Donald Trump’s sex edict set to face legal challenges

Having campaigned heavily on transgender issues, Donald Trump moved quickly this week to change the US government’s policy on sex and gender. This is what it means.

In the final days of the presidential election, it was difficult to turn on a TV in a battleground state without hearing this line: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

Donald Trump and his allies spent tens of millions of dollars replaying the ad with the killer kicker, so effective it was that Kamala Harris’s team never managed to settle on a rebuttal.

It was no surprise, then, that the President declared on his first day back in charge this week that the US government’s policy was that “there are only two genders: male and female.”

The executive order – titled “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government” – was crafted by May Mailman, Mr Trump’s senior policy strategist and the ex-director of the Independent Women’s Law Center.

“We could not be more ecstatic,” said Beth Parlato, the group’s senior legal adviser who worked alongside Ms Mailman as she finalised the order in the post-election transition.

“Sex has always meant male and female. It’s always meant that from day one.”

May Mailman is said to have drafted Trump's gender executive order `2021 As seen in social media posts

She said the order’s immediate impacts would include overhauling government-issued IDs to refer to a person’s sex rather than their gender identity, removing transgender women from female prisons, and ending taxpayer-funded gender care for inmates – a practice for which Ms Harris’s support was included in Mr Trump’s campaign commercial.

Ms Parlato said she was also soon expecting federal restrictions to prohibit transgender women participating in female sports, another election commitment of the President.

“We’re very happy that we have an administration that’s going to stand up and protect women,” she said, adding that while Ms Mailman and her colleagues were expecting legal challenges, they believed “100 per cent that any of these executive orders will be upheld”.

Advocates for Trans Equality boss Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen blasted the order as “an attempt by hateful extremists to make it impossible for us to participate in public life”.

“We refuse to return to the time in American life when trans people were forced to hide,” he said, promising to “use every resource at our disposal … to hold the line against these attacks”.

Ms Parlato said the President’s actions had “nothing to do with any negative connotations on the trans community”, and encouraged Australia to follow suit because “sex is sex, and it’s rooted in biology”.

Both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton refused to do so this week.

Originally published as Donald Trump’s sex edict set to face legal challenges