Trump’s Assault on Trans Rights Has Begun. Here’s What to Watch For.

Trump teased his much-anticipated executive order targeting transgender people throughout his Inauguration Day events. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” he said in his inaugural address on Monday. The text of the order, issued later that day, recalls one of the most headline-grabbing of the first Trump administration’s attacks in 2018: when the department of Health and Human Services attempted to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, a move which reportedly could have “defined” trans and nonbinary people “out of existence,” and which drew widespread condemnation and protest.

The new order, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” should serve as a statement of intent from the second Trump administration. It is packed with the kinds of conspiratorial thinking about gender and sexuality  that have become commonplace on the right: “Ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex,” the order states, have used “socially coercive means” so that people can “self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces.” (Anti-trans campaigners have yet to offer any credible example of this actually occurring.) The order also contains vague pronouncements like, “Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.” The whole order is framed around the notion that it protects women and womanhood, accusing anti-discrimination laws protecting trans and nonbinary people of  “invalidating the true and biological category of ‘woman.’” In one its loftier moments, the order claims, “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.” (If only it were so simple to shake the entire American system!)

Of course, the office of the presidency cannot control what we think and believe about gender or who gets to define gender. Neither the rhetoric about battling “gender ideology,” nor the order’s decree that there are two sexes, male and female, which are determined “biologically,” can be considered new; neither is likening trans people to sexual predators, nor is claiming the definition of “woman” is under threat, All this is now old-hat anti-trans rhetoric and policy language. LGBTQ+ legal experts and advocates correctly anticipated much of what the order would contain, and for months have been preparing strategies to respond.

Putting aside much of the vague concern in the order about “gender ideology,” there are some directives in the order that could result in concrete changes in the lives of trans and nonbinary people. These changes would not be the result of Trump’s order alone; rather, they would be the decisions each federal agency takes to implement these directives. Their decisions would not all be evident immediately.

One of the most significant changes for any trans person concerns identity documents issued by the federal government: passports (issued by the Department of State) and social security cards (issued by the Social Security Administration). If agencies implement the order, they would be impeding people’s ability to change the gender marker on federal identity documents. Anything one needs these documents for, especially if one doesn’t have state-issued identity documents with a correct gender marker, would also be affected (if you have a driver’s license issued by a state, for example, that is not directly affected by this order). All of these changes in policy would have to survive legal challenges. Past litigation, like that which established the “X” gender marker, might also help in any legal fight to restrict federal identity documents for trans and nonbinary people.

But of all trans and gender nonbinary people, it’s those who are incarcerated in America’s federal prisons and detention centers who could see significant changes quickly. The order directs the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers.” That means trans women would be moved to men’s prisons. It also directs the Bureau of Prisons to revise its “policies concerning medical care to be consistent with this order,” including barring access to gender-affirming care for people incarcerated in federal facilities. Some of these directives contradict existing law, such as the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA); again, all would likely have to survive a court challenge.

Trump’s order was predictably celebrated by Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian nationalist legal group pushing the anti-trans bathroom panic, among others. “The fight against gender ideology is far from over, but today, the U.S. government switched sides in this conflict—from promoting the lie to defending the truth,” wrote Jim Campbell, ADF chief legal counsel, in a fundraising email this week. ADF is part of Project 2025, a roadmap for Trump which Trump took steps to distance himself from during the campaign. Its influence is all over this order, from its preoccupation with stopping “gender ideology” and its directive to remove any mention of gender from federal documents, to its multiple proposals for how to cut off federal funding for any program that deviates.

The anti-trans order is far from alone in its legally problematic design. With it, Trump issued multiple orders that have or likely soon will be challenged as unconstitutional, such as an order to end birthright citizenship (multiple lawsuits to stop this order were filed within hours of its issuance) and to expand the federal death penalty by the “Overruling of Supreme Court Precedents That Hinder Capital Punishment.” All this came in a barrage of executive orders Trump signed on Monday evening, closing out a bizarre rally for his faithful at a Washington sports arena, the same one where Elon Musk offered two apparent Nazi salutes. The sprawling legal chaos resulting from the orders is playing out alongside such expressions of eliminationist politics: a clear statement of intent for those with eyes to see, but carried off in such a shambolic manner that many will easily fool themselves into thinking the totalitarian aesthetics are unintentional or a joke.

“There is no clear way to be ready for a world where those in power wish for your demise,” Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, wrote this week. “But we have no choice but to be ready to fight and we will—in court, in legislatures, in our local communities. “ Trump’s order takes aim at “gender ideology,” even as it appears he does not have any real idea what “gender ideology” means. There’s no need for “gender ideology” to mean anything more than this: an enemy to be defeated. But there is no such enemy ideology. There’s only people.