Trump’s Executive Order Makes Anti-Trans Bigotry Official State Policy
It will open trans people to cruelty and violence without making anyone safer
During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump wasted no opportunity to flaunt his disdain for transgender people and policies designed to protect them. His campaign spent $215 million—or $134 for every trans person in America—on media ads to spread his demeaning message. As he stated: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” The ads were a textbook example of how authoritarians operate: Identify a vulnerable minority, portray it as a terrifying threat, and use the resulting fear and loathing to win votes. There is no clear verdict yet on just how effective the ads were, but they certainly fired up his base and featured prominently in the Trump campaign’s closing message. Last year’s rhetorical attacks, however, are nothing compared to the comprehensive assault that the new administration has just launched.
Trump’s Anti-Trans Order
On Trump’s first day back in office, he issued an executive order declaring: “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” It denounces “gender ideology” for “permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.” The order says that the administration is reversing Joe Biden’s policy treating discrimination against trans people as a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Transgender individuals will no longer be allowed to choose how to designate their sex on passports, and non-binary Americans will no longer be allowed to choose “X” instead of “M” or “F.”
The order instructs federal agencies to stop using gender identity as a classification, requires federal documents to categorize people strictly by their biological sex as designated at birth, bars federal prisons from assigning inmates according to their gender identity or providing gender-affirming medical care, and rescinds a raft of federal documents aimed at promoting transgender equality. Restrooms in federal buildings, including military bases, would no longer be accessible to trans people in accordance with their gender identity—and the Civil Rights Act apparently would be used to force the same policy on private companies.
Title IX of that law, which forbids sex discrimination in colleges and schools that receive federal funding, will no longer be used to combat discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identification. Trump also scrapped Biden’s policy allowing transgender people to serve in the military, and issued his own directive declaring that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.” Trump has said his goal is to “get transgender out of the military.”
There are some difficult issues when it comes to the treatment of transgender people—such as whether, or under what circumstances, transgender high school or college students should be allowed to compete on sports teams aligned with their gender identification, and whether, or to what extent, gender-affirming therapies should be available to minors. But the Trump administration doesn’t do nuance. It simply repudiates any policy accommodating the interests of transgender people.
The strategy rests on two untenable pillars: denial and disgust. Trump’s policy asserts that there are only two sexes and that everyone must be categorized accordingly. This claim ignores the existence of intersex individuals whose biological sexual characteristics are mixed—say, a penis and an XX chromosome, or an external vagina and internal testes. The United States has some five million intersex people, making them more numerous than Korean Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Muslims, or Hindus. When Trump says the existence of only two sexes is “a fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” he’s wishing away a subset of humanity that is itself a fundamental and incontrovertible reality.
The administration is also refusing to confront the undeniable fact that millions of people experience serious gender dysphoria—as recognized by every major medical and psychiatric organization in the country. Experts estimate the prevalence of this condition at about 0.5% of American adults. And it’s not just a quirk of personality. A study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism notes that “recent studies point toward a biological basis involving endocrine, neurobiological, and genetic factors,” including exposure to sex hormones in utero. For these people, adapting their lives and bodies to match their deeply rooted sense of gender can be not just liberating but lifesaving.
Anti-Trans Hysteria Has Become a Core MAGA Principle
The MAGA approach is to pretend such people don’t exist except as dangerous impostors and predators. When Sarah McBride, the first-ever transgender House member, arrived in Washington, Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina demanded that the Delaware Democrat and other transgender women be barred from women’s restrooms in the Capitol, ostensibly to ensure personal safety in an intimate space (and to add gratuitous humiliation to this cruelty, a Republican colleague of Mace’s recently introduced McBride as “the gentleman from Delaware”). But this purported protection is not based on any documented danger in places where trans women are allowed to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms. The number of alleged abuses is microscopically tiny, which is why hundreds of organizations concerned with sexual assault and domestic violence signed onto a 2018 letter that said: “As rape crisis centers, shelters, and other service providers who work each and every day to meet the needs of all survivors and reduce sexual assault and domestic violence throughout society, we speak from experience and expertise when we state that these claims are false.”
What’s more, the alleged danger that cross-dressing men will invade restrooms and locker rooms to prey on women is strikingly hypocritical coming from a party whose leader has been found guilty of sexual abuse by a civil jury—and who has bragged of forcibly groping women. Trump has also sought to elevate to Cabinet offices men credibly accused of sexual abuse, including Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Matt Gaetz. None of them was reported to be wearing women’s clothing when they committed their alleged offenses.
There are bound to be harmful practical consequences from the anti-trans policies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo prohibiting enlistment by anyone with gender dysphoria and suspending gender-affirming care from those already in the military. If the policy is applied to banish transgender men and women, the ranks of the armed forces would lose upwards of 15,000 members whose training and experience represent a costly investment that would instantly go up in smoke. Critics of Biden’s policy insisted it would harm morale and readiness, but in 2018, before Trump’s previous partial ban was imposed, the chiefs of all four military branches testified before Congress that military readiness and unit cohesion had not been affected by the presence of openly transgender troops. A survey conducted in 2020, when Trump’s previous ban was in effect, found that two-thirds of active-duty service members supported allowing transgender people to serve.
Opponents of transgender equality have nightmares of hairy guys in skirts barging into women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and domestic violence shelters, where they can ogle, paw, and rape without hindrance. There are some obvious flaws in this reasoning. Men don’t need to impersonate females to forcibly violate women—something Trump himself has shown. And his policy will backfire in a big way. A transgender man, bearded, muscular, and brimming with testosterone, will be exiled to women’s private spaces—and women will have to accept it.
Nancy Mace is appalled at the idea that the feminine Sarah McBride could be in a neighboring stall. But what would Mike Johnson or Jim Jordan do if she walked in as they unzipped at the urinal? Some transgender people barred from the restrooms they prefer will be forced, in effect, to out themselves, which can be a dangerous thing to do. And non-trans men and women with a slightly androgynous appearance may be falsely accused of using the wrong restroom. Mace and fellow GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado already erred in confronting a woman they thought was McBride in a women’s restroom.
Barring transgender women from women’s prison wings also creates serious risks. A survey of transgender inmates by the Vera Institute of Justice found that 53% had suffered “a nonconsensual sexual encounter during their current sentence.” A transgender woman inmate who had undergone both top and bottom surgery as well as hormone therapy was transferred to a men’s prison, where she was put in solitary confinement and felt like “a zoo animal.” She filed a lawsuit making the argument that “a woman with full female anatomy has no place in a men’s facility,” and she was returned to the women’s prison—though the threat of being placed with men remains very real. The new policy would inevitably mean that inmates born female who have fully transitioned, and look no less manly than Elon Musk, will be sharing cells with women. Will women inmates feel safer? Will they be safer? Have the MAGA people really thought this through?
Invoking a Divine Order to Justify an Executive Order
But the furious opposition to transgender rights among Trump and his loyalists isn’t based on logic or evidence. They are acting instead on a visceral abhorrence of people whose choices they find incomprehensible, and they often claim authority from the Bible. House Speaker Mike Johnson is fond of citing Genesis, which says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” But if God made humans male and female, He also made some of them intersex. The axiom “God doesn’t make mistakes” is also used to rebut the idea that someone’s gender identity could be misaligned with that person’s biological sex. But people born with spina bifida or cleft palates raise the possibility that divine errors really do occur. If it’s biblically permissible to perform surgery to correct other birth defects, why not for a grievous contradiction between minds, hearts, and sex organs?
The legality and even constitutionality of this executive order is dubious at best. Numerous courts have held that laws barring discrimination on the basis of sex make it illegal to discriminate against transgender people. In a 2020 decision regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.” The same logic applies to discrimination in other contexts. Then there is the 14th Amendment. Camilla Taylor, deputy legal director for litigation for Lambda Legal, told me, “For the government to issue an executive order stating that a group of people shouldn’t exist and depriving them of rights, benefits, and health care in every aspect of their lives—I can’t think of a more flagrant violation of the Equal Protection guarantee.”
In 1996, the Supreme Court struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment forbidding local governments from enacting laws to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. The reasoning in that case is highly relevant to Trump’s decree. “First, the amendment has the peculiar property of imposing a broad and undifferentiated disability on a single named group, an exceptional and, as we shall explain, invalid form of legislation,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. “Second, its sheer breadth is so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it that the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects.” Animus is clearly the motive for this order. It is, Taylor says, “a lawless celebration of cruelty.”
As is often the case, religious objections serve as a cover for bigotry. In her 2010 book, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law, University of Chicago philosophy and law professor Martha Nussbaum wrote: “Today, large segments of the Christian Right openly practice a politics based upon disgust. Depicting the sexual practices of lesbians and, especially, of gay men as vile and revolting, they suggest that such practices contaminate and defile society, producing decay and degeneration.” The same formula works for transgender people.
The executive order, like the campaign messaging, is intended to single out a tiny group as worthy of nothing but fear, contempt, and ridicule—with the goal of suppression, if not legal eradication. The MAGA dream is of a world in which transgender people don’t exist. It’s a blinkered mindset cultivated by authoritarians, who prosper by inciting hatred in order to elevate some groups while punishing others who fail to conform to traditional expectations. It’s a repudiation of the ideals of a liberal society: personal freedom, bodily autonomy, tolerance, and respect for the dignity of every individual.
America was founded on a belief in the value of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The simple concept, so at odds with authoritarian values, that transgender people are real and that their lives have value is in perfect accord with our national ideals. Trump’s policies repudiate those ideals, and dehumanizing transgender people is just one of his methods for wrecking the institutions that are the foundation of our system of government. So the targets of this policy won’t be the only victims. When you set out to inflict pain and suffering on a vulnerable minority, the harm is bound to spread.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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This is a backlash against progressive overreaching and narrowmindedness, including false, inflammatory claims about gender transitions and suicides that are routinely made by progressives. A transgender lawyer conceded to the Supreme Court that gender-affirming care DOESN'T reduce teen suicides. But when a polite friend of mine linked to a news article about that on Bluesky, he was blocked by left-wing writers for the Unpopulist and Liberal Currents, such as Adam Gurri and Ken White (Popehat), who were enraged that he had debunked the false claim that puberty blockers and other gender-affirming care cut suicides. Giving minors sex-changes or puberty blockers does not seem to reduce suicides. The transgender lawyer challenging Tennessee’s ban on certain transgender treatments for minors, Chase Strangio, admitted to the Supreme Court that “completed suicide is thankfully and admittedly rare” among transgender youth, even those not given gender-affirming treatment, and that “there is no evidence…that this treatment reduces completed suicide.”
Sex-change procedures come with serious side effects than can leave transgender people with lifelong pain and discomfort, as a transgender activist conceded in a New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” That’s because of the physical pain and discomfort that result from a sex change, and the artificial, subpar nature of the sex organ that doctors create in sex-change surgery. As Andrea Long Chu wrote in that op-ed: "Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to."
A gender transition can result in a lifetime of pain, discomfort, and medications, such as hormone therapy. As Britain’s National Health Service explains, hormones “need to be taken for the rest of your life, even if you have gender surgery.” The FDA has publicly warned that puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and vision loss, and an FDA official who supported giving minors puberty blockers conceded that they actually increase suicidality. Indeed, the “FDA knew ‘gender affirming’ puberty blockers increase ‘suicidality’ in 2017,” reported Just the News.
Jazz Jennings is the most famous kid to undergo a gender transition, with a long-running TV show celebrating Jazz’s gender transition. Health providers falsely said that a sex change would make Jazz happy, and falsely told Jazz’s mother that Jazz was at risk for suicide if she didn’t allow Jazz to transition. “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?,” they asked Jazz’s mother, peddling a false talking point that is often used on parents of transgender teens -- even though transgender lawyer Chase Strangio conceded to the Supreme Court that such care doesn't reduce suicides.
But by 2023, Jazz was miserable. Jazz’s penis was surgically removed at age 17, after Jazz was put on puberty blockers at age 11. Jazz became depressed, saying “I don’t feel like me, ever.” After Jazz’s sex change, Jazz experienced pain, constant reflux, a lack of sex drive, an inability to orgasm, rapid weight gain, and mental illness.
Even when the article is calling out all the ways that trans people, who have done no wrong, are being singled out and persecuted by the US government there’s still so much transphobia in the comments section. I hope that some day trans people are able to live their lives free of persecution and fascists like Trump and Musk are the one living in fear, but I don’t know how to get from here to there.