Trump’s lightning-speed rollback of transgender rights sparks lawsuits

Donald Trump has signed an executive order banning transgender girls and women from school sports as government agencies’ rush to implement his directives prompt a series of lawsuits.

Donald Trump speaks before signing the No Men in Women's Sports Executive Order into law in the East Room of the White House. Picture: AFP.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order stripping federal funding from schools that allow transgender girls and women, whose sex at birth was male, to participate in female sports events in schools and colleges.

The move honours a key campaign promise, but even before he signed it, the National Collegiate Athletic Association indicated that it would move rapidly to change its rules ahead of the order that will affect every one of its 1,100 member schools.

Mr Trump’s latest order comes as government agencies move with lightning speed to implement his directives to roll back transgender rights, prompting a series of lawsuits unfolding by the day.

Since a flurry of Trump executive orders in his first two weeks in office, the military has paused transgender recruits and removed at least one transgender trainee from her barracks. Hospitals have cancelled surgeries and prescription refills for transgender patients, and turned away new patients for fear of losing government funding. Prisons started the process of transferring transgender inmates from women’s to men’s facilities.

Donald Trump with campaigners against transgender women in sport. Picture: AFP.

Federal agencies also have been scrambling to implement a Trump order demanding they root out “gender ideology,” which has prompted at least the temporary removal of a number of government websites. The White House also cited Trump’s stance as one justification for the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, saying foreign aid had funded projects including a Colombian opera and Peruvian comic book that contained transgender themes.

Judges in a number of jurisdictions are considering lawsuits by transgender rights groups that seek to slow the upheaval. Late Tuesday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., blocked the transfer of three transgender women incarcerated in federal facilities, whom prison officials were seeking to move into male facilities. The administration said the government routinely houses transgender women in male facilities and had selected facilities that would minimise the potential for harm to the prisoners it intends to transfer.

Lawyers representing current and prospective transgender service members this week asked a Washington judge to block Trump’s order barring them from the military, arguing it constituted unlawful discrimination. The plaintiffs alleged the administration already was beginning to push people out.

Memos sent to high-level military personnel last week directed officials to pause the applications of new transgender service members, place some employees who work on gender-related projects on administrative leave and strictly limit access to gender-specific spaces along lines of biological sex.

Donald Trump acknowledges former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines before signing the No Men in Women's Sports Executive Order into law. Picture; AFP.

At least one Army trainee, a 28-year-old transgender woman, was housed for days on a cot in an empty classroom and told she may be removed from service after she declined to sign a form saying she was “willing to live in male bays, use male latrines, and be partnered with a male battle buddy,” according to the plaintiffs’ lawsuit. A Justice Department lawyer said in court Tuesday that there were no confirmed reports of transgender service members losing their jobs due to the executive order.

Trump has said his series of executive orders are designed to restore commonsense distinctions between the sexes, protect women and girls in intimate spaces and shield minors from life-altering medical procedures. His order on transgender healthcare, issued on Jan. 28, directs federal agencies to withhold funding to institutions that provide common gender therapies, including drugs that delay the onset of puberty, to anyone under the age of 19.

“This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end,” Trump’s order said.

The president gave the Department of Health and Human Services 60 days to develop a plan and 90 days to publish updated guidance, but some providers were so concerned about the loss of federal funding for research, medical education and healthcare that they scaled back almost immediately. Several major hospitals have announced they aren’t taking on new patients, and cancelling routine hormone checkups and surgeries.

A group of minors and their families sued Trump and HHS on Tuesday, alleging the order was motivated by a discriminatory purpose and exceeds the president’s authority while also intruding on states’ traditional powers to regulate healthcare.

Kristen Chapman, one of the litigants, said a Virginia hospital cancelled an appointment for her 17-year-old transgender daughter the day after Trump’s executive order, with just a few hours’ notice. The family had already moved to Virginia from Tennessee because of state-level restrictions there. “I am heartbroken, tired and scared,” Chapman said.

Gender therapies for minors are restricted in about half of the U.S. The Supreme Court is currently considering a case from Tennessee to decide whether states can maintain such limits.

During oral arguments in December, the Biden Justice Department took the position that Tennessee’s restrictions were discriminatory and disregarded the views of doctors, minor patients and their parents.

The Trump-era department is expected to reverse that position.

Dow Jones