On Jan. 20, the first day of his second term as President, Donald J. Trump signed an executive order stating “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
This means that the United States is now only recognizing two genders: male and female. The executive is trying to dissolve the existence of transgender, genderfluid, and any individual who doesn’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.
This executive order is stripping the identity that people who identify outside of their biological gender have worked so hard to justify. These orders take the liberty of a person’s identity and gender. People will no longer be recognized unless they identify as cisgender and nothing else.
And it doesn’t just stop with people not being able to identify as transgender. According to the U.S. News and World Report, “The order calls for passports, visas and Global Entry cards to reflect the administration’s definition of sexes.” This means the transgender community has lost their right to identify with their chosen gender in their legal documents.
And as if this wasn’t enough, Trump continued his assault on an already vulnerable community by signing another executive order barring transgendered individuals from joining the military.
So what does all this mean?
It is likely Trump’s demands will reach schools, especially if legal documents are being changed to enforce this executive order. It could make it so staff and students will have no choice but to be referred to as their birth gender.
Transgender students will be forced to identify with their birth assigned gender instead of being able to identify with the gender or genders they’ve chosen. It’s an attack on freedom of expression by forcing individuals to comply with a “biological normality.”
The worst part of this is that Trump states “ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women.”
So, basically he is using the tired argument that people who transition from being male to female are doing so in order to see women at their most vulnerable in single-sex spaces.
As if anyone would go through the steps of transitioning, coming out to their loved ones, and enduring a number of difficult medical procedures just to commit sex crimes.
Clearly this is an assault on a population Trump and his party want to send back into the closet. It should leave any reasonable person to wonder: if Trump is taking these things away from the transgender community, who’s to say he won’t go after the entire LGBTQ+ community next?
