President Donald Trump issued yet another executive order attacking transgender people on Wednesday, this time seeking to ban them from participating in women’s sports. “We will defend the proud tradition of female athletes, and we will not allow men to beat up, injure, and cheat our women and our girls,” Trump said during the signing, where he was surrounded by dozens of athletes, coaches, and parents who have advocated against the inclusion of trans women in sports.
On one level, that’s rich language coming from a man who was found liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll, has been accused of sexual violence or misconduct by more than two dozen other women, and has also stacked his Cabinet and administration with multiple men who’ve been accused of sexual assault, harassment, and domestic violence. (All have denied the allegations against them.) On another, Trump is continuing his campaign’s work of exploiting people’s ignorance to make a convenient bogeyman out of transgender girls and women — while putting their health and safety in jeopardy.
Trump vowed during his campaign to protect women whether they “like it or not,” and he has framed this flurry of anti-trans policies as an effort to “defend” us from harm. But in reality, his agenda has nothing at all to do with protecting women and instead seeks to enforce a retrograde and limiting, far-right vision of what a woman should be. Before signing Wednesday’s order, Trump repeatedly referred to trans female athletes as men “posing” as women — a violent act of erasure, even if it wasn’t backed by his rewriting of federal policy.
Despite Trump’s fearmongering, there’s simply no evidence that transgender girls and women are an imminent threat to their peers — in fact, they are more likely to be the victims of violence due to their identities. Four percent of all hate crimes recorded by the FBI in 2022 were committed against transgender and gender-nonconforming Americans, a trend that has only increased in recent years. And yet trans people occupy an outsize space in the conservative imagination, even when about 1.6 million people, or 0.6 percent of the U.S. population, identify as trans or nonbinary, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA. The same holds true for their representation in sports. Fewer than ten people among the 500,000 college athletes belonging to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) publicly identify as transgender, according to Charlie Baker, the organization’s president. That’s less than .002 percent of young athletes whose lives Trump is foaming at the mouth to make harder.
If the president were truly so concerned about the welfare of girls and women, why did he reinstate a Title IX policy from his first term that makes it harder to report sexual assaults and gives more protections to those students accused, who are often men? Or direct his Department of Justice to enforce the FACE Act only in “extraordinary circumstances,” making patients seeking care at reproductive-health clinics vulnerable to anti-abortion extremist attacks? Or enforce the Hyde Amendment, making it harder for low-income pregnant people to access abortion care?
It doesn’t stop there. Trump fired independent commissioners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which oversees women’s workplace protections. The Office of Management and Budget’s attempt to freeze federal grants left domestic-violence shelters at risk of winding down their services or entirely shutting down. And Trump’s “gender ideology” executive order led to thousands of federal web pages containing crucial public-health information — including vaccine guidelines for pregnant people, education around teen-dating violence, and a tool kit aimed at preventing postpartum depression — being taken offline.
Women and girls beyond America’s borders are also feeling the impact. The destruction of USAID has left some of the world’s most vulnerable without access to food, life-saving health care, and clean water. Trump also reinstated the global gag rule, which bans nongovernmental foreign organizations from receiving federal funds if they promote or offer abortion care. Experts have said millions of girls and women worldwide will suffer from a lack of access to contraception, pregnancy care, and HIV treatment. To give a sense of the scale of the damage, the organization MSI Reproductive Choices said that the last time Trump implemented the rule, the funding lost “would have allowed us to serve 8 million women, preventing 6 million unintended pregnancies, 1.8 million unsafe abortions, and 20,000 maternal deaths. And that was just one organization.”
Within 24 hours of Trump’s latest order, the extent of the harm to the trans community began to come into focus, too. The NCAA capitulated to Trump, saying athletes can only participate in women’s sports going forward if they were assigned female at birth. The Department of Education announced that it is opening civil-rights investigations into San Jose State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for allowing trans athletes to compete in women’s sports. While the Penn investigation focuses on swimmer Lia Thomas, a 2022 graduate who became the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title that same year, the San Jose inquiry focuses on a volleyball player who’s been piled on by conservative media and her opponents despite not speaking publicly about her gender identity. The witch hunt echoes the controversy surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif at the Olympics last summer: Khelif is cisgender, but that didn’t stop public figures like J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk from falsely claiming that she was a trans woman who had an unfair advantage over her rivals — remarks that put her in harm’s way in her home country, which criminalizes LGBTQ+ people. Trump repeated these lies at Wednesday’s signing, calling Khelif a “male boxer.”
For all his claims that he is protecting women, the president’s actions put us at risk, whether we are trans or not. Today’s executive order could be tomorrow’s sex-testing mandate, which could become next year’s period-tracking law, impacting everyone regardless of their sex assigned at birth. Combined with his other legal and policy rollbacks on issues ranging from health care to protections against sexual violence and workplace discrimination, Trump is rapidly pushing an agenda with the ultimate goal of curtailing women’s ability to participate in society. Trans girls and women who just want to freely exist are not the threat here. That’d be the man in the Oval Office and his cronies.