President Donald Trump continued his executive attacks on transgender people on Wednesday, signing an order that barred trans athletes from competing in women’s sports.
“The radical left has waged an all-out campaign to erase the very concept of biological sex and replace it with a militant transgender ideology,” Trump said ahead of signing the order. “With this executive order, the war on women’s sports is over.”
The executive action, dubbed “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” ordered the Department of Education and Department of Justice to take action against any school that allows trans women to compete in women’s sports. The order threatened the federal funding of any school found to be out of compliance.
Trump’s order said that allowing trans athletes to compete “deprive[s] women and girls of fair athletic opportunities” and “results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls.”
While speaking on the order, Trump falsely accused Olympic gold medalist Imane Khelif of being a man. The boxer was the subject of harassment during last year’s Summer Olympics after she was falsely accused of being male.
It should be noted that a recent review of research on transgender athletes and their supposed advantages over their cisgender counterparts found that “sex differences” between athletes who have gone through puberty “are reduced, if not erased, over time by gender-affirming hormone therapy.”
The authors of the study, published in late 2023, added that the underlying assumption of many attacks on trans athletes, that “men, who cannot succeed in sports among other cis men, would choose to misidentify as trans women to gain an advantage” is a phantom.
“There are no legitimate cases of this occurring,” they wrote.
The Trump administration has been fixated on the specter of so-called “gender ideology” since taking office. Other Trump executive orders have stripped Title IX protections from transgender students, barred the discussion of transgender identity from K-12 schools, ordered a stop to federal funding of gender-affirming care for minors and ended federal recognition of any sexes beyond male and female.
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