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In 10 Days, Four Anti-Trans Exec Orders & a Bathroom Ban for Fed Employees
Keep looking up. Trump 2025 has been in office for a bit over a week.
Here’s a list to keep track of the anti-trans actions of the Trump administration in the 10 days since he was sworn in. Already, he’s issued four executive orders that are anti-trans and many others that can affect trans people intersectionally or in unexpected ways.
This is a partial fulfillment of the wish list of the Heritage Foundation via Project 2025, signed on the desk of President Donald Trump. It will get worse. Know your allies, know your enemies, and keep looking up.
The Four Anti-Trans Orders
#1: No gender identity, only unchangeable sex assigned at birth
The first anti-trans order establishes a definition of sex and aims to “promote this reality.” It says the government will use the words “women” and “girls” only to refer to females, and “men” and “boys” only to refer to males.
By contrast, it defines the term “gender ideology” as the belief that men can become women, that women can become men, and that there are other genders too. It says that this competing idea “fundamentally attack[s] women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being” and has a “corrosive impact…on the validity of the entire American system,” jeopardizing “scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
Any time the government says it will do away with “gender ideology,” we should hear it as doing away with acknowledgment of the existence of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people. It will fire and otherwise penalize anyone who acknowledges and accepts gender diversity. This order gets rid of guidance documents with names like “The White House Toolkit on Transgender Equality.” The current White House does not believe in transgender equality.
An odd thing about the very existence of this order is that it attempts to define biology at all. That’s for biologists to explain. And if something is an unconstructed, material fact, no government needs to issue an order constructing the fact.