How Trump Uses Language to Attack the Idea of Transgender Identity

On his first day back in office, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female, that a person’s sex is established at conception and that it cannot be changed.

Then, through a series of executive orders, he issued a raft of policies targeted at transgender Americans, a population of roughly 1.6 million. The orders cover many areas of life — schools, medical care, prisons, housing and passports — and pull the government back from accepting trans people in the military, allowing them to participate in sports and protecting them under anti-discrimination laws based on sex.

Lawsuits have already been filed. More are on the way. But the sheer volume of orders, and their language and tone, suggest to both transgender advocates and Mr. Trump’s supporters that the overarching intention is about more than policy — it’s about undermining the very idea that transgender identities are legitimate and should be recognized.

The transgender debate is divisive, with polls showing that many Americans want to protect trans people from discrimination, but also think that society has gone too far in accommodating them. A Gallup poll conducted last month found that a majority of Americans support allowing transgender men and women to serve openly in the military, though that percentage has declined since 2019. And nearly 80 percent do not believe transgender female athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, according to a recent poll from The New York Times and Ipsos.

But the executive orders are notable for the way they try to frame the debate in moral terms, portraying trans people as lacking honesty and integrity, and thus unworthy of consideration when it comes to legal rights.

For instance, the orders use the term “biological reality” to imply a deliberate deception on the part of trans people, a trope that has historically been used to rationalize violence against them. In the first directive alone, that term appears six times.

The executive order on the military states that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”

And the executive order on sports asserts that the participation of trans girls and women in women’s sports must be prohibited not just as a matter of safety and fairness but one of “dignity and truth.”

“This is on the worse end of the range of outcomes that I had anticipated,” said Alex Chen, director of the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy clinic at Harvard Law School. “They’re frontally attacking the validity of transgender existence, right? I don’t think there’s any other way to put it.”

For many supporters of trans rights, gender identity — how people think of themselves in terms of male, female or something else — is more malleable and more of a spectrum than traditional notions of sex allow. They also argue that gender identity is itself a critical determinant of a person’s sex, and likely has a biological factor.

Defining sex as only physical and fixed at conception “ignores the complexity of all of our bodies and experiences,” said Raquel Willis, co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement, a trans advocacy group.

But many supporters of Mr. Trump’s trans policies, across the political spectrum, have chafed at what they see as pressure to replace sex with gender identity. The insistence on pushing gender identity to the forefront of how society organizes itself, they say, conflicts with what they believe are fundamental biological differences between men and women.

The language in Mr. Trump’s orders is channeling the anger over that cultural clash, whether it is about pronoun usage or trans athletes in women’s sports.

“People want to be able to identify biological realities and express them without being labeled a bigot,” said Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that helped formulate some of Mr. Trump’s policies.

The orders, he said, “restore words to their common-sense, scientifically sound meanings.”

The president’s directives came packaged in five executive orders, adding up to more than 10,000 words. To “eradicate the biological reality of sex,” his first order says, deprives women “of their dignity, safety and well-being” and ultimately has a corrosive impact “not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”

The order goes on to define women as “belonging to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” Men, on the other hand, produce the small reproductive cell.

Even some critics of the transgender rights movement see the language as excessively strident.

Doriane Coleman, a Duke University law professor and an expert in gender and sports, has advocated that federal law return to the definition of “sex” that Mr. Trump has adopted. But she objects to the tone of the executive orders.

“Instead of just saying, ‘Trans movement strategy has gone too far,’ they’re also saying, ‘Trans people are false and defective and not worthy of being seen,’” she said. “And that’s both wrong on the substance and understandably scary for trans people.”

One of the executive orders takes aim at medical treatments for transgender children, a hotly disputed issue. Two dozen states have barred doctors from treating minors with puberty blockers, hormones or surgeries. Several European countries have limited the treatments and are conducting research to gauge their efficacy.

On the other side, the American Academy of Pediatrics has so far continued to endorse the treatments as effective in relieving the psychological distress many transgender youths experience as a result of the incongruence between their sex and their gender identity.

The Trump administration’s order calls the practice of medical transition for youths “a stain on our nation’s history” and the medical guidelines “junk science.” It directs federal agencies to withhold funding for hospitals and medical schools that carry out transgender medical care for patients under the age of 19, referring to it as “maiming.”

In a lawsuit filed last week challenging the order’s constitutionality, the attorneys general of Washington, Oregon and Minnesota noted the title, “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” saying it was “false and repugnant.”

Mr. Trump’s executive order on transgender troops is widely seen as particularly demeaning.

It declares that a transgender identity “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

And it lumps transgender identity with mental health conditions that are disqualifying for military service, including bipolar disorder and prior psychiatric hospitalization.

Last week, at a hearing challenging the order, Ana Reyes, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., told a government lawyer to be prepared to answer whether Mr. Trump’s language reflected a type of animus, which could factor into the arguments over its constitutionality.

“Isn’t this the type of infused animus that the Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down?” Judge Reyes asked.

Many see Mr. Trump’s orders, though, as a long-awaited corrective. They point to President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s own directive, issued on his first day in office, which directed federal anti-discrimination policies based on “sex” to cover gender identity; it cited a 2020 decision by the Supreme Court, which ruled that a landmark civil rights law protects transgender employees.

And some took particular umbrage at a directive from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that said that failing to use pronouns corresponding with an employee’s gender identity could violate federal law.

Doreen Denny, a senior adviser for Concerned Women for America, a conservative group that has pushed for barring transgender women from sports, said that Mr. Biden was guilty of overreach with his directive, and that it offered little justification. At least Mr. Trump’s orders, she said, are “giving you reason and rationale.”

Trans activists say the debate unleashed by Mr. Trump’s orders further endangers a population that already feels vulnerable. And courts have stepped in. A temporary restraining order has blocked the Bureau of Prisons from housing transgender women with male inmates and from stopping transgender medical treatment.

But a few trans activists also see an opportunity.

Since the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, “transgender issues have been seen under the umbrella of L.G.B.T.Q.,” Mr. Chen of Harvard Law School said. “That may have obscured the fact that we never really have had a full debate about transgender identity the way we did about gay identity.”

“I always did think,” he added, “ultimately we would have to wage the battle on the merits with the public.”