President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday compelling schools to ban transgender women from women’s sports.Andrew Leyden/Zuma
President Donald Trump’s barrage of executive orders targeting transgender people has resulted in an immediate catastrophe for trans people, their families, and those who seek to work with them. Federal agencies have scrambled to scrub so-called “gender ideology” from websites and agency guidance, removing valuable information about HIV prevention, research into health disparities, and webpages about sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. Meanwhile, federal employees are ordered to remove pronouns in their email signatures, and agencies have banned Pride events.
Trump signed his first anti-trans executive order within hours of taking office and has only continued the onslaught. The speed and scope of the orders are “all- encompassing and terrifyingly breathtaking,” as Lambda Legal senior attorney Carl Charles tells me—which is the point. The orders will run up against significant constraints, like established legal precedent and administrative procedures, but by instilling fear in trans people and the institutions that support them, the Trump administration is banking on preemptive obedience.
“They’re hoping that they can scare people into compliance and therefore not have to actually account for—and do the things—that potentially require compliance,” Charles says.
“They’re hoping that they can scare people into compliance and therefore not have to actually account for—and do the things—that potentially require compliance.”
So far, Trump’s suite of anti-trans executive orders compel schools to ban trans women from women’s sports, redefine “sex,” threaten hospitals’ funding if they offer gender-affirming care to patients under age 19, ban trans people from the military, and direct the Department of Justice to investigate teachers who “socially transition” trans and nonbinary students by respecting their names and pronouns. Hospital systems from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles have decided to obey Trump in advance, voluntarily canceling gender-affirming medical care appointments for children to avoid the drastic removal of essential federal funds, even as state attorneys general have argued that the Trump order is illegal. The overarching goal of the orders, says Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson with the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, is to establish as law the Trump administration’s completely unscientific version of gender as binary and established at conception.
“This is an administration whose principal priority is driving transgender people from public life,” Branstetter says, “and doing everything in its power to try and control our bodies and our lives.”
Nonetheless, trans people and their allies are fighting back. Trans federal prisoners are challenging expected transfers and the end of their gender-affirming care. On Tuesday, parents of trans youth sued the Trump administration, arguing that his effort to ban gender-affirming care by executive fiat encroaches on Congress’ spending power, infringes on parental rights, and violates the First Amendment. A group of 15 attorneys general, representing states with some of the strongest protections for trans people, has declared their intent to ignore Trump’s gender-affirming care executive order and have promised to take the federal government to court should it attempt enforcement. New York and other states have their own anti-discrimination laws protecting access to such care.
“They are wielding trans people against these hospital systems as a weapon, as a cudgel to say, ‘Don’t do this, or you won’t be able to serve anybody,’” Charles says. “That is so incredibly shameful. It is shameful and it’s disgusting.”
Whether Trump’s executive orders have any teeth—the ACLU and Lambda Legal, among other civil rights organizations, argue they don’t—the mere threat of enforcing those orders has been enough to overturn what have become norms. Instead of waiting for agencies to go through formal rulemaking, a process that requires public input and takes years, or for courts to weigh in on whether the executive orders are legal, major institutions are capitulating.
“They are wielding trans people against these hospital systems as a weapon, as a cudgel to say, ‘Don’t do this, or you won’t be able to serve anybody.’”
Consider Trump’s trans sports ban that completely rewrites Title IX policy, even though the Department of Education is responsible for such regulation changes. Some institutions have already responded as though the order were an enforceable legal mandate. Harvard University’s athletics department removed its transgender inclusion policy from its website hours after Trump signed the order. On Thursday, the National Collegiate Athletic Association banned trans women from women’s sports competitions across its 1,100 member colleges and universities, with its president saying Trump’s order “provides a clear, national standard.” The same day, the federal Department of Education (the agency created by Congress that Trump suggests he would eliminate via executive order) announced it was investigating San Jose State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for their trans athlete policies.
Schools receive a significant amount of money from the federal government; the Department of Education disbursed more than $73 billion across K-12 schools and higher education in fiscal year 2021 (the most recent data available). Institutions of higher education rely far more on federal funds than K-12 schools; public two-year colleges, for example, have received more than a quarter of their funding from the federal government, while 18 percent of public four-year colleges’ revenue comes from federal sources. Institutions found in violation of Title IX risk losing all their federal funds. Since the law was passed in 1972, the federal government has never delivered on that threat, but the Trump administration’s unprecedented moves thus far don’t inspire confidence in norms to continue. “I don’t think anyone in the education world wants the administration using them as an example of something that is wrong,” Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, told Chalkbeat.
Similarly, major hospital systems, including Children’s Hospital LA in California and NYU Langone Health in New York, have stopped providing gender-affirming medications and surgery to trans youth under 19—much to the glee of the White House. In this case, the threat was explicit, so hospitals and medical schools that offer gender-affirming medical care to minors would lose federal funding. The order also mischaracterized puberty blockers and hormone treatments as “chemical mutilation.” Federal agencies were directed to begin a review process of research grants offered to medical institutions, and the Department of Justice was instructed to pursue civil and criminal prosecutions against providers under consumer fraud and female genital mutilation laws.
The 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County recognized that workplace discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation is, inherently, sex discrimination. Despite the actions of the Trump administration, this is still the law of the land. But the Trump administration has made efforts to simply erase the ruling. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that reviews workplace discrimination complaints, has removed its webpage on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination—a webpage that, until late January, outlined the Bostock ruling.
On January 28, EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas—a Republican holdover from Trump’s first term and one of two remaining commissioners after he fired two Democrats—announced that one of her top priorities is to “defend the biological and binary reality of sex.” As part of that, she directed the EEOC to remove the “X” gender marker and “Mx.” honorific on complaint intake forms and mentioned her disdain for prior EEOC guidance suggesting that the repeated misgendering of an employee could amount to discrimination. Former and current EEOC employees confirmed to Mother Jones that the commission has temporarily halted all investigations into complaints of discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.
The EEOC’s move to foreclose queer people from raising sex discrimination claims upends its own longstanding practice and puts LGBTQ workers at risk, Charles says. “We’re talking half a century, nearly, of anti-discrimination systems that exist to protect people in the workplace, to ensure their complaints are heard,” he tells me. “There’s a lot of mischief and mayhem that can be caused just by delaying people the opportunity to be heard and delaying their day in court.”
The Supreme Court has not extended its ruling in Bostock to other federal anti-discrimination laws—like Title IX, which applies to education, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the Biden administration and federal courts did expand myriad protections for trans people, from prohibiting anti-trans discrimination in schools to allowing intersex and nonbinary people to select the gender marker “X” on their passports.
“This is an administration whose principal priority is driving transgender people from public life .”
Now, in the aftermath of Trump’s executive orders, the State Department has stopped processing all requests to update passport gender markers. Branstetter says the ACLU has heard from trans and nonbinary people across the US whose identification documents—including former passports, photo IDs, and court orders for name changes—are being held by the State Department, with no timeline given for their return.
In his order seeking the elimination of “gender ideology” from the federal government, Trump also directed federal prisons to rehouse trans women in men’s facilities and forcibly detransition incarcerated people. That order, which incarcerated trans women have already challenged, flies in the face of federal court decisions that classify the blanket denial of gender-affirming care as cruel and unusual punishment, Charles says.
The Biden administration further protected trans people by applying Bostock to other anti-discrimination laws through administrative rulemaking. Last May, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services released a final rule specifying that gender dysphoria could be considered a disability. And under President Joe Biden, the Department of Education’s Title IX regulations affirmed that the education law protected trans and nonbinary students from gender identity discrimination. As I previously reported, this was one of Biden’s rules that was vacated by a judge shortly before Trump took office.
None of the Trump administration’s moves come as a surprise, Branstetter says. Trump’s directives are the culmination of a yearslong, coordinated conservative movement to restrict trans rights, elevating what had been a mostly state-level effort to cover every aspect of the federal government and fulfilling Trump’s anti-trans campaign promises. Nonetheless, what she finds most startling is the rhetoric contained in the mandate to eradicate trans people from the military—likely the largest single employer of trans people in the United States. The order says identifying as trans “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
“That order basically suggests that, by virtue of being trans, we are inherently less trustworthy and deceitful by nature,” Branstetter says, “basically echoing the way that the government used to describe homosexuals in the 1940s and ’50s and before purging thousands of them from the federal government.”