A federal judge in Rhode Island has ruled that the National Endowment for the Arts’s (NEA) application of the Trump administration’s ban on “gender ideology” to its grant review process violates the First Amendment.
William Smith, a judge for the United States District Court in Rhode Island, ordered the NEA to stop considering whether applicants “promote gender ideology” as defined in Trump’s January executive order, which denied the existence of transgender and nonbinary people.
In his ruling, issued on Friday, September 19, Smith wrote that the NEA’s consideration of whether or not an applicant would use its grant money to “promote gender ideology” violated freedom of expression protections because it imposed a “viewpoint-based restriction on private speech.” That the NEA would be less likely to award funds to organizations it deemed to promote “gender ideology,” Smith wrote, is “presumptively unconstitutional.”
The court also agreed that the addition of the NEA’s “gender ideology” criteria usurped congressional authority as stipulated by the Administrative Procedure Act.
The NEA could still appeal the decision, but has not yet done so. The agency has not responded to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment.
The decision follows a months-long First Amendment challenge filed in March by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its Rhode Island chapter, representing a cohort of four prospective NEA applicants seeking funding for trans and LGBTQ+ affirming projects. After President Trump ordered all federal agencies to alter their internal policies so as not to use federal funds to “promote gender ideology,” the NEA, a federal agency, updated its website to include a certification requirement that would force applicants to agree not to “promote gender ideology” with their funds.
The NEA voluntarily dropped the certification requirement in March, but the agency said it would still factor in whether an organization “promote[s] gender ideology” in its review of applications.
ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Vera Eidelman, who litigates free speech cases for the civil rights organization, called the ruling a “resounding victory.”
“Given all of the efforts that we’re seeing this administration make to use every tool at its disposal and not at its disposal to impose ideological conformity, I think orders like this are incredibly important to remind individuals, the public, and the government that it doesn’t get to use government funds to force people to say only what the government wants to hear,” Eidelman told Hyperallergic.
Eidelman said she does not know of any other similar direct challenge to the NEA’s Trump crackdowns.
The National Queer Theater submitted a grant application for its annual Criminal Queerness Festival (image courtesy National Queer Theater)
Rhode Island Latino Arts (RILA), an interdisciplinary nonprofit arts organization in Central Falls and the lawsuit’s leading plaintiff, has received over $70,000 in funding from the NEA in prior cycles. The organization had planned to apply for an NEA grant to fund a production of Faust for which it considered casting a nonbinary actor, or a storytelling series that could include transgender and nonbinary performers.
“I just thought of them and realized that if I received funding, I was not going to tell them not to be themselves,” RILA Executive Director and oral historian Marta V. Martínez told Hyperallergic in a phone interview.
Separately, Martínez said that the organization had its Challenge America grant rescinded and has struggled to recoup the losses with private funding. In February, the NEA canceled its Challenge America program designed to support “underserved communities” and revoked other awards en masse in May, notifying recipients that their projects did not align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Rose Oser, producing director for lawsuit plaintiff National Queer Theater, said that she welcomed the ruling. The Brooklyn-based organization submitted an NEA grant application for its annual Criminal Queerness Festival, which highlights playwrights from places where LGBTQ+ individuals face criminalization or censorship. Earlier this year, its $20,000 grant for the festival was rescinded, but the organization was able to raise funds privately.
“It’s absurd to look at what NEA was trying to do, basically saying: ‘You must believe that a cisgender man is a man and a cisgender woman is a woman to get federal funding,’” Oser told Hyperallergic.
Oser noted that decisions for Fiscal Year 2026 grants will be released in November, the results of which could test whether the NEA truly did not consider “gender ideology” despite the recent court ruling.
Previously, the court denied the National Queer Theater’s request for a preliminary injunction, which would have removed the “gender ideology” requirement earlier in the application season, said Lynette Labinger, a Rhode Island attorney cooperating with the ACLU in the case.
“It is important to keep vigilant and keep challenging where we believe that there is a disconnect between the Trump administration imposing so-called ‘policies’ and ‘directives’ that are incompatible with congressional action,” Labinger said.
For now, Martínez said she’s holding tight for a possible appeal, but is still celebrating the ruling.
“Many people have said, in the midst of everything else going on, that this little flame in little Rhode Island has brought some joy,” Martínez told Hyperallergic. “But it’s still a little flame … the fire is much bigger, and our little flame is a light more than a flame, I think.”
