President Donald Trump on Monday plans to sign executive orders proclaiming that the U.S. government will recognize only two sexes, male and female, and ending “radical and wasteful” diversity, equity and inclusion programs inside federal agencies, according to senior White House officials.
The officials grouped both orders under the Trump administration’s wider “restoring sanity” agenda. The orders were detailed by an incoming official on a phone call Monday ahead of Trump’s swearing-in.
The official presented the gender order as part of a policy “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.”
The order aims to require that the federal government use the term “sex” instead of “gender,” and directs the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to “ensure that official government documents, including passports and visas, reflect sex accurately.”
The order will also prevent taxpayer funds from being used for gender-transition health care and add “privacy in intimate spaces” in facilities such as prisons, migrant shelters and rape shelters.
Trump campaigned on rolling back protections for transgender and nonbinary people and emphasized the issue in television advertisements, including a commercial that aired frequently in key swing states such as Pennsylvania. “Kamala is for them/them. President Trump is for you,” the most notable ad said.
The second order detailed by the White House official aims to end “radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing” inside the federal government.
The official said the new administration will hold monthly meetings with the deputy secretaries of key agencies to “assess what type of DEI programs are still discriminating against Americans and figure out ways to end them.”
The official said the new administration intended to “dismantle the DEI bureaucracy,” singling out environmental justice programs and equity-related grants.
The official said it was “very fitting” that the order was announced on Martin Luther King Jr. Day because “this is order is meant to return to the promise and the hope, captured by civil rights champions, that one day all Americans can be treated on the basis of their character, not by the color of their skin.”
In recent years, Trump and conservatives have assailed DEI initiatives across American society, characterizing them as discriminatory.
Trump referenced the orders in his inaugural address Monday afternoon, saying in part that his administration would resist what he described as efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” He added that his administration would “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.”
The proponents of DEI in American society have argued that such initiatives are essential to make companies, schools, government agencies and other institutions more racially and socially inclusive.
In the weeks leading up to Trump’s return to power, major corporations such as Meta, McDonald’s and Walmart have announced they are ending some or all of their diversity practices.
Jennifer C. Pizer, the chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization that litigates on behalf of LGBTQ Americans, said she expects her organization and others to file lawsuits against the administration over the executive actions.
“The president can’t, with a wave of a pen, change the reality of who people are and the fact that we as a community of people exist, and we have equal protection rights, just like anybody else does,” Pizer said.
Pizer, who has not read the executive orders, which are not yet public, said that in order for the presidential actions to stand in court, the administration will have to prove what Pizer described as not provable: that transgender people are legitimately a threat to women’s-only spaces.
“We’ve dealt with this historically, where the dominant group just doesn’t want those people using the same space, because the presence of ‘those people’ sort of makes them uncomfortable,” Pizer said. “That’s not a good reason for making life as a practical matter impossible for a small group of people.”