Hate Speech
The president’s executive order is an attempt to roll back decades of progress. LGBTQ+ advocates intend to fight back
Hours after his inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that in the eyes of the U.S. government, “women are biologically female, and men are biologically male” — meaning transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and two-spirit individuals would no longer be recognized. But it didn’t stop there. This deliberate rollback of trans and other LGBTQ+ rights and protections also includes a section with definitions that belies basic biology: claiming that “‘female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” and “‘male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
“It’s especially egregious that this order defines ‘sex’ as starting ‘at conception,’ which is impossible,” says Ash Lazarus Orr, press relations manager at Advocates for Trans Equality. “While it’s possible to know chromosomal information, human embryos don’t show sexual differentiation at that stage — and all embryos initially develop along ‘female’ lines until later in development.”
So, according to this definition, all Americans are female.
But the implications of this misguided misgendering extend far beyond problems with language. “This obsessive focus on ‘sex at conception’ — something that can’t even be determined — reveals the administration’s anti-science stance and its commitment to spreading falsehoods about how sex and gender actually function,” Orr tells Rolling Stone.
While much of Trump’s anti-trans agenda has focused on “protecting” children from “left-wing gender insanity,” in reality, the executive order relies on transphobic stereotypes — “like the idea that LGBTQ+ people are sexual predators who will harm cisgender women — to strip the community of the protections we have spent years fighting for,” says Allegra L. Fishel, founder and executive director of the Gender Equality Law Center.Editor’s picks
Though it’s unclear how and when the relevant executive branch departments will create policies enacting the executive order, this blatant attempt to erode human rights touches on everything from education to passports to prisons, rescinds five of Joe Biden’s executive orders expanding transgender rights, and dissolves the White House Gender Policy Council. Here’s what to know about one of Trump’s first acts in office.
An attempt at trans erasure
Given Trump’s ongoing commitment to degrade and dehumanize transgender people — which has included spending $15.5 million on anti-trans TV ads over a three-week period during his campaign — the contents of the executive order are hardly surprising. “Trump did exactly what he said he was going to do, and he made it his top priority on day one,” says Mariah Moore, director of policy and programs at the Transgender Law Center. “The purpose of this executive order is to erase the existence of trans folks and continue to drive hatred towards our community.”
Similarly, as Orr points out, by attempting to force a binary definition of sex, the executive order is a direct attack on the dignity, rights, and safety of trans, nonbinary, and intersex individuals, “aiming to erase us from public life and deny us equal protection under the law.”
This erasure occurs by way of definitions. The executive order stipulates that for the purpose of federal law and policy, “sex” refers to a person’s biological classification as male or female, and should be used instead of “gender” in all applicable Federal policies and documents.
Of course, Trump can’t magically make a group of people disappear by signing a piece of paper. “You can’t undo who people are, or how they experience their internal sense of gender by issuing an executive order,” Fishel says. “The executive order tries to suggest that transgender and non-binary individuals shouldn’t exist. We and other advocates do not intend to accept this.”Related Content
Passports and prisons
In addition to only recognizing two sexes, the executive order also directs the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to “require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder’s sex.” This includes rolling back 2022 Biden administration policy permitting passport holders to use the gender-neutral “X” marker. As of Tuesday, a page on the State Department website that had previously provided instructions for updating passport gender markers redirected to a general passports page.
Beyond passports, the executive order calls on the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to stop housing incarcerated trans women with other women to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers.” It also stipulates that no federal money should be used for “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” Finally, denying trans women access to sexual assault survivor shelters and other “single-sex spaces” like restrooms and locker rooms is another directive in the executive order, Orr explains.
The fight ahead
Even though executive orders are legally binding, Sarah Warbelow, a vice president at the Human Rights Campaign who leads their team of lawyers, says that they will “take time to go into effect, and will be challenged in court.” The CEO of Lambda Legal, Kevin Jennings, told CNN that the organization is preparing to challenge Trump’s decision in court, and the American Civil Liberties Union has pledged to take “the Trump administration to court wherever we can” to defend LGBTQ+ individuals.
While the immediate impact of this executive order may be limited, “It could set the stage for a series of targeted anti-trans actions across federal agencies,” Orr says. Not to mention that having this type of messaging come from the president is in itself incredibly damaging. The day following Trump’s election, the Trevor Project, a group focused on suicide prevent among LGBTQ+ youths, reported an overall volume increase of nearly 700 percent — and that was out of fear of what he might do in office.
“These actions are designed to create division and chaos and serve no other purpose than to hurt our communities and our families, and treat us differently than all other Americans,” Warbelow says. “The president may believe that with a stroke of his pen he can rip away our freedoms, but he does not, in fact, have the power to unilaterally do this. We will fight back against these harmful provisions with everything we’ve got.”