Trump’s new anti-trans executive order is a ‘human rights violation’

Within hours of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government”, following a whipping up of anti-trans feeling during the US election.

The order states that Trump’s administration will make it “the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

The response from LGBTQ+ groups was dismay and fear. Quoted in the Detroit Free Press, trans woman Rachel Crannell-Crocker remarked that Trump “wants to say we are not real,” while Bobbie Hirsch said “I’m scared, I’m really scared for my future.” Kimberly Frost, co-director of ILGA World, said Trump was “emboldened by anti-gender movements” to “use the lives of trans people as tools to sow divisions in society. Our communities deserve better.”

Trump’s move is not unexpected. During a fraught and divisive election campaign, Republicans spent nearly $215m alone on network TV ads that vilified transgender people, according to recent data from AdImpact. The past few years have seen a rush of anti-trans bills in red states, such as banning changes to birth certificates or defining sex as immutably set at birth. Books featuring LGBTQ+ content have been banned, and drag shows have faced protests and been subject to lurid conspiracy theories by Trump’s far right supporters.

Having spent nearly a decade reporting on far right threats to gender rights, the order’s purpose is clear to me: it sits squarely within the attack on so-called “gender ideology” with the ultimate aim to restore a "natural order” of white male supremacy. And while the target is trans people, the threat goes much wider, potentially laying the groundwork for further attacks on the US’s already degraded abortion rights.

What is gender ideology?

Originating in the mid-1990s in Catholic and other conservative Christian circles, the term “gender ideology” sprung up in response to feminists seeking to place “gender” into a United Nations report on its 1994 women’s conference. Initially the term focused on abortion rights, but quickly expanded to criticise any rights related to gender and sexuality, including LGBTQ+ and trans rights.

As the term gathered momentum, it became framed as a threat to ‘traditional’ – see conservative and Christian nationalist – values. LGBTQ+ activists and feminists were accused of imposing “gender ideology” on everything from schools to families and government, determined to “indoctrinate” children and young people with the “transgender agenda.”

Attacks on “gender ideology” were amplified by conservative writers such as Dale O’Leary who popularised the term in her book Gender Agenda, and picked up by the Vatican, as well as the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ ‘religious freedom’ organisations such as Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation. The right-wing think tank is behind the controversial Project 2025, with ADF on the project’s advisory board.

The project – which brings “together … over 100 respected organizations from across the conservative movement, to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people” – is key to understanding Trump’s move.

Project 2025 published a “Mandate for Leadership”, providing an anti-rights blueprint for the incoming administration. It offered policy ideas to demolish so-called “gender ideology”, demanding that “enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology.” It demanded that “gender ideology” be removed from school curricula and, in language echoed in Trump’s order, warned “radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on … young girls.”

The project also called on the government to “reverse the DEI [diversity, equality, inclusion] revolution in Labor policy”. Trump’s order did so willingly, revoking previous executive orders that protected against discrimination and stating that government agencies must “take immediate steps to end Federal implementation of unlawful and radical DEI ideology.”

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A threat to abortion?

While the executive order is first and foremost a frightening attack on trans people, its wording sets alarm bells ringing for abortion rights, too. It will be no surprise that curtailing abortion rights is a key focus of Project 2025 – the mandate mentions “abortion” 199 times.

Trump’s previous administration created a conservative-majority Supreme Court that overruled Roe vs Wade, opening the door for individual states to implement deadly and devastating abortion bans across the US. Now, the executive order’s wording suggests a wider attack on reproductive rights.

The order defines “female” as meaning “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell”, while male is defined as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

“Female: a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell”Trump executive order

As well as being troubling for trans identity, the wording defines male and female foetal personhood from conception. If the foetus is recognised as a person at conception, then that foetus legally has the same rights as a born person, with catastrophic consequences for pregnant women and people. Foetal personhood means a woman can be prosecuted for murder if she has an abortion, as it violates the right to life. She can face manslaughter charges if she has a miscarriage for which she is blamed.

Bethany Van Kampen Saravia, senior legal and policy adviser at the gender rights NGO Ipas, told openDemocracy that “the language used in this cruel and dehumanising executive order is undoubtedly deliberate and deeply flawed on several counts. Simply put, it is outside of the executive authority to declare a fertilized egg a ‘person’ who has constitutionally protected rights."

This is not a new threat. So far, 24 US states have included foetal personhood language in laws regulating or banning abortion, while 17 states have foetal personhood by law or judicial decision that applies to either criminal or civil law, or both. There have already been multiple cases where women in the States have been criminalised for miscarriage.

“Personhood arguments have long been used by anti-rights actors in attempts to fully ban and criminalize abortion and to punish pregnant people,” warned Van Kampen Saravia. “This language can also ban some forms of birth control and fertility treatments like IVF. This is a clear and deliberate signal of what is to come from this Administration.”

“It is outside of the executive authority of the President to instate a nationwide abortion ban, yet there is much that he can do to limit access to medication abortion and those threats need to be taken seriously,” she added. “Ipas US condemns these egregious acts of hate and bigotry. These executive orders are nothing shy of human rights violations and the world should be paying very close attention now to what is being feigned as 'defending women' and who is actually being targeted and criminalized.”

The ideology behind the ‘natural order’

The attacks on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights are often interlinked, as both pose a threat to the far right idea of a ‘natural order’ which has been undermined by feminism and human rights, and must be returned to through reversing social progress and protections.

The idea that there is a ‘natural order’ which needs to be re-established has its roots in fascist ideology, and its intent is found in almost all attacks on gender rights including from Trump, Putin, and anti-gender ideologues in Europe. It valorises male supremacy, female subordination, and declares the non-existence of LGBTQ+ people.

As I write in my book, the existence of trans people is a grave threat to the natural order and its advocates who want to reassert male supremacy and abolish the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The goal of male supremacist, anti-gender movements is to ‘naturalise’ gendered stereotypes about men’s and women’s behaviour and status: they want to naturalise male supremacy and female inferiority.

“The goal of male supremacist, anti-gender movements is to ‘naturalise’ male supremacy and female inferiority”

The far right wants to tie women’s inferiority to biology, and to claim that harmful gendered stereotypes are biologically innate in order to pin women to specific roles in society. These same stereotypes are used to justify women’s oppression: women are just more nurturing, or they are bad at leadership, for example, they should stay in the domestic sphere and leave the public sphere to the boys. The anti-gender movement wants to claim that women’s oppression is natural, rooted in women’s biology, and therefore cannot be challenged.

But biology is not destiny, as the famous feminist slogan states. The ‘natural order’ of female inferiority and male supremacy is disrupted by feminists saying women can have control over their fertility, or LGBTQ+ people saying one can express their gender identity as they choose. They therefore have to be stopped.

This order has nothing to do with “defending women” from “extreme gender ideology.” The extreme gender ideology is the one that tries to push women into oppressive boxes, ban abortion, and seek to abolish the existence of trans people and the LGBTQ+ community more widely.

The extreme gender ideology is the movement that elects a President after a judge in New York found a rape allegation made against him to be “substantially true”. It is the movement that celebrates his election with the slogan “your body, my choice.”