Umair
President Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday aimed at prohibiting transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports, directing agencies to withdraw federal funding for any schools that refused to comply.
“From now on, women’s sports will be only for women,” he said in the East Room of the White House before signing the order.
The order, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” and signed on National Girls and Women in Sports Day, sought to deliver on an issue that Mr. Trump made a key theme of his campaign, which frequently denounced transgender athletes. Mr. Trump is relying on the Education Department to achieve the directive’s end through a revised interpretation of federal civil rights laws. Schools that do not follow these laws can lose federal funding.
The order also directed the State Department to push the International Olympic Committee to make similar changes at the international level by making eligibility “determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction.”
The Trump administration is using the Education Department to carry out the policy by changing its interpretation of Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in programs that receive federal funding. The Biden administration had put forth a rule last year that made discrimination or harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity a violation of federal civil rights law, but last month a federal judge vacated that regulation, providing Trump officials a path back to using the Title IX standards set in Mr. Trump’s first term.
In a statement after the order, the Education Department’s deputy general counsel, Candice Jackson, took up the president’s call to action, saying the department would “prioritize Title IX enforcement.”
“The president affirmed that this administration will protect female athletes from the danger of competing against and the indignity of sharing private spaces with someone of the opposite sex,” Ms. Jackson said.
“This is a wildly popular position with the American people,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters, appearing to cite a poll by The New York Times and Ipsos from January in which 67 percent of Democratic respondents opposed transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.
Several states and legal groups immediately vowed to challenge the order.
“Trump is going to do this again and again,” Connecticut’s attorney general, the Democrat William Tong, said in a statement. “He’s going to try to tell us we have two choices, to either inflict terrible harm on Connecticut families or accept the consequences of his lawless draconian threats.”
“We need to remember there is always a third option — to stand together and fight back,” Mr. Tong said.
The change could compel athletic governing bodies, such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to update their policies to comply with the order. In January, the N.C.A.A.’s president had called for greater legal clarity on the issue from regulators, and indicated that the organization would tailor its stance on transgender athletes to correspond with federal law.
In 2022, the N.C.A.A. had adopted a policy for transgender athletes modeled off the Olympic movement’s, which takes a sport-by-sport approach to determine eligibility.
A variety of civil rights organizations on Wednesday denounced the possibility that those standards could be abandoned.
“Transgender people, like everyone else, must be able to realize their human rights so they can fully participate in sports with safety and dignity,” said Karla Gonzales Garcia, the director of gender, sexuality and identity programs at Amnesty International. “The policing of who can and cannot play sports could lead to problematic invasive testing of all athletes.”
More than two dozen states already bar transgender athletes from participating in school sports, whether in K-12 schools or at the collegiate level. And in January, days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the House passed a bill to bar transgender women and girls from sports programs for female students nationwide. The bill faces uncertain prospects in the Senate, where seven Democrats would have to join Republicans to advance it to a final vote.
Conservative nonprofits and lawmakers celebrated the order, praising the Trump administration’s recognition of two “immutable” sexes — male and female — and its rejection of any gender identity outside that binary.
“No amount of activism, corporate pressure or lies can erase reality — men are biologically different from women,” Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, said in a statement. “This executive order restores fairness, upholds Title IX’s original intent and defends the rights of female athletes who have worked their whole lives to compete at the highest levels.”
Critics of proposals to bar transgender athletes have pointed to the harm posed by categorically excluding a group of people from a school activity, and the tide of misinformation overstating the scope of the controversy.
Last year, Mr. Trump frequently railed against transgender athletes on the campaign trail, and embraced debunked claims whipped up on social media, including about a female boxer whose eligibility was challenged during the Paris Olympics over false claims that she was transgender.
“It segregates a group of young children, bars them from something that all other kids get to do, and forces schools and teachers to pile on or risk their jobs,” said Tyler Hack, the executive director of the Christopher Street Project, a political action committee and nonprofit started last month in response to Mr. Trump’s transgender policies.
“It’s a moment where we need everyone to stand up and be vocal,” Mr. Hack said.
Mr. Trump’s executive orders concerning gender and diversity and equity policies have already run into legal challenges.
On Tuesday, stymieing one of Mr. Trump’s first executive orders, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Bureau of Prisons from housing transgender women with male inmates or halting medical treatment related to gender transitions.
Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Education Department had proposed additional Title IX regulations that would have prohibited blanket bans on transgender athletes. But it withdrew the regulations from consideration in December in part to prevent them from being hastily rewritten and co-opted by the incoming Trump administration.
