President Donald Trump on Feb. 5 signed an executive order barring transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, following through on his discriminatory 2024 presidential campaign pledge to kick trans athletes to the curb.
Like other recent orders, the Trump administration’s latest executive order misgenders trans individuals and uses humiliating and false language to refer to trans athletes in a bid to justify the directive. The order is deceptively called “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
“In recent years, many educational institutions and athletic associations have allowed men to compete in women’s sports,” states the order, which wrongfully but deliberately refers to trans women as men. “This is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”
The order states that it is the “policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.” It further states that all executive departments and agencies should review education grants and “rescind funding to programs that fail to comply with the policy established in this order.”
The order outlines an all-hands-on-deck approach, using different parts of the Trump administration to carry out the order, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, as well as the education secretary — despite the president’s stated desire to gut the Department of Education. The president’s nominee to lead that agency, Linda McMahon, has yet to be confirmed but will face the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on Feb. 13.
The executive order also orders the US ambassador to the United Nations — Trump’s nominee for that role, Elise Stefanik, has also yet to be confirmed — to help facilitate the order.
The order’s scope goes beyond the United States’ borders and even directs the secretary of state to prod the International Olympic Committee to update its policy to ensure “that eligibility for participation in women’s sporting events is determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction.”
The order also shifts the White House’s interpretation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which is a federal law stipulating that educational institutions receiving federal funds may not discriminate on the basis of sex. The Biden administration interpreted Title IX to also bar discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity, citing the Supreme Court’s definition of employment discrimination “because of sex” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the 2020 Bostock case.
Former President Joe Biden proposed a rule barring schools from outright bans on trans athletes, which gave some leeway to schools to customize their own policies, but it faced lawsuits and was later withdrawn in anticipation of the incoming Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is interpreting Title IX in accordance with the executive order and is vowing to “prioritize Title IX enforcement” against schools and athletic associations “that deny female students an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletic events by requiring them, in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.”
The order is a prime example of the Trump administration’s tendency to target LGBTQ issues without a reasonable basis: Out of more than a half-million college athletes, there are not even 10 who publicly identify as transgender, according to NCAA President Charlie Baker.
However, after the order was announced, Baker quickly fell in line, saying the NCAA would review the order and “take necessary steps to align NCAA policy in the coming days, subject to further guidance from the administration.”
“The NCAA is an organization made up of 1,100 colleges and universities in all 50 states that collectively enroll more than 530,000 student-athletes,” Baker said in a written statement posted on the NCAA’s website. “We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions. To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.”
More than 25 states have state laws restricting trans athletes from playing sports, according to the Movement Advancement Project’s nationwide tracker. At the same time, court rulings have put some of those laws on hold, including in Arizona, Idaho, Utah, and West Virginia, and such laws have been partially blocked in New Hampshire and Montana.
Lambda Legal, which fights for LGBTQ rights in courtrooms nationwide, blasted the president’s order.
“Make no mistake, multiple states have attempted to enact similar bans,” Lambda Legal senior attorney Carl Charles said in a written statement. “We’ve confronted them in court repeatedly and have won repeatedly. There is no reason to think a national ban will avoid being similarly squashed. We are appalled, and in fact disgusted, at this administration’s insatiable appetite for fearmongering about and relentless targeting of this most vulnerable population. And we are neither cowed nor deterred. We and our partners are standing together to protect those rights already won, and fight for those still needed, to allow the LGBTQ+ community and everyone living with HIV to live freely and safely as their full and authentic selves — a freedom everyone in this country should be able to take for granted.”
Athlete Ally, an organization fighting for LGBTQ inclusion in sports — including trans athletes — also criticized the order.
“Our hearts break for the trans youth who will no longer be able to know the joy of playing sports as their full and authentic selves,” the organization said in a written statement. “We hope they will continue to feel the love and acceptance from their teammates, coaches, friends and family members that they deserve, and that this executive order will not impact their inalienable sense of worthiness and belonging.”
Last April, hundreds of professors, advocacy organizations , and current and former athletes — including out stars like Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird — sent a joint letter to the NCAA Board of Governors, a governing body, urging its leadership to support trans athletes. That letter also featured research from the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport finding that biologial data on athletes to be “severely limited and often methodologically flawed.” Academic scholars have long warned that such efforts to restrict athletes on the basis of gender identity have been rooted in racism, sexism, ableism, and misogyny.
