Donald Trump’s executive order which insists that gender is equivalent to sex follows the president’s repeated attacks on transgender people and their rights during the 2024 election campaign, writes Melissa R. Michelson. Not only is the order at odds with best practices in medicine and psychology, and with global trends and US public opinion which recognizes transgender identities, she argues that it will encourage harmful discrimination against LGBTQ people and further worsen the threat of hate crimes and violence.

One of Donald Trump’s first Executive Orders (EO), doubling down on the anti-transgender message of his 2024 campaign, purports to aim to protect women and pursue truth, but in fact perpetuates harmful myths about gender and transgender people. My research on transgender politics leads me to believe that these policy changes are likely to increase violence and discrimination against transgender people, with negative downstream effects on their mental and physical health.

What Trump’s order does and how it goes against global trends

Trump’s executive order on transgender people, misleadingly titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” erases transgender people and insists that gender is equivalent to sex, defined as an immutable biological reality linked to reproductive anatomy. The order affects government issued identifications (e.g., passports and visas), and pushes back against federal guidance issued in response to the 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision by the US Supreme Court, which defined discrimination against transgender individuals as a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Trump’s EO reverses the Biden Administration’s guidance that the Bostock ruling supports transgender individuals’ access to single-sex spaces (e.g., restrooms and locker rooms).

Nonbinary identities have been recognized for millennia by cultures and societies around the world. Being transgender has not been considered a mental illness since the American Psychiatric Association (APA) last revised its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) in 2013, and the World Health Organization (WHO) voted in 2019 to require member states to stop classifying transgender identity as a mental disorder by 2022. An increasing number of countries offer X gender markers on government documents.

And while support for transgender rights among Americans lags behind support for gay men and lesbians, the trend over the past decade has been one of increasing support. In an August 2022 national survey, 83 percent of respondents said they believe that transgender people deserve the same rights as other Americans. Trump’s EO moves policy away from public opinion and preferences, and global trends, and instead harkens back to a past where transgender people were pathologized and feared.

The importance of public messaging on LGBTQ rights

In our book, Listen, We Need to Talk, Brian Harrison and I present data which shows how messages from elected officials, and their actions, generate changes in public attitudes toward LGBTQ people. Even if Trump’s new policies are blocked or delayed due to legal actions or other forms of institutional resistance, public opinion – especially among Republicans – will change. In our subsequent book, Transforming Prejudice, Dr. Harrison and I document how claims that transgender women pose a threat to women and girls generates fear of transgender people. The resulting discrimination and prejudice will likely have negative mental and physical health consequences on those targeted, especially LGBTQ youth.

Transgender people are more likely than other Americans to have mental health issues due to “the discrimination, stigma, lack of acceptance, and abuse they face on an unfortunately regular basis.” Even if they are not attacked, concerns about future violence or social rejection can cause stress and suffering for transgender and non-gender conforming individuals. Strict adherence to a gender binary hurts everyone, not just transgender people. One common example is the challenge of non-gender conforming women (in other words, women who do not present as stereotypically female) being challenged when they use public restrooms. These are women who identify as women, but because someone has decided that they don’t look like a woman, their safety is put at risk.

“2019.05.29 Rally to Protect TransHealth,” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by tedeytan

How the order encourages harmful discrimination against LGBTQ people

As Brian Harrison and I detail in another book, LGBTQ Life in America: Examining the Facts, discrimination, social stigma, and denial of civil and human rights that targets members of marginalized communities, including LGBTQ people, causes anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation. This hostility can sometimes erupt into hate crimes and violence, especially toward transgender people and even more so toward transgender women of color and transgender people of low socioeconomic status. Young transgender and gender non-conforming people are especially vulnerable, and thus more susceptible to self-harm and suicidal ideation.

Trump’s executive order encourages this sort of harmful discrimination. It repeats baseless stereotypes about the alleged threat posed by transgender women, putting the power of the federal government behind those who hate, and marginalizing those whose mental and physical health is negatively impacted by those stereotypes.

Anti-transgender rhetoric leads to anti-transgender lawmaking

Those who followed the 2024 election should not be surprised by Trump’s action on this issue. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly made attacks on transgender individuals and their rights and promised to target them if elected. Republicans spent at least $215 million on television advertisements attacking transgender people. Already in its current session, the US House of Representatives has approved legislation that would ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, and late last year the House passed a defense authorization bill that bans gender-affirming care for transgender children of service members. Congressional Republicans have supported these and similar provisions for several years; the new Republican majorities might mean more of them becoming law, especially given the priority given to anti-transgender policies in the new House rules package.

It remains to be seen the degree to which that legislation will proceed and become law. The lawmaking process, by constitutional design, is slow. In contrast, executive orders are unilateral and immediate, which is part of what makes them so popular with presidents. At the same time, Trump’s Executive Order on transgender rights is illustrative of the major weakness of EOs generally: they are easily reversed by one’s successor. While presidents may appreciate the unilateral power of Executive Orders, the ease with which they are overturned by subsequent presidents brings disruption and uncertainty.

In the United States, recent administrations have played political games with transgender people. President Barack Obama recognized them in 2014, but Trump reversed the decision with a rule change finalized in 2020. President Joe Biden reversed again on his first day in office, using an executive order, and Trump has now used yet another EO to reverse the policy again. Biden ordered for transgender individuals to be allowed to serve openly in the US military; Trump has now reversed that order, a decision that will uproot an estimated 9,000-14,000 active military personnel.

Trump’s executive order on transgender people will hurt women and is not based on truth, but on harmful stereotypes. Trump claims to be acting to protect women’s dignity, safety, and well-being. Instead, the order will cause real harms to women, men, and transgender people, especially those who are young, economically disadvantaged, or are people of color. It puts the administration at odds with best practices in medicine and psychology, and with global trends.   

• Subscribe to LSE USAPP’s email newsletter to receive a weekly article roundup. 
• Please read our comments policy before commenting. 
• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics. 
• Shortened URL for this post: https://wp.me/p3I2YF-eRw