Last week, Trump signed an executive order banning transgender women from participating in women’s sports by removing funding from federally funded programs that continue allowing it.
The order, titled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’ and signed on National Women and Girls in Sports Day on February 5th, was designed to end the “war on women’s sports” according to Trump. The order itself says that allowing trans women to compete in women’s sports “endanger[s], humiliat[es], and silenc[es] … women and girls and deprives them of privacy” while deliberately misgendering trans women by referring to them as men. It is to be enacted in educational K-12 sports programs, in addition to collegiate and Olympic-level teams. At the signing ceremony, surrounded by young female athletes, Trump stated that “[t]he radical left has waged an all out campaign to erase the very concept of biological sex and replace it with a militant transgender ideology”.
It is worth mentioning that the order has not barred trans women in sports effective immediately — Trump has simply threatened to take away funding from sports that allow trans women to compete on women’s teams, as well as enacting a change to Title IX that makes allowing trans women in sports a violation of the anti-gender discrimination law. This is in direct retaliation to Biden’s late-term proposed changes to Title IX that would include discrimination on the basis of gender identity in Title IX. The White House Press Secretary stated that Trump does except the NCAA as well as the Olympic Committee to comply with the order, despite being on a non-educational program level.
The order is simply the latest in a barrage of anti-LGBTQ+ orders being made by Trump in his first month in office; in his first day as president this term, he signed an order dictating that there are two genders and that every citizen of the United States is legally the gender they were assigned ‘at conception’. The funny thing about that wording is that all embryos are biologically female until six to seven weeks post-conception, technically making everyone in the U.S. female.
