Within hours after taking office, President Donald Trump signed a pivotal executive order defending women by recognizing only two sexes, male and female, and ordering the executive branch to abandon the “false” gender ideology.
The executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” reverses Biden-Harris administration policies that sought to eradicate the distinction between the two sexes. The order rescinds Biden’s infusion of gender identity into Title IX sex-discrimination protections that allowed for gender-confused males to invade women’s sports and intimate spaces – something a federal judge recently struck down nationwide as unconstitutional. Now, President Trump’s order specifically rejects the concept of “gender identity,” orders federal agencies to remove all external messages promoting gender ideology, and to return to just using the binary term “sex.”
As the order reads, gender ideology is the “false claim” that “males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa,” while requiring society to believe that it is all true.
“This is wrong,” stated the order. The Trump administration notes that this “coercive” ideology has led to a “fundamental attack” on the safety and dignity of women, but that federal policy moving forward will protect women by being based solely on “biological truth.”
The order simply defines a man and a woman in strict biological terms:
“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.”
“‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
The order declared that “sex” is an “immutable” trait, and therefore, “is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity.’”
According to the order, the Biden-Harris administration used the 2020 Bostock decision from the U.S. Supreme Court to require “gender identity-based” distinctions across federal law. President Trump noted this has “harmed” women and ordered the U.S. Attorney General to issue guidance that corrects this misuse of Bostock and protect sex-based distinctions that are permitted under statutory language.
To further restore policies based on biological sex rather than gender identity, President Trump also ordered:
- all agencies and federal employees acting in an official capacity to use the term “sex” and not “gender” in all applicable federal policies and documents.
- all agencies end the federal funding of gender ideology where permitted by law.
- federal prisons not to detain biological males in women’s prisons or house them in women’s detention centers.
- all agencies to ensure that intimate spaces designated for women, girls, or females (or for men, boys, or males) are designated by sex and not identity.
- the Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs to present proposed bill text within 30 days to codify the definitions in this order.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “President Donald Trump’s executive order is a massive and welcomed policy shift that dispenses with the false, unscientific premise that a person can change their gender. This order will require thousands of medical and other forms to return to common sense questions that include the biological reality of male and female. This commonsense order returns the U.S. Government to the biological reality that gender is fixed at birth. Governance based on fact not fiction will allow the nation to once again protect the privacy, safety, and fairness for women and girls.”
