President Donald Trump holds an executive order he just signed during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. / Credit: JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 21, 2025 / 09:30 am (CNA).

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order billed as “defending women from gender ideology extremism,” one that the White House says restores “biological truth to the federal government.”

Trump, who centered the transgender issue during much of his 2024 presidential campaign, signed the order on Monday, the first day of his return to the U.S. presidency.

“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,” the executive orders states. “This is wrong.”

The executive order is sweeping in nature. Its application will include removing gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms from governmental agencies. It explicitly affirms that the word “woman” means “adult human female.” And it orders that government identification like passports and personnel records must reflect biological reality and “not self-assessed gender identity.” 

The order establishes a government-wide acknowledgement of the reality of biological sex, including the explicit assertion that there are only two sexes, male and female. 

It also puts an end to the practice of housing men in women’s prisons and brings an end to the use of taxpayer money to fund “transitions” for prisoners. 

Additionally, the order directs that the U.S. attorney general shall “issue guidance to ensure the freedom to express the binary nature of sex and the right to single-sex spaces in workplaces and federally funded entities covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

At a rally in Washington, D.C., on Sunday prior to his inauguration, Trump told the crowd he also intends to “keep men out of women’s sports.”

Trump reverses Biden’s LGBT directives

The move is a stark reversal from former President Joe Biden’s directives on gender on his first day in office four years ago. 

At that time Biden ordered the federal government to “review all existing orders, regulations, guidance documents, policies, programs, or other agency actions” in an effort to bolster transgender “rights.” Trump on Monday also formally rescinded Biden’s order.

Trump on Monday also rescinded rules set by Biden that withheld federal money from schools, including colleges, that failed to adhere to the government’s gender ideology. 

The directives were hailed by conservatives on Monday. 

“In a shocking return to normalcy, Trump’s first executive orders will rescind all of Biden’s orders promoting gender ideology and revert to regular human recognition of male and female,” wrote Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, on X ahead of the signing of the order.

Two senior administration officials framed the executive order in terms of protecting women, telling The Free Press: “Women deserve protections, they deserve dignity, they deserve fairness, they deserve safety. And so this is going to help establish that in federal policy and in federal laws.”

Trump made issues surrounding transgenderism central to his campaign, often remarking on the stump his desire to get “the transgender insanity“ out of schools and other areas of public life. 

“Just take a look at the polling,” an administration official told The Free Press. “The public is broadly in favor of the president’s and of the Republican Party’s stance on gender. That there are two biological sexes is something that the public is supportive of.”

A New York Times/Ipsos poll, conducted between Jan. 2 and Jan. 10, found that 49% of respondents said that “society has gone too far in accommodating transgender people,” compared with 28% who believe society has struck a reasonable balance on the issue and 21% who believe society has not gone far enough.

Tom McFeely contributed to this report.