WIN! President Trump Issues Sweeping Executive Order on Sex and Gender Identity
Note: We reiterate our commitment to women’s reproductive autonomy, including women’s rights to abortion and birth control. We also support the needs of lesbians and bisexual women, including to be free from discrimination based on their sexual orientation. As always, WoLF will work with those currently in power and others who align on our issues to effect change for women and girls in the best way we can with a focus on issues that mainstream feminists have ignored.
What the order means for women’s rights, and what comes next
“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.”
On his first day in office, President Trump issued the executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government.” The order directs the government agencies to interpret all laws, regulations, etc. related to sex based on biology, not “gender identity,” and to issue new rulemaking, guidance, etc. where needed to protect single-sex spaces and women’s sex-based rights.
Trump also revoked many of President Biden’s executive orders, including the order President Biden issued on his own first day in office in 2021 which eliminated sex-based protections for women across federal agencies.
The order is extremely comprehensive, covering domestic violence shelters, prisons, education, free speech, and more.
WoLF has been fighting for over a decade to see sex-based protections like this brought for women. However, there is still a long road ahead in the implementation of this order as well as in other looming threats to women’s rights and autonomy.
What can an executive order accomplish?
“Each agency and all Federal employees shall enforce laws governing sex-based rights, protections, opportunities, and accommodations to protect men and women as biologically distinct sexes.”
Executive orders have become an increasingly popular tool in the hyper-partisan political landscape for Presidents to accomplish policy goals without having to work with Congress to pass new laws. These orders are “weaker” in constitutional strength than actual bills passed through Congress and are vulnerable, as they can be overturned easily by future administrations (as we are seeing now).
One of the president's powers as the leader of the executive branch of government is to direct federal agencies. Federal agencies include the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Labor. These agencies all have laws they must follow, including laws passed by Congress relating to sex. This executive order directs federal agencies on how to interpret these laws and actions to take regarding their correct implementation.
However, rolling out changes to federal agencies is often slow and tedious. For example, even though President Biden issued an executive order directing agencies to interpret “sex” to include “gender identity” on his first day in office, we did not see the final Title IX regulation resulting from that order until April 2024.
Definitions
“Gender identity” reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”
The order importantly differentiates between the reality of sex, rooted in biology, and “self-assessed gender identity.” The order directs agencies to interpret the terms “sex”, “male”, “female”, “men”, “women”, “boys” and “girls” with the following definitions:
(a) “Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”
(b) “Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.
(c) “Men” or “man” and “boys” or “boy” shall mean adult and juvenile human males, respectively.
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.*
The order also directs federal agencies to use the term “sex” instead of “gender” in applicable Federal policies and documents.
*Note: (d) and (e) could be interpreted to provide concerns for women’s reproductive sovereignty.
Prisons
“The Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security shall ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers, including through amendment, as necessary, of Part 115.41 of title 28, Code of Federal Regulations and interpretation guidance regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
WoLF has been fighting to get men out of women’s prisons for years, and we are thrilled to see the specific inclusion of women’s prisons in this order. The order directs the Attorney General to oversee the amendment of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) regulations to ensure men are not housed in women’s prisons. This is a major victory since PREA anticipates the housing of men in women’s facilities under certain circumstances, and this has presented a major issue for advocates of single-sex prisons.
Education
“The prior Administration argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which addressed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, requires gender identity-based access to single-sex spaces under, for example, Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act. This position is legally untenable and has harmed women. The Attorney General shall therefore immediately issue guidance to agencies to correct the misapplication of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) to sex-based distinctions in agency activities.”
The executive order directed the Attorney General to issue guidance to agencies on protecting sex-based distinctions, and the Education Secretary to rescind multiple guidance documents from previous administrations that put “gender identity” into schools.
Other Protections
The order directed the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to rescind a previous rule allowing men to use women’s housing (including in shelters) based on their claimed “gender identity,” and submit a new policy protecting women seeking single-sex rape shelters.
The Attorney General was also directed to “issue guidance to ensure the freedom to express the binary nature of sex and the right to single-sex spaces in workplaces and federally funded entities covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964." This would make it illegal to fire someone for this speech, another major win for women around the country who have felt forced into silence on these issues.
Next Steps in the Fight Against Gender Identity
This executive order is a huge win for women’s rights. It represents over a decade of work by feminist women and organizations like WoLF to sound the alarm about the harms of gender identity ideology. We look forward to working over the next four years to help federal agencies implement these new directives and overturn years of dangerous policies.
However, we also recognize the limitations of executive orders, and hope to see further steps taken to solidify these policies in laws that can not be so easily reversed. For example, we call on Congress to work together to pass the Women’s Bill of Rights, which codifies biological definitions of sex and protects women’s single-sex spaces.
All of these policies and new laws will also likely face multiple levels of legal challenges, and WoLF will be there every step of the way providing a feminist voice.
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