By Shauneen Miranda, States Newsroom
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that prohibits transgender athletes from competing on women’s sports teams consistent with their gender identity.
Trump, who repeatedly pledged throughout his campaign to “keep men out of women’s sports,” is already following through on his broader anti-trans agenda in just the two weeks since he took office.
Trump recently signed an executive order barring openly transgender service members from the U.S. military and another that restricts access to gender-affirming care for kids.
He also signed an executive order on his first day in office that makes it the “policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”
Just last month, the U.S. House passed a measure that would bar transgender students from participating on women’s school sports teams consistent with their gender identity.
Speaking at the signing ceremony inside a crowded White House room, Trump said that under his administration, “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.”
“From now on, women’s sports will be only for women,” he said.
Dozens of women and young girls, some wearing sports uniforms, stood behind him.
The room was full of prominent GOP senators, members of Congress, governors, state attorneys general and leading voices in the movement opposing trans athletes’ participation in sports that align with their gender identity.
The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, has noted that there has been “considerable disinformation and misinformation about what the inclusion of transgender youth in sports entails” and that trans students’ sports participation “has been a non-issue.”
The order states that it is “the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.”
The order also directs all departments and agencies to “review grants to educational programs and, where appropriate, rescind funding to programs that fail to comply with the policy established in this order.”
Trump also asks the Department of Justice to offer resources to relevant agencies to “ensure expeditious enforcement of the policy established in this order.”
The order also calls on the assistant to the president for domestic policy to, within the next two months, convene state attorneys general to “identify best practices in defining and enforcing” the measure.
The executive order is sure to be met with legal challenges.
“We all want sports to be fair, students to be safe, and young people to have the opportunity to participate alongside their peers,” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement ahead of the executive order.
“But an attempted blanket ban deprives kids of those things. This order could expose young people to harassment and discrimination, emboldening people to question the gender of kids who don’t fit a narrow view of how they’re supposed to dress or look,” Robinson said.
In January, a federal judge in Kentucky struck down the Biden administration’s final rule for Title IX, part of which aimed to bolster federal protections for LGBTQ+ students.
Title IX is a landmark federal civil rights law that bars schools that receive federal funding from practicing sex-based discrimination.
The Education Department, under the Trump administration, clarified in a Dear Colleague letter last week that, following the judge’s order, the agency will enforce an earlier interpretation of Title IX from Trump’s first White House term.
“The department will return to enforcing Title IX protections on the basis of biological sex in schools and on campuses,” the agency noted.
Last updated 6:15 p.m., Feb. 5, 2025
