President Donald Trump has targeted transgender and nonbinary people with a series of executive orders since he returned to office.
He has done it with strong language. In one executive order, he asserted “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.”
That’s a dramatic reversal of the policies of former President Joe Biden’s administration — and of major medical organizations — that supported gender-affirming care.
American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Sruti Swaminathan said that to be put into effect, provisions of the orders should first go through federal rulemaking procedures, which can be years long and include the chance for public comment.
“When you have the nation’s commander-in-chief demonizing transgender people, it certainly sends a signal to all Americans,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director at Human Rights Campaign.
Things to know about Trump’s actions:
Recognizing people as only men or women
On Trump’s first day back in office, he issued a sweeping order that signaled a big change in how his administration would deal with transgender people and their rights.
It questions their existence by saying the government would recognize only two unchangeable sexes: female and male.
The stated purpose is to protect women. “Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being,” the order says.
The document calls on government agencies to use the new definitions of the sexes, and to stop using taxpayer money to promote what it calls “gender ideology,” the idea broadly accepted by medical experts that gender falls along a spectrum.
Federal agencies have been quick to comply. Andrea Lucas, the acting chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for example, announced this week that she would remove identity pronouns from employees’ online profiles and disallow the “X” gender marker for those filing discrimination charges.
“Biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters,” Lucas said in a statement.
On Friday, information about what Trump calls “gender ideology” was removed from federal government websites and the term “gender” was replaced by “sex” to comport with the order. The Bureau of Prisons stopped reporting the number of transgender incarcerated people and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed lessons on building supportive school environments for transgender and nonbinary students.
Researchers have found less than 1% of adults identify as transgender and under 2% are intersex, or born with physical traits that don’t fit typical definitions for male or female.
Requests denied for passport gender markers
In the order calling for a new federal definition of the sexes, Trump included some specific instances in which policy should be changed, including on passports.
The State Department promptly stopped granting requests for new or updated passports with gender markers that don’t conform with the new definition.
The agency is no longer issuing the documents with an “X” that some people who identify as neither male nor female request and will not honor requests to change the gender markers between “M” and “F” for transgender people.
The option to choose “X” was taken off online passport application forms Friday.
The ACLU says it’s considering a lawsuit.
Transgender women moved into men’s prisons
Trump’s initial order called for transgender women in federal custody to be moved to men’s prisons. Warbelow, from Human Rights Campaign, said her organization has received reports from lawyers that some have been.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to requests for information about such moves.
There have been at least two lawsuits trying to block the policy. In one, a federal judge has said a transgender woman in a Massachusetts prison should be housed with the general population of a woman’s prison and continue to receive gender-affirming medical care for now.
Opening the door to another ban on transgender service members
Trump set the stage for a ban on transgender people in the military, directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to come up with a new policy on the issue by late March.
In the executive order, the president asserted that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
Trump barred transgender service members in his first term in office, but a court blocked the effort.
A group of active military members promptly sued over the new order this week.
Defunding gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth
Trump called for halting the use of federal money to support gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth under 19 years old.
The care in question includes puberty blocking drugs, hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery, which is rare for minors.
If fully implemented, the order would cut off government health insurance including Medicaid and TRICARE, which serves military families, for the treatments.
It also calls on Congress to adopt a law against the care, though whether that happens is up to lawmakers.
Twenty-six states already have passed laws banning or limiting gender-affirming care for minors, so the change could be smaller in those places.
Some hospitals have paused some gender-affirming care for people under 19 following the executive order while they evaluate how it might apply to them.
Barring schools from helping student social transitioning
Another executive order this week seeks to stop “radical indoctrination” in the nation’s school system.
It calls on the Education Department to come up with a policy blocking schools from using federal funds to support students who are socially transitioning or using their curriculum to promote the idea that gender can be fluid, along with certain teachings about race.
The order would block schools from requiring teachers and other school staff to use names and pronouns that align with transgender students’ gender identify rather than the sex they were assigned at birth.
Some districts and states have passed those requirements to prevent deadnaming, the practice of referring to transgender people who have changed their name by the name they used before their transition. It is widely considered insensitive, offensive or traumatizing.
