It was never about women's sports
The trojan horse worked.
Well, friends. We are almost two weeks into Donald Trump’s second term in office, and each day has brought new horrors.
Trump and his team have made so many sweeping changes in such a short period of time that it’s impossible to even begin to process them all. But today I think it’s really important to focus in on his attacks on the transgender community.
These attacks are, of course, not surprising in the least. That doesn’t make them any less horrifying or damaging. The Republican party passed an onslaught of anti-transgender laws across the country during President Joe Biden’s term in office, and found success in the court of public opinion by framing all transgender rights issues around the false pretense of “protecting women’s sports.” Trump carried that message and momentum right into the White House.
But Trump’s first days in office prove what the transgender community and its allies have known all along: This was never about women’s sports.
It was about reinforcing traditional gender roles, asserting control over women’s bodies, and, most terrifyingly, eradicating transgender people from public life completely.
This doesn’t mean Trump won’t keep attacking transgender athletes, both rhetorically and regulations. But women’s sports were merely the trojan horse.
I’ve spent this week combing through all of Trump’s executive orders pertaining to the transgender community. Even though these executive orders will face legal challenges and it is unclear how (or if) they will be enforced, it’s worth looking at them and grasping just how far Trump’s war against transgender people is prepared to go.
First, Trump tries to redact transgender people from existence
In his inauguration speech, just moments after taking the oath of office, Trump stated, “From now on, it is the official position of the United States that there are only two genders: male and female.”
Then he put that in writing. One of his first executive orders was pithily entitled, “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.”
That executive order is 1,925 words. One word not missing from the order? “Sports.” (Although it does include the word “passports,” so if you control F it, you will get a hit.)
I have a hard time putting into words how all-encompassing this order attempts to be, so I’ll cite Casey Parks of the Washington Post: “The order … narrowly defines sex in a way that aims to erase the very concept of trans and nonbinary people.”
Read that again: “[I]t narrowly defines sex in a way that aims to erase the very concept of trans and nonbinary people.”
Absolutely terrifying.
Of course, you can’t just erase an entire category of people, unless you commit a genocide. So Trump is physically attempting to erase transgender people from all government documents and policies, emphasis mine:
(d) The Secretaries of State and Homeland Security, and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, shall implement changes to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder’s sex, as defined under section 2 of this order; and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management shall ensure that applicable personnel records accurately report Federal employees’ sex, as defined by section 2 of this order.
(e) Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.
There are a lot of questions remaining about how this will be implemented. Intersex and nonbinary people have been able to have the gender marker of “X” on their passports since 2021. Marco Rubio has already put a stop to that. But there is no clarity about what this means for people who currently hold passports with “X” marked as a gender.
But, as always, the destabilizing chaos is by design.
There are a couple of other things in this first anti-trans executive order I want to highlight.
Trump explicitly defines transgender women as predators
While this first order impacts all transgender people, it hones in on transgender women and paints them as a threat to all cisgender women. This is in-line with the “protect women’s sports” slogan, but the terminology is incredibly sinister, dehumanizing, and incorrect:
Section 1. Purpose. Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. 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. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
The order goes on to say that transgender people who are imprisoned must be detained in prisons or detention centers congruent with their sex assigned at birth, barring trans women from women’s domestic violence shelters and women’s prisons.1
On a completely unrelated note, via Wikipedia, “Donald Trump has been accused of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment, including non-consensual kissing or groping, by at least 25 women since the 1970s.”
Trump was caught on a hot mic in 2005 talking to Access Hollywood about women, saying “when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy.”
He has also been accused of entering women’s dressing rooms during Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants while contestants were undressing. In 2005 he bragged to Howard Stern on live radio that he could “get away with things like that” because he owned Miss Universe.
In 2023, a jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in 1996 in a civil suit, and awarded her $5 million in damages.
Amidst the transphobia, Trump also gave a terrifying nod to anti-abortion advocates
Yes, we are still on his first executive order about gender identity on the first day. But I want to also note that in this order — which again, did not mention the word “sports” once — he states that sex begins at conception.
In the part of the order that offers Trump’s definitions of terms, he includes this:
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
While the word “abortion” or “life” is not written, his message was clear: At the 2025 March for Life last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La) got a huge round of applause from the crowd when he said, “I don’t know if you saw [Trump’s] executive order on gender, but he defines life as beginning at conception rather than birth.”
Don’t you feel safer, women athletes??
Next, Trump tries to abolish all gender-affirming healthcare for minors
This week, things somehow got even worse, with multiple executive orders targeting the transgender community.
First let’s talk about the one that goes after transgender health care for minors, “Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation.” It is devastating in its cruelty, falsely painting medical transitions for minors as widespread and common and misrepresenting it as mutilation forced upon minors.
Section 1. Policy and Purpose. Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.
Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.
This is just spreading lies. Last year, researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health “found little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) minors in the U.S. The study also found that cisgender minors and adults had substantially higher utilization of analogous gender-affirming surgeries than their TGD counterparts.”
These surgeries on minors are extremely rare. But when Trump says refers to “mutilation” he is not only talking about top surgery or bottom surgery; he is referring to all methods of gender-affirming health care:
(c) The phrase “chemical and surgical mutilation” means the use of puberty blockers, including GnRH agonists and other interventions, to delay the onset or progression of normally timed puberty in an individual who does not identify as his or her sex; the use of sex hormones, such as androgen blockers, estrogen, progesterone, or testosterone, to align an individual’s physical appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex; and surgical procedures that attempt to transform an individual’s physical appearance to align with an identity that differs from his or her sex or that attempt to alter or remove an individual’s sexual organs to minimize or destroy their natural biological functions. This phrase sometimes is referred to as “gender affirming care.”
Not only will this order prevent both transgender and cisgender youth alike from getting the health care they need, it is also only the beginning. Multiple states have also outlawed gender affirming care for adults, and that is the logical next step for Trump.
He is coming after social transitions, too
In another executive order issued on Thursday, “Ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” Trump paints schools, and teachers in particular, as the enemy. He takes steps to ban all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from public schools, and the order is extremely and deplorably racist. But I’m going to focus in on the parts that relate to gender identity.
“In many cases … young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed,” he says. “These practices not only erode critical thinking but also sow division, confusion.”
Trump adds that schools are “steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation without parental consent or involvement” and “allowing males access to private spaces designated for females,” two statements that have been widely debunked.
He then directs his cabinet to provide a plan within 90 days that will focus on:
(iii) Each agency’s process to prevent or rescind Federal funds, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, from being used by an ESA, SEA, LEA, elementary school, or secondary school to directly or indirectly support or subsidize the social transition of a minor student, including through school staff or teachers or through deliberately concealing the minor’s social transition from the minor’s parents.
So not only is Trump trying to stop transgender children from getting health care, he is attempting to outlaw all social transitions as well.
What is a social transition? Well, the executive order defines social transition as such:
(e) “Social transition” means the process of adopting a “gender identity” or “gender marker” that differs from a person’s sex. This process can include psychological or psychiatric counseling or treatment by a school counselor or other provider; modifying a person’s name (e.g., “Jane” to “James”) or pronouns (e.g., “him” to “her”); calling a child “nonbinary”; use of intimate facilities and accommodations such as bathrooms or locker rooms specifically designated for persons of the opposite sex; and participating in school athletic competitions or other extracurricular activities specifically designated for persons of the opposite sex. “Social transition” does not include chemical or surgical mutilation.
So yes, this order would impact girls’ sports. But that is practically just an add-on. Trump didn’t write this executive order to ensure fairness in a track meet. He wrote it to alienate transgender children from every aspect of life, and to scare educators and therapists and teachers from providing any support at all to a child dealing with gender dysphoria, even in the form of a pronoun.
As Power Plays has previously reported, school is already fraught for transgender youth. A study from 2017 and 2019 found that almost 44 percent of transgender youth reported considering suicide in the previous year, versus 16 percent of cisgender youth.
These policies will make things far, far worse.
Perhaps most devastatingly, Trump deems transgender people ‘mentally unfit’ and ineligible for the military
In the first week of his second administration, Trump repealed a Biden-era provision allowing transgender people to serve in the military.
This week he got far more specific in the executive order, “Prioritizing military excellence and readiness.”
This is, truly, one of the most deplorable things I have ever read. He flat out says that being transgender makes you unable to be in the military because it is inherently dishonorable:
Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.
Read that again: “A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”
If there are words capable of emphasizing just how insulting and false that statement is, I haven’t found them.
And, in case you think Trump is just concerned about the impact of a medical transition on the physical capabilities of a transgender person in the military, he makes it clear that he is not:
Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity. This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.
Pure. Evil.
I wish I had a pithy way to wrap this up, but I don’t.
I’m going to keep covering this, and also keep covering the real issues that are actually impacting women’s sports, and hopefully find ways this community can help and also find ways we can experience joy.
I love you all. And if you’re trans, I love you even more.
Again, I note that this will be challenged in court, along with all of his executive orders.
Words like yours help to keep this issue in focus when all we are feeling is assaulted. It's easy to get caught up in the jumble of hatred and falsehood, so this is so helpful. Please keep writing about this!
Thank you for such a clear article and continued fight against injustice