in high school to go into a shower where young girls are. I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s not safe,” Adams told reporters.
Hizzoner said his takes were in direct response to Mamdani’s progressive platform. The Queens assemblyman has not explicitly made comments on school restrooms, though his campaign platform does include $65 million in public funding for health and other services for transgender New Yorkers.
“I don’t believe people fully understand what he stands for,” Adams said.
When pressed about the missive sent to the city Department of Education, he claimed, “I haven’t read the letter. I don’t know what’s in it. I have no idea.”
Mamelak Altus later clarified that while the mayor hadn’t reviewed the letter himself — members of his administration were looking it over before coming to him with recommendations.
US Education Department Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor, in the letter, wrote he was “deeply concerned about NYC DOE’s Guidelines to Support Transgender and Gender Expansive Students,” claiming the policy could amount to a violation of non-trans students’ civil rights.
Adams first brought up the bathroom matter on the campaign trail Wednesday, as he railed against Mamdani and his Democratic Socialists of America pals, declaring he won’t “succumb” to letting girls and boys share the same facilities.
He then doubled down Thursday during an unrelated briefing outside United Nations headquarters, saying he’d look into whether he had the authority to change the schools policy, which currently reads, “Students must be provided access to facilities consistent with their gender identity asserted at school.”
Mamdani called the mayor’s comments “dangerous.”
“Awful and dangerous to hear the Mayor echo the transphobic bigotry coming from the Trump administration,” he said in a post on X.
“It’s completely at odds with the values of our city, and another reason why his single, disgraced term in office cannot end soon enough.”
Despite disavowing mixed-gender restrooms in schools — Adams on Friday praised city restaurants that have single-use stalls for both genders.
“When you go to the restaurant, you see a symbol on the door that a man or woman can use the restaurant facilities,” he said.
“It doesn’t have a sign on the door. Hey, you should go in together.”
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