President Donald Trump on his first day in office swiftly ended Biden administration efforts to extend Title IX discrimination protections to transgender students as part of a sweeping executive order that makes it U.S. policy to recognize only two sexes.
The executive order was one of a handful of actions around gender identity on Trump’s first day in office. It emanated from promises the Republican made on the campaign trail that continued as a throughline to his inaugural address.
The executive order defining sex as male and female calls for official government documents like passports and visas to allow applicants to describe themselves as only male or female. It also directs the attorney general to instruct government agencies that civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on sex—such as Title IX, the federal law outlawing sex discrimination at federally funded schools—can’t be expanded to apply to discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, as the Biden administration had done.
It’s that move that could lead the U.S. Department of Education to issue new guidance to schools with instructions on applying Title IX more narrowly.
Trump signed the gender identity order along with several others in the Oval Office Monday evening following a series of speeches and public appearances earlier in the day. It’s one of the few from Trump’s first-day batch that appear to directly affect schools.
And before the Oval Office order signing session, the president appeared before a crowd of supporters at the Capitol One Arena in Washington to rescind dozens of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders, including one that kicked off efforts to extend Title IX discrimination protections to transgender students and another that directed former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to fight discrimination against LGBTQ+ students.
Republicans have increasingly focused on limiting transgender rights in recent years. Trump-aligned groups spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans advertisements during the 2024 campaign, according to the New York Times. Trump himself vowed on the campaign trail to take action on transgender rights—including a pledge to swiftly undo a Biden regulation to expand protections under Title IX to include discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
In his remarks during his inaugural address, Trump said he would “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”
“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders—male and female,” he said.
The nation’s two largest teachers’ unions decried Trump’s inaugural address as divisive.
State lawmakers have limited rights of transgender youth across the country
LGBTQ+ activists had been anticipating this action from Trump. But well before Trump returned to office, many state legislatures had implemented bans limiting what sports teams transgender student-athletes can play on and which bathrooms transgender students can use, and passed laws restricting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity and requiring that parents be notified when students request to go by a different name or pronouns at school.
Following Trump’s election, LGBTQ+ youth crisis centers reported a spike in calls.
Already on Capitol Hill, a bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives with Republican support earlier this month that would prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on K-12 and college teams that align with their gender identity. The House also agreed to a bathroom ban policy, prohibiting the nation’s first openly transgender lawmaker in Congress from using the women’s bathroom.
Roughly 3 percent of high school students identify as transgender, and 2.2 percent are questioning their gender identity, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ+ young people, said in a statement that many organizations and activists had been preparing for such political challenges.
“And for many communities, these are not new,” Black’s statement continued. “Lucky for us, we sit on the shoulders of leaders who have faced tremendous obstacles and uncertainties, for generations.”
Trump has telegraphed his intentions for transgender rights since the campaign
Trump has laid the groundwork for these actions for months.
In one campaign rally last year, Trump said Biden’s regulation to expand the scope of Title IX to protect students from discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation would be terminated on his first day in office (it was struck down earlier this month by a federal judge in Kentucky after other judges had put it on hold in 26 states and at individual schools elsewhere).
Biden dropped another, separate effort to protect transgender student-athletes to keep Trump from skipping the regulatory process, which can take months and sometimes years to complete, and changing the proposal to better support his aims and finalize it more quickly.
Trump also promised to cut federal funding to any schools “pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
More involved actions—like matters of funding—would likely need support from Congress.
Still, the effort is a continuation from Trump’s first term, and could foretell more to come.
As one of her first official actions, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s first education secretary, rescinded Obama administration guidance on transgender students’ rights to use school facilities, pronouns, and names that align with their gender identity.
During Trump’s first administration, students’ discrimination complaints related to sexual orientation and gender identity were less likely than during the Obama administration to result in changes at their schools, federal records showed. The Education Department during Trump’s first tenure in office had also confirmed it would not investigate complaints on restroom access for transgender students, which drew ire from civil rights groups.
Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for education secretary for his second term, will oversee the implementation of the new president’s agenda at the Education Department. Until she is confirmed, Trump has directed the interim leader of the U.S. Department of Education’s federal student aid office, Denise Carter, to lead the agency.
Teachers’ unions leaders respond to Trump’s Inauguration Day remarks
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said Trump’s actions on gender identity ignore “what we know is needed to ensure every student has the opportunity and resources to grow into their full brilliance.”
“Parents and educators agree our students need more learning opportunities, not less,” she said in a statement. “They need to be respected for who they are, no matter their race, place, background, sexual orientation, or gender identity. And our students need to learn the good and bad of our history to be prepared to succeed in our diverse and interdependent world.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the newly inaugurated president missed an opportunity to bring the country together.
“Rather than unifying people and building on America’s best qualities, Trump delivered a speech that was laden with divisiveness, showing that he is the president of only some Americans,” she said in a prepared statement. “Those of us in the labor movement and in public education are fighting for opportunity and dignity for all Americans.”
