According to senior White House officials, President Donald Trump will sign executive orders on Monday announcing that the U.S. government would only recognize male and female sexes and that radical and inefficient diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within federal agencies will be discontinued.
Both instructions were grouped by the authorities under the Trump administration’s broader aim for restoring normalcy. Prior to Trump’s swearing-in, an incoming official described the orders over the phone on Monday.
As part of a policy to protect women from extreme gender ideology and restore biological reality to the federal government, the official introduced the gender order.
The directive instructs the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that official government documents, such as passports and visas, appropriately reflect sex and attempts to mandate that the federal government use the term “sex” rather than “gender.”
Additionally, the directive will increase privacy in private areas in institutions like rape shelters, migrant shelters, and jails, and it would prohibit the use of state dollars for gender-transition health treatment.
Watch live political coverage
Trump stressed the topic in television commercials, including one that was often broadcast in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania, and ran on a platform of reversing rights for transgender and nonbinary individuals. “Kamala belongs to them. The most famous advertisement stated, “President Trump is for you.”
The White House official’s second directive is to eliminate preferencing inside the federal government as well as radical and inefficient government DEI programs.
In order to determine whether DEI programs continue to discriminate against Americans and how to stop them, the official stated that the incoming administration will meet regularly with the deputy secretaries of important agencies.
According to the official, the incoming administration aims to “dismantle the DEI bureaucracy,” specifically focusing on grants related to equity and environmental justice initiatives.
According to the official, the order’s announcement on Martin Luther King Jr. Day was highly appropriate since it aims to restore the hope and promise that civil rights activists held: that one day, all Americans will be treated according to their character rather than their skin color.
Conservatives, including Trump, have attacked DEI programs nationwide in recent years, calling them discriminatory.
In his inauguration speech on Monday afternoon, Trump mentioned the directives, stating that his government would oppose attempts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” His government would “create a society that is merit-based and color-blind,” he continued.
DEI proponents in American society have maintained that such programs are necessary to increase the racial and social inclusivity of businesses, educational institutions, governmental organizations, and other establishments.
Big businesses including Walmart, McDonald’s, and Meta have declared they are discontinuing some or all of their diversity initiatives in the weeks preceding Trump’s reelection.
The chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, a civil rights group that represents LGBTQ Americans in court, Jennifer C. Pizer, stated that she anticipates her group and others will sue the administration over the executive orders.
“The president can’t, with a wave of a pen, change the reality of who people are and the fact that we as a community of people exist, and we have equal protection rights, just like anybody else does,” Pizer stated.
“The administration will have to prove what Pizer described as not provable: that transgender people are legitimately a threat to women’s-only spaces,” Pizer remarked, without having seen the executive orders, which are not yet public.
“We’ve dealt with this historically, where the dominant group just doesn’t want those people using the same space, because the presence of ‘those people’ sort of makes them uncomfortable,” Pizer stated. “That’s not a good reason for making life as a practical matter impossible for a small group of people.”