Through a series of executive orders signed in his first two weeks in office, President Trump is moving to eliminate the concept of “gender identity” — that a person can identify as something other than their biological sex — from the federal government, the military, public schools, and other federally funded institutions.
Transgender rights activists are vowing to fight this and have already filed lawsuits to preserve transgender protections for military service members and prisoners. Yet Mr. Trump’s orders should come as no surprise. Candidate Trump vowed on the campaign trail to end “leftwing gender insanity” and the “mutilation” of children through prescribing of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries.
Roughly a third of the Trump campaign ad buys in the final months were for transgender-related television spots, including the much-talked-about ad with the tagline, “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you.” A senior legal adviser for Independent Women’s Law Center, Beth Parlato, tells the New York Sun: “This was not a sleeper issue. This, I believe, was at the forefront of the election.”
Mr. Trump’s Day One executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and restoring Truth to the Federal Government,” set the foundation for the orders that followed. It defines sex based on biology and says that the federal government will recognize only two genders, male and female.
The order prohibits federal agencies from using the word “gender” in place of “sex” and orders that these agencies “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”
This order reverses President Biden’s Day One executive order to review all federal policies regarding gender identity, effectively adding gender identity protections to those previously based on sex. Mr. Trump’s order also bars transgender women — biological men who identify as women — from being housed in women’s federal prisons. It requires federal identification like passports to list a person’s biological sex, not their preferred gender identity or a gender-neutral X.
Ms. Parlato’s colleague at the Independent Women’s Law Center, attorney May Mailman, wrote the executive order. Ms. Mailman is now working in the White House. The law center is a part of the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative women’s rights organization that is helping lead the fight against transgender encroachment in women’s private spaces and sports.
“The executive order is brilliant. It accomplishes exactly what the intention was,” Ms. Parlato says. “It’s a women’s rights issue. If we conflate sex with gender or use sex and gender as synonyms — and believe it’s the same thing — what that ultimately does is it erases women.”
Transgender congressperson, Sara McBride, disagrees, telling MSNBC the sex requirement on identifications amounts to a “forced outing.” Ms. Parlato, though, laughs this off. “It’s illogical, nonsensical. There is no outing. You are either biologically male or female,” she says. “Sex is binary. It’s immutable. It’s unchangeable.”
The lawsuits, though, are just starting. A United States district judge in Boston, George O’Toole, temporarily blocked the transfer this week of a transgender prisoner from a women’s to a men’s prison after the first lawsuit challenging Mr. Trump’s executive order was filed by an inmate on Sunday. A startling 15 percent of inmates in women’s prisons identify as transgender, according to the New York Times, while only 1.6 percent of the adult population identifies this way.
On Monday, Mr. Trump signed another executive order effectively barring transgender persons from serving in the military. “It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity,” the order says. “This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria.”
Two LGBTQ rights organizations, Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign, are vowing to sue. “The Trump administration is attacking a vulnerable population based on bias, political opportunism and demonstrably untrue ‘alternative facts,’ denying brave men and women the opportunity to serve our country without any legitimate justification whatsoever,” Lambda Legal counsel and Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project director, Sasha Buchert, said in a statement. “We will sue.”
Ms. Parlato says the Independent Women’s Forum has been working on behalf of women prisoners for years. The organization employs what it calls “ambassadors” to educate and sway public opinion on how transgender rights are infringing on women’s rights. Female inmates, athletes, and detransitioners are part of the program. The most notable among these is Riley Gaines, the NCAA swimmer who swam against University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas.
“I don’t think a lot of people had heard about men playing in women’s sports until Riley Gaines made it known,” Ms. Parlato says. “I honestly believe that this issue was elevated because of the personal stories.”
The same could be said of the harms of child gender transition. Detransitioners like Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosely — who took cross-sex hormones and underwent mastectomies, euphemistically called “top surgery,” as teenagers — speaking up put a face to the harms caused by a gender affirming model with lax guardrails.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump signed a sweeping executive order to restrict access to so-called gender affirming medical care — the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries — for minors, which the order defines as under the age of 19. The order bars federal funds, including Medicaid, from being used to “sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.”
The order also bars federal research grants and funding to institutions that provide this care to minors. It rescinds all policies and guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a group that puts out a “Standards of Care” for transgender medicine.
“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” the executive order says. “This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”
In response, several health systems announced this week that they will be suspending gender-related care for minors. Virginia Commonwealth University health system, Denver Health, and Children’s National Hospital are among these.
President Trump’s directive also orders the Secretary of Health and Human Services to publish a review of the existing literature on transgender medical care for minors. The United States is following the lead of several European countries that have already shut down or seriously curtailed gender medical care for minors. The United Kingdom shut down its only specialist gender clinic for children after a systemic review of the literature, the Cass Review, was published last year.
“This broadside condemns transgender youth to extreme and unnecessary pain and suffering, and their parents to agonized futility in caring for their child,” Lambda Legal senior counsel, Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, said in a statement. “The federal government — particularly, this administration — has no right to insert itself into conversations and decision-making that rightly belongs only to parents, their adolescent children, and their medical providers.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump issued another executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” which, among other things, bars the teaching of gender ideology or the practice of social transitioning in schools that receive federal funding.
The rapid fire with which Mr. Trump is issuing these executive orders is causing fear among transgender persons. A rash of lawsuits is expected that will test Mr. Trump’s “flood the zone” approach to executive orders, not only on gender.
The Office of Personnel Management directed agency heads in a memo released Wednesday to remove “gender ideology” from websites, contracts, and emails by Friday at 5 p.m. It also ordered employees to remove pronouns from their bios. This last directive got pushback even from some on the right.
Ms. Mailman posted a photo to X on Friday of an “all gender restroom” sign being removed from a federal building — a symbol of how far these executive orders reach. “Eos being implemented,” she wrote.
Ms. Parlato says her focus now is on passing legislation on these issues in the states. “Do I believe we’ve turned the corner? I really I want to be hopeful and positive, yes, we have,” she says.
