Newly minted President Trump wasted no time on Monday in rolling back protections for transgender and nonbinary people.
“This week I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” he said in his inauguration speech in Washington. “We will forge a society that is color blind and merit-based. As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
The definition flies in the face of prevailing medical wisdom, which holds that gender lies along a chromosome-determined spectrum. Among the experts asserting otherwise are the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, which stipulate that gender is not a two sizes-fit-all binary structure.
While the full text of the order was not posted online on Monday afternoon, the White House website did summarize the underlying philosophy, which is purportedly to shield women.
“The president will establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology,” the White House said, under the heading, “Bring Back American Values.”
On the ground, this means that government agencies must use the binary definition on passports, visas and government employee records, and eliminate taxpayer-funded “transition services,” the official said.
It also means cutting off federal funding from programs that acknowledge transgender identity, Trump officials said, according to ABC News. In addition, in federal prisons as well as migrant shelters, people would be segregated by the order’s definition of sex rather than how they identify.
The move rescinds Biden administration guidance enacted in 2023 that allows for gender inclusion and calls for all federal employees to “have their respective gender identities accurately reflected and identified in the workplace.”
Trans and human rights advocates slammed the new federal stance.
“[The] executive actions targeting the LGBTQ+ community serve no other purpose than to hurt our families and our communities,” HRC President Kelley Robinson said in a statement Monday. “We are not going anywhere, and we will fight back against these harmful provisions with everything we’ve got.”
The civil rights organization Lambda Legal was among several that vowed to fight the policy in court.
“The president can’t, with a wave of a pen, change the reality of who people are and the fact that we as a community of people exist,” Jennifer Pizer, chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, told NBC News. “We have equal protection rights, just like anybody else does.”