Trump Signs Action to Ban Transgender Women From Female Sports
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump signed an executive action that bans transgender women from participating in female sports, setting up a legal and political battle over an issue that became a flash point in the 2024 presidential election.
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“From now on women’s sports will only be for women,” Trump said Wednesday at a signing ceremony at the White House.
The measure allows the Department of Education to investigate schools and possibly withhold their federal funding, according to a White House official. The administration will also look to roll back rules passed by former President Joe Biden’s administration interpreting Title IX provisions to offer protection for transgender students.
And the Trump administration is warning that athletes coming into the country on visas denoting a sex other than that assigned at birth could be investigated for fraud. Separately, the US State Department will ask the International Olympic Committee to take steps to preserve single-sex sports, the White House said in a factsheet on the action.
Trump on the campaign trail vowed to roll back protections for transgender people, promising to bar them from female sports. His campaign spent millions highlighting the issue in campaign ads and at rallies, where Trump regularly claimed transgender athletes had an unfair advantage over their competitors.
Critics of the move said that the policy unfairly targeted students who just wanted to participate in normal high school activities.
“Trans kids are so often denied autonomy over their bodies, over their lives, over their joy,” said Angelica Christina, board director of The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, which supports LGBTQ nonprofits globally. “And so to just simply want to do something like playing sports and to criminalize that is insane.”
Trump last month signed an executive order saying it is “the official policy” of the US that there are only two sexes, male and female, and requiring agencies to give force to the definitions when applying statutes and regulations. The order mandates that agencies will use the term sex, not gender, and would have the secretaries of State, Homeland Security and other agencies ensure that official documents, including passports and visas, reflect sex.
Earlier: Trump to Sign Orders Defining Sexes, Ending DEI in Agencies
Trump on Wednesday was joined by women athletes and Republican lawmakers, including Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a fierce critic of transgender people’s access to bathrooms that align with their gender identity, and Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as Governors Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Greg Abbott of Texas.
Republican-led states in recent years have passed laws targeting transgender health care, limiting discussions of gender in classrooms and barring transgender athletes from participating in sports that match their gender identity. In 2024, 672 anti-trans bills were introduced across the country, the fifth year in a row to break records, according to Trans Legislation Tracker, a research organization that follows lawmaking impacting the community. About 9% of those proposals were sports-related.
More broadly, Trump has promised a massive overhaul of education policy, including plans to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory and what conservatives cast as inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on children.
The exact number of transgender athletes actively competing in college sports is unclear as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the organization that regulates student athletics, does not track data on transgender participants.
NCAA President Charlie Baker told a Senate panel recently that there are fewer than 10 transgender people in college sports that he is aware of out of 510,000 athletes.
Legal challenges to the order could hinge on the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX, a federal law which banned gender-based discrimination in schools, and which is known mostly for its role in expanding gender equity in sports.
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