Trump is right to take on ‘transgender lunacy’

It looks like Donald Trump is about to deliver a devastating blow to trans ideology. The US president-elect has promised that, following his inauguration today, he will sign an executive order that will put a stop to the ‘radical gender ideology [that] has devastated biological truth and women’s safety and opportunity’.

The executive order on ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’ will, among other things, define ‘woman’ as an ‘adult human female’. It will restrict men’s participation in women’s sports, prevent male prisoners from being housed in women’s prisons and effectively put an end to self-identification on government documents. As far as the federal government and other public institutions are concerned, there are to be only two recognised genders – male and female.

The changes resulting from the executive order will be sweeping. There will be no more ‘trans inclusion’ guidance. Federal employees will no longer be expected to state their preferred pronouns. Passports and other identification documents will be forced to reflect biological reality, rather than someone’s inner gender identity. It will also end the bizarre practice of taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgeries for prisoners – a position once championed by Kamala Harris, which formed the basis of a hugely effective attack ad with the notorious tagline: ‘Kamala is for they / them. President Trump is for you.’

Trans activists have been quick to accuse Trump of abusing his executive power and rolling back ‘hard won’ rights. But we shouldn’t forget that it was a sweeping executive order that ushered in so many of the maddest ‘trans inclusive’ policies in the first place. On Joe Biden’s first day in office in 2021, he ordered the federal government to ‘review all existing orders, regulations, guidance documents, policies, programmes or other agency actions’ that might be incompatible with ‘trans rights’. As a result, the priorities of trans activists became enmeshed in the US bureaucracy.

Of course, it will take more than just one executive order to roll back what Trump describes as ‘transgender lunacy’. Thankfully, there is also the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Bill, which also recently passed in the House of Representatives. Republicans (and even some Democrats) hope this will put an end to men identifying their way into women’s sports in federally funded schools and universities. The madness will only truly end when there is a cultural shift in elite institutions that reflects the public mood (voters, including Democrats, already oppose the goals of trans activists).

Whatever faults Donald Trump may have, at least there is finally someone in power who knows what a woman is.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.