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Now, There’s a No-Sports Order

Tucker Lieberman
5 min readFeb 6, 2025

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closeup of person holding a basketball
Athlete by Pexels from Pixabay

Today, Donald Trump signed another anti-trans executive order. I’ve written about four previous executive orders. This is the fifth.

They’re threatening federal funding of schools

Appealing to Title IX, the half-century-old civil rights law that forbids sex discrimination, Trump says he will “rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.”

Specifically, those that cause “endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls” and violate their “privacy.”

Very specifically, those that allow trans women to play sports as women.

The order doesn’t say whether or how to verify an athlete’s sex

The authors of this executive order interpret the inclusion of trans women as “requiring” cis women, playing “in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.”

I’d like to imagine that their expressed concern about women having to “appear unclothed before males” could somehow be used to protect athletes from having to submit to sex verification. Alas, I believe this executive order is non-binding and that the Trump administration is free to interpret its own words however it wishes. It means whatever they want it to mean.

Beyond Title IX, ‘more broadly,’ they’ll try to stop the recognition of trans women’s gender

The executive order warns that the government will “oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”

The order encourages sports organizations to make a policy

It declares that “sport-specific governing bodies” are being “unfair” to cis women even when the organization has “no official position or requirements regarding trans-identifying athletes.”

(No, this executive order doesn’t define the term “trans-identifying,” nor did…

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Tucker Lieberman
Tucker Lieberman

Written by Tucker Lieberman

Cult classic. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." Editor for Prism & Pen and Identity Current. tuckerlieberman.com

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