On his first day back in office on Monday, President Trump issued an executive order declaring that the US government would only know the sex of a person assigned at birthlimit the definition of a “male” or “female” to their reproductive cells and possibly stop federal funding for programs that recognize transgender people or “gender ideology.”
Medical and legal experts say the executive order ignores the reality of sexual and gender diversity, and they are concerned about the consequences for intersex, non-binary and transgender Americans.
Anti-transgender issues were central to the Trump campaign. In the months leading up to the 2024 election, Republican campaigns and groups spent millions on anti-trans TV ads. Trump also promised to limit access preserving gender affirmation and transgender participation in sport.
Trump’s executive order declares sex to be an “immutable biological classification of male or female” and states that “gender identity” cannot be included in the definition of “sex,” and that “sex” and “gender” cannot be used interchangeably.
The executive order declares that there are only “two sexes, male and female,” and defines “female” as “a person of a sex that produces a large reproductive cell during reproduction.” The Order defines “male” as: “Pertaining to the individuals of the sex that produce the small reproductive cell during reproduction.”
“This is a huge departure from what we know from science,” said Kellan E. Baker, executive director of the Institute for Health Research. & Policy Whitman-Walker on the health services network said in an interview with ABC News.
Baker noted that we’re used to thinking of sex as “a pretty simple, binary, unchanging thing,” but science tells us it’s not that simple.
President Donald Trump signs documents as he issues executive orders and pardons for the Jan. 6 defendants in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
“Sex is not a singular, binary, immutable characteristic,” she said. “In fact, it’s a complex set of multiple features, some of which overlap and some of which don’t.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines sex as “the biological status of being male, female, or something else. Sex is assigned at birth and is associated with physical characteristics such as anatomy and chromosomes.”
Intersex populations are not mentioned in the executive order. Intersex people are those who have variations in their sex characteristics, such as genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, or reproductive organs, and differ from expectations of male and female anatomy.
The term intersex can also be classified as “differences in sexual development”. Not all conditions are evident at birth, depending Medline PlusA National Library of Medicine resource and therefore may not be known until later in life.
“There are a number of sexual characteristics that make up this concept that we think of as sex,” Baker said. “There are chromosomes, for example. They also include external genitalia, gonads, hormones.”
Baker also says that sex differentiation by reproductive cells doesn’t occur until about six weeks after conception, contrary to the executive order’s definition.
The order says the definitions of sex are a response to “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex.”
“Abolishing the true, biological category of ‘woman’ transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based options into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing long-standing legal rights and values with a new social concept based on identity.” the order is read.
Jenny Pizer, legal director of LGBTQ civil rights group Lambda Legal, told ABC News that her organization is preparing for legal action against the executive order. The order says it could force agencies to derecognize transgender or intersex people by limiting funding to those who promote “gender ideology.”
The order states that gender ideology is “internally inconsistent because it minimizes sex as an identifiable or usable category, yet maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sex body.”
It goes on to say, “Agency forms requesting an individual’s gender will list either male or female, and will not request gender identity.”
Supporters and opponents of transgender rights rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court as the high court hears arguments in a case regarding transgender health rights, on December 4, 2024 in Washington.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, FILE
“The current structure of our society is that there is federal funding in many of our essential systems, so we don’t know, but it’s certainly possible that the Trump administration will try to exclude or mistreat members of our community in many, many of these settings,” Pizer said.
The executive order also overturns a 2022 Biden administration rule that allowed the US State Department to allow people applying for American passports. Select “X” to mark their gender.
The rules, announced by then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, marked Transgender Day of Visibility and were designed to accommodate non-binary, intersex and gender non-conforming people.
Lambda Legal was behind the effort to introduce an “X” gender marker for passports. The client at the time, Dana Zzyym, was denied a passport because they were intersex and could not accurately choose between male or female on the application form, according to the organization.
“We will continue to stand with Dana and all intersex, non-binary, and transgender people to defend their right to identity documents that accurately identify who they are, and to defend their equal protection rights against targeting and exclusion by their governments,” she said. statement posted on its website on Monday.
Trump also enacted policies or attitudes that have harmed the LGBTQ community during his first term. He banned some transgender people from serving in the militaryrepealed the Obama era non-discriminatory health care policy and defended against Employment protection for LGBTQ workers before the Supreme Court.
