“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders – male and female,” said President Donald Trump during his second inaugural address Monday.
Indeed, one of the sweeping changes Trump announced upon his return to the White House, was an order “restoring biological truth to the federal government.” This order is intended to protect women, said Trump and it argues that “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.”
In recent years, debate about gender identity has become a political issue in the U.S., especially centered around whether people who identify as a different gender than their sex identified at birth should be able to use public washrooms that correspond to their gender identity. Education Week reported that the Trump administration’s order is in opposition to the administration of former President Joe Biden and its work to protect transgender Americans.
For example, the most recent Occupational Health and Safety Administration Best Practices guide refenced by the federal government as of Tuesday explained that: “All employees, including transgender employees, should have access to restrooms that correspond to their gender identity.”
However, Trump said that the U.S. is going down an “unhealthy road,” that is “paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.”
While the new order establishes that it is U.S. policy to recognize two genders (man and woman), the United Nations Office for the High Commissioner on Human Rights does note that an estimated 1.7% of the world population is born with intersex traits that do not fit within this binary. Intersex people often have a male or female gender identity regardless of their biology.
“Intersex children are frequently subjected to unnecessary surgical and other procedures for the purpose of trying to make their appearance conform to binary sex stereotypes,” said the office. “These often irreversible procedures can cause permanent infertility, pain, incontinence, loss of sexual sensation, and lifelong mental suffering, including depression,” and are regularly performed without the full consent of patients.
This week, Trump also announced that the U.S. would pull out of the World Health Organization, another U.N. agency.
Apart from intersex people, there are an estimated 1.6 million people age 13 and older in the U.S. who identified as transgender as of 2022, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. That means that their gender identity is different than the sex they were identified with at birth. While the Williams Institute said that around 0.5 % of adults identified as transgender, an estimated 1.4% of youth age 13 to 17 identified as transgender. Out of 1.3 million transgender adults, 38.5% were transgender women, 25.6% were transgender men and 25.6% were gender non-conforming.
Although a Gallup survey conducted last summer found that six in 10 U.S. adults were opposed to laws that banned gender-affirming care for children, 51% also said they believed that changing one’s gender was morally wrong. That was in line from surveys conducted in 2021 and 2023.
In Trump’s order, he said that: “Invalidating the true and biological category of ‘woman’ improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.”
Within the next month, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is required through the order to provide to the U.S. Government, external partners, and the public clear guidance expanding on the sex-based definitions established in it. Furthermore, changes are expected to government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, to “accurately reflect the holder’s sex,” as defined by the order and agencies are expected to remove communications and other materials that promote concepts identified in the order as “gender ideology.”
“The prior Administration argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which addressed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, requires gender identity-based access to single-sex spaces under, for example, Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act,” Trump’s order continued. “This position is legally untenable and has harmed women. The Attorney General shall therefore immediately issue guidance to agencies to correct the misapplication of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) to sex-based distinctions in agency activities.”
The order also included stipulations about who may be detained in women’s prisons.
While the order does reverse some efforts by the Biden administration to establish more protections for transgender Americans, the former president himself signed legislation last month for the, FY25 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), that included a a provision inserted by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) blocking healthcare for the transgender children of military servicemembers, according to the Human Rights Campaign.