Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration will be issuing new “guidance” on the treatment of transgender students under Title IX.

The Trump administration will issue new guidelines on how public schools treat transgender students, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said at a news briefing on Tuesday, indicating that the matter should be left up to states.

The announcement suggests the Justice Department will rescind a policy enacted by the Obama administration designed to protect transgender students from discrimination and harassment, which said students could use facilities that match their gender identity, from restrooms to dorms.

This comes as no surprise, having discussed at length the means by which the Obama Departments of Justice and Education wound their way from a law that prohibited sex discrimination, enacted in 1972, to the euphemistically named “guidance,” meaning not law, not even regulations, but a letter sent out by a bureaucrat completely changing everything, even though it’s putatively unenforceable. It’s just, you know, “guidance.”

And that’s where the problem lies.

Vanita Gupta, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under Obama, said repealing the guidance — which interprets federal law — would not eliminate protections provided by the laws themselves.

This is true. And false. Gupta is right that new guidance no more changes the law than old guidance, which similarly didn’t change the law. What it did was ram down school districts’ throats less-than-lawfully-created rules that warmed the innards of Gupta and Catherine Lhamon, the head of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, and appointed by President Obama at ten minutes before midnight in his administration to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

“This administration cannot strip away the rights of transgender students by retracting the guidance — the issue is before the courts now and the law has not changed,” she said in a statement to BuzzFeed News, referring to questions before the Supreme Court and other federal judges.

That, however, is notably inaccurate. To the extent courts adopted the guidance as a valid agency interpretation of Title IX, morphing the clear words “sex discrimination” into gender identity, it was due to deference. New administration, new guidance. Deference is a double-edged sword, which is why it’s anything but a substitute for law.

“To cloak this in federalism ignores the vital and historic role that federal law plays in ensuring that all children are able to attend school free from discrimination,” she said.

The United States Department of Education opened for business on May 4, 1980. Gupta’s “historic” claim may be a bit hyperbolic. Before that, education had long been considered a matter under local control. School districts had school boards who called the shots for the students. They reflected the will of the community.

This is either a wonderful or terrible thing, according to how you feel about the will of the community. In fairness, some communities elected some radical folks to their school boards, the sort who preferred religious instruction to things like science. It may not be quite so simple to call local control good or bad, and consequently, it may not be so simple as to call oversight by the state or feds overreaching.

That said, Gupta’s claim is facial nonsense. It is not, and never has been, the law that “sex discrimination” under Title IX means gender identity, and that a “guidance” letter by her and Lhamon means your kid has to share a locker room, a dorm room, and whatever will come down the road when this newly manufactured right slides down the slope, with a child with different genitalia.

Notably, nothing about this precludes a local school board from adopting the positions expressed by Gupta and Lhamon. Schools can address the rights of transgender students any way they deem appropriate, whether it’s to formulate policies that would put a big grin on Lhamon’s face or not. Nothing in the law forbids a school from following the guidance voluntarily. Indeed, schools could even go farther, if that’s what they choose to do.

So what’s the big deal?

The problem is that this monumental shift in discrimination law lacks support. While Gupta and Lhamon, together with transgender advocates, believe in the virtues of social engineering, it comes at the expense of the rights of others to privacy and modesty. It is not necessarily that people hate transgender students, or don’t care about discrimination against them or, worse yet, the potential of their being subject to harm. It’s that they aren’t prepared to sacrifice their children’s rights for the benefit of other children’s.

What Gupta and Lhamon realize is that there is no widespread public support for their radical initiatives, which is why Congress has rejected it repeatedly, and why they can’t trust local school boards to comply with it absent the threat of financial ruin. The goal of forcing it down the throats of school boards until it was embedded in the way they did business provided a means to “normalize” their agenda while they had the chance.

Once in place, it would be far harder to undo. More importantly, once in place, they believed everyone would adopt their feelings about transgender discrimination and let go of their prejudice against transgenders. They weren’t sick, evil people. They weren’t pedophiles or rapists. They were just kids who identified differently than other kids. If people understood this, the discrimination, fear and hatred would evaporate.

And indeed, that might well be the case. Regardless of how you feel about transgender people in general, and students in particular, no one should be harmed or denied an appropriate education. What that means, and how the rules of the road will flesh out, however, should be the subject of discussion and legislation, not the radical ideas of a couple of bureaucrats with an agenda and a pen.

It’s not likely to change anyone’s mind for Gupta to lie about it being the law. It’s not. She does not get to invent law. Her calling it law does not make it so. And like so many of the divisions that polarize our political dialogue, her trying to force her agenda down an unwilling public’s throat isn’t going to help us achieve a cogent accommodation of transgender people’s rights while accommodating the rights of everyone else as well.