President Donald Trump is predicted to signal an govt order Wednesday banning transgender athletes from taking part in girls’s sports activities, senior administration officers advised ABC Information, fulfilling a promise that was on the middle of his 2024 marketing campaign.
The order will set up sweeping mandates on intercourse and sports activities coverage and can direct federal companies, together with the Division of Justice, to interpret federal Title IX guidelines as prohibiting the participation of transgender women and girls in feminine sports activities classes, based on a White Home doc on the upcoming govt order obtained by ABC Information.
The order, titled “Retaining Males Out of Girls’s Sports activities,” sources stated, will mandate fast enforcement, together with in opposition to faculties and athletic associations that “deny girls single-sex sports activities and single-sex locker rooms,” based on the doc, and can direct State attorneys normal to establish finest practices for implementing the mandate.
The White Home expects sports activities our bodies just like the NCAA to vary their guidelines in accordance with the order as soon as it’s signed, based on a senior administration official.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks throughout a joint press convention with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu within the East Room on the White Home in Washington, Feb. 4, 2025.
Leah Millis/Reuters
“We’re a nationwide governing physique and we observe federal legislation,” NCAA President Charlie Baker advised Republican senators at a listening to in December. “Readability on this difficulty on the federal stage can be very useful.”
Trump is predicted to signal an govt order on Wednesday afternoon at a signing ceremony that includes athletes, coaches and advocates who’ve campaigned in opposition to transgender participation in girls’s sports activities, sources stated. Greater than 60 attendees, together with former College of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, will be a part of the ceremony.
“We need to take actions to affirmatively shield girls’s sports activities,” deputy assistant to the president and senior coverage strategist Might Mailman advised ABC Information, who stated that the manager order is designed to additional overturn Biden-era insurance policies that required faculties and athletic organizations to deal with gender id and intercourse as equal. She famous that a court ruling decided such necessities weren’t crucial, and that the president’s govt order would explicitly ban them.
Trump’s govt order will result in elevated discrimination and harassment, Human Rights Marketing campaign President Kelley Robinson stated in a press release on Tuesday.
“This order may expose younger individuals to harassment and discrimination, emboldening individuals to query the gender of children who do not match a slim view of how they’re supposed to decorate or look,” Robinson stated. “Collaborating in sports activities is about studying the values of teamwork, dedication, and perseverance. And for therefore many college students, sports activities are about discovering someplace to belong. We should always need that for all youngsters – not partisan insurance policies that make life tougher for them.”
Mailman stated the manager order’s aim was “to not guarantee that all people conforms to their intercourse stereotype as they’re taking part in sports activities” however to “shield girls’s sports activities,” including that choices like co-ed classes would nonetheless be obtainable.
If universities do not comply, the White Home warned they may not solely lose federal funding but additionally face authorized motion.
“If faculties do not comply, it isn’t simply that they are prone to DOJ-based actions,” Mailman stated. “Title 9 has a personal proper of motion element behind it, so if faculties are violating the legislation, they’re prone to lawsuits from their feminine college students, that’s going to really be extra than simply taking away federal funding. These are multi-million greenback lawsuits.”
The chief order additionally directs the Secretary of State to push for adjustments inside the Worldwide Olympic Committee to take care of single-sex competitors and the Division of Homeland Safety to evaluation visa insurance policies to stop transgender girls from figuring out as feminine, which might enable them to compete in girls’s sports activities, based on the doc detailing the order.
The order is probably the most aggressive transfer but by Trump to satisfy one among his central marketing campaign guarantees relating to transgender athletes in girls’s sports activities.
Trump signed an govt order final week seeking to restrict gender-affirming look after individuals below the age of 19.
The order would transfer to limit medical establishments that obtain federal funding from offering such care — together with puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and surgical procedures — calling on the secretary of the Division of Well being and Human Providers to “take all acceptable actions to finish the chemical and surgical mutilation of kids.”
