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.”
The Biden administration permitted U.S. citizens to use the gender-neutral “X” as a passport marking in 2022.
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.
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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 NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s director of strategic projects, Jin Hee Lee, stated that there are many uncertainties over the specific DEI programs that will be terminated in response to Trump’s directive. However, she stated that the organization is prepared to take whatever necessary steps to stop prejudice, including suing to overturn the decision.
According to Lee, a move to outlaw anything pertaining to initiatives to combat inequality would be a major blow to the progress of racial justice.
“Any incoming president can set the policies for the federal administration,” she continued, “but it would be unsettling if it became acceptable for the government or employers to discriminate on the basis of sex or race.”
LGBTQ legal advocates react
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,” Pizer stated. “We have equal protection rights, just like anybody else does.”
Trump’s executive order on gender identity will undoubtedly be challenged in court, according to another attorney and LGBTQ legal expert, but the administration can nonetheless carry out the directive and, in certain situations, make modifications right away.
The expert, who requested anonymity to discuss the executive order openly, pointed out that rape shelters, jails, and migrant shelters might start relocating transgender individuals to areas that correspond with their natal sex rather than their gender identification right now. This implies that trans women incarcerated in women’s prisons, for instance, could be transferred to male prisons very quickly.
The attorney added that transgender Americans should be careful when they leave the country because they may face difficulties reentering the country and possibly be detained by border officials if they have X as their gender marker on federal documents like passports.
A person may be held in Customs and Border Protection custody “until they can work with the Department of State to get an alternate ID issued,” according to the attorney, if a Customs and Border agent is unable to enter the individual’s X gender marker into their system to permit the individual to return to the United States.
However, because agencies must go through a process that takes months or even years to change the rules governing the agencies, some changes, like how the Department of Housing and Urban Development protects trans tenants from being evicted by landlords or how agencies handle health care for transgender Americans, may take longer to implement.
The legal expert stated that in certain instances, it will require time for the agencies to publish a final rule after issuing Notices of Proposed Rulemaking, reviewing the comments, as required by law, and correcting any inadequacies.
Courts may attempt to halt the executive order’s enforcement by granting injunctions after the expected legal challenges are submitted. However, if challenges proceed through the legal system, including to the Supreme Court, which may support the Trump administration, judges may potentially choose to permit the order to be put into effect.