Trump Signs Executive Order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to Federal Government”
The sweeping order, which defines sex as binary and fixed and seeks to exclude biological males from women's prisons and rape shelters, will inevitably be challenged by multiple lawsuits.
The second Trump administration is only a few hours old, but already has sought to wield its power to undo throughout federal law what it refers to as “gender ideology.” The gender-identity-focused executive order Donald Trump signed today, brashly entitled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to Federal Government,” seeks to eradicate acknowledgement of the existence of transgender people throughout the federal government. In its place, the administration seeks to instal a rigid definition of sex as binary and fixed at conception and otherwise to banish the notion of gender identity, and even the word “gender.”
The implications of such an order are profound. It could impact transgender people’s presence in prisons, rape shelters and schools and how their sex is designated on their passports. But the order will inevitably be challenged by a raft of lawsuits filed by The ACLU, Lambda Legal and others. So it would be naive for anyone to think that the sweeping changes the president seeks will be rolled out expeditiously or comprehensively.
Gillian Branstetter, a communications representative for the ACLU who is transgender, made clear her thoughts about Mr. Trump’s shot across the bow toward trans people, posting on Bluesky a photo of AIDS activists from 1990 carrying a makeshift coffin inscribed with a message for then-president George H.W. Bush: “WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER, WE HATE THE FUCKING PRESIDENT!”
Mr. Trump won the presidency in the wake of hundreds of millions of dollars of ad spending by Republicans attacking Kamala Harris and the Democrats’ positions on transgender people and gender-transition treatment. So whether those ads tipped the balance or not, his administration has evidently taken the sequence of events as a mandate to push back forcefully on what a recent New York Times poll characterized as the notion, apparently held by about half of Americans, that “society has gone too far in accommodating” transgender people.
As I wrote in the immediate wake of the election, Democrats have lost the upper hand on this issue, in particular when it comes to simply defining “sex” vs. “gender.”
Instead of leading with base and explicit denigration of transgender people, the Trump administration has cloaked its efforts to undo advancements in trans civil rights under the rubric of defending women from males entering their protected spaces. The new executive order also seeks to leverage Democrats’ trust the science ethos to denigrate so-called gender ideology as unscientific and Orwellian and therefore harmful.
On Sunday,
of was the first to report a summary of Trump’s day-one orders about gender identity.
The actual text of Mr. Trump’s gender-identity-related executive order went live on the White House website Monday evening. Below is a summary of that order, followed by a series of Biden administration executive orders that the president rescinded today.
Update: On Tuesday morning, attorneys from the conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom held a press conference regarding the executive order in which they expressed gratitude toward the Trump administration and optimism about how the order will impact their clients and concerns.
According to former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, the executive order was written May Mailman, who was a White House attorney with the previous Trump administration and is the former legal director of the Independent Women’s Forum. She is now deputy assistant to the president and senior policy strategist in the White House. Ms. Mailman also represented the women from the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at the University of Wyoming who sought to expel a transgender woman from their sorority. Longtime Trump deputy Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, also contributed to the drafting.
“Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to Federal Government”
This Trump executive order essentially erases the concept that there is such a thing as being transgender from the federal bureaucracy and replaces it with a strict binary of two sexes: male and female.
The Trump administration states: “Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
The order defines sex as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. ‘Sex’ is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity.’” Females are defined as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” Males are defined as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
“‘Gender ideology’,” the order asserts, “replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.”
The order seeks to strip use of the term “gender” and replace it with “sex” in all federal policies and documents.
Passports, visas and global entry cards must indicate someone’s sex at birth, the order states. This would require those transgender people who have had their sex changed on their documents to revert to their biological sex. And this would end the use of “X” as a sex marker on passports.
Federal agencies, the order continues, should cease asking people for their gender identity on forms and should only ask if their sex is male or female.
The order states that the Biden administration’s effort to extend the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which barred employment-based discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, to Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools, “legally untenable.” The effort, the order states, “has harmed women.” And so: “The Attorney General shall therefore immediately issue guidance to agencies to correct the misapplication of the Supreme Court’s decision.”
“Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology,” the order states.
Biological males would be forbidden “in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers, including through amendment, as necessary” an interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
The Trump administration will move to rescind an Obama-era Housing and Urban Development rule that permitted biological males who identify as female to access single-sex rape shelters for women.
No federal funds, the order asserts, should go to provide gender transition treatment—meaning cross-sex hormones—or surgeries in federal prisons. There are some 2,290 federal prisoners who identify as transgender. Such a restriction would force any of them who receive cross-sex hormone treatment to detransition.
“The Attorney General shall issue guidance to ensure the freedom to express the binary nature of sex and the right to single-sex spaces in workplaces and federally funded entities covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the order states.
Rescinded Biden Executive Orders
The White House has posted a long list of executive orders from the Biden administration that the president rescinded today. This signals the new administration’s intention to combat diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs within the federal government. Colloquially, it is Mr. Trump’s way of essentially saying that the era of woke government is over.
The White House states:
The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government. The injection of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy. Orders to open the borders have endangered the American people and dissolved Federal, State, and local resources that should be used to benefit the American people. Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.
I have provided hyperlinks to the full text of all these rescinded LGBTQ-related Biden-administration executive orders if you want to read them.
Executive Order 13988 of January 20, 2021: Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation
This ordered federal agencies to see to it that they had policies that forbade discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.
The Biden administration stated: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes. People should be able to access healthcare and secure a roof over their heads without being subjected to sex discrimination. All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.”
Keep in mind that the Bostock v. Clayton County decision already bars discrimination in the workplace based on gender identity or sexual orientation, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Executive Order 14004 of January 25, 2021: Enabling All Qualified Americans To Serve Their Country in Uniform.
This permitted transgender people to serve openly in the military as the gender they identify.
Biden administration stated that “gender identity should not be a bar to military service. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that allowing transgender individuals to serve in the military does not have any meaningful negative impact on the Armed Forces. To that end, in 2016, a meticulous, comprehensive study requested by the Department of Defense found that enabling transgender individuals to serve openly in the United States military would have only a minimal impact on military readiness and healthcare costs. The study also concluded that open transgender service has had no significant impact on operational effectiveness or unit cohesion in foreign militaries.”
Executive Order 14020 of March 8, 2021: Establishment of the White House Gender Policy Council
This created The White House Gender Policy Council, which sought to “work across executive departments and agencies (agencies) to advance gender equity and equality and provide a coordinated Federal response on issues that have a distinct impact on gender equity and equality.”
The order defined “equity” as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as women and girls [and, among many other groups]…lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons.”
Executive Order 14021 of March 8, 2021: Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free From Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity
This interpreted Title IX to include gender identity and sexual orientation in addition to sex, to ensure that “all students should be guaranteed an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex, including discrimination in the form of sexual harassment, which encompasses sexual violence, and including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
The order also stated that the secretary of education should “account for the significant rates at which students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) are subject to sexual harassment, which encompasses sexual violence.”
In a decision issued January 9, Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky ruled that the Education Department could not follow the Biden administration’s official move in 2023 to expand Title IX to include gender identity under its sex-based protections. Those rules had sought to apply Bostock’s findings to students.
I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The New York Sun. I have also written for theWashington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation. Follow me on Twitter: @benryanwriter and Bluesky: @benryanwriter.bsky.social. Visit my website: benryan.net
Thank Goddess this day has arrived. Women are a separate sex class, deserving of our own sex-based rights, privacy, safety and dignity. That's why we have separate sex-based spaces in the first place, because men and women are different! Men demanding to be allowed into women's intimate spaces against their wishes is demonstrating the misogyny of the gender cult, it is the ultimate in male oppression of women. No more.
So glad, relieved really, to see that sex is being defined correctly: Two sexes, and only two, because there are only two gametes- sperm and egg.
Was there ever any mechanism from preventing a male from claiming a female "identity"? I think this is a huge flaw of the notion of "gender identity" and glad to see its being diminished in government use.