After emerging from the worlds of academia and social-justice activism and finding a foothold in national politics, gender ideology is set to become one of — if not the — defining issue in a presidential race for the first time ever in 2024.

“I would be shocked if this was not a central topic of concern and that it did not loom as large as abortion and immigration did in the previous election,” said Jay Richards, the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, and a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. 

In January, former president Donald Trump released his “plan to stop the chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth.”

“On Day One, I will revoke Joe Biden’s cruel policies on so-called gender-affirming care — ridiculous,” Trump said in a video message.

Trump vowed to sign an executive order “instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age” and said he would ask Congress to stop the use of taxpayer dollars to promote or pay for such procedures. He also vowed to revoke Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals that perform them.

In some ways, Trump is playing catch-up on the issue, according to Richards, who points out that he had a chance to establish permanent bulwarks against gender ideology in his first term — and failed to do so.

“President Trump had, in his first term, a mixed record on this,” Richards said. “He slowed down some of the gender ideology stuff but frankly, didn’t do what could have been done and so now he sort of issues this very strong statement . . . about what he would do if given a second term. But I’m frankly frustrated that he didn’t do more on it during his first term.”

Richards is skeptical that the president has unilateral authority to shut down gender-transition surgeries across the country, especially for adults. He calls Trump’s proposal a “mixed bag” that should be viewed as a general sign he takes the issue seriously, or “at the very least, he realizes that it is politically advantageous.” 

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, by contrast, has a more established track record he could draw on during a presidential campaign.

“I honestly think Ron DeSantis has more of a clear and direct track record of actually doing this, and I think President Trump probably recognizes that and realizes that this is going to be a liability for him, so he’s at least talking a very strong game about what he will do if elected president,” Richards said.

DeSantis has been at the forefront of the fight. In August, the Florida governor decried “gender-affirming care,” saying that “what they don’t tell you is that they are giving very young girls double mastectomies, they want to castrate young boys — that’s wrong.” 

He added: “You don’t disfigure ten-, twelve-, 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria.”

Under DeSantis’s watch, the Florida Board of Medicine and state Board of Osteopathic Medicine voted to ban puberty blockers and sex-reassignment surgery as treatments for transgender minors in the state. The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration in August created a rule prohibiting Medicaid coverage of gender-transition services, such as hormone therapy and surgery.

In 2021, he signed a bill into law banning biological males from participating in girls sports. In March 2022, he signed the Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits instructors from teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms.

If Florida has served as a model for other states in the fight against gender ideology, the Biden administration’s work to advance it offers evidence of how much power a president has in this area.

Every expert I spoke to sounded alarms about the Biden administration’s proposed Title IX rules, which are expected to effectively bar federally funded universities from maintaining women-only spaces and sports teams, among other far-reaching consequences. The Education Department, after spending months reviewing more than 238,000 public comments it received on the proposed rules, said the rules will become public in May. 

Aside from undoing the Title IX changes, if they take effect as proposed, Richards suggested a future president could take action by launching investigations into federal funding of pediatric gender medicine and surgery, including expenditures by the CDC, Medicare and Medicaid, and the National Institutes of Health more broadly.

What, then, could a conservative president committed to retaining the sex binary in federal law accomplish?

Ginny Gentles, senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice, called for a future president to open an investigation into school districts that have misused the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to keep student records private from parents in instances where schools secretly updated a student’s name. She suggested a president could also advance a training agenda from the Office of Civil Rights, in the Department of Education, to ensure that school districts are aware of what the federal law requires of them, as far as parental rights are concerned.

She also suggested withholding federal funds from school districts that have gender-support plans in place (IWV’s Education Freedom Center was able to quickly build a list of at least 50 school districts that are “gleefully hiding information” from parents through the plans, she said). A future president should also slash federal funding to Planned Parenthood, which is a “huge and growing provider of gender-transition hormones.”

Autumn Stoup, the senior vice president for strategy at Family Policy Alliance, said a president should support and sign the Protecting Minors from Medical Malpractice Act, which was introduced by Representative Jim Banks (R., Ind.) and Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and would allow minors who underwent gender-transition treatment to sue for the harms done to them.

A president should call for and sign congressional legislation to ensure that federal women’s prisons remain just for women and should similarly call for and sign a federal parental bill of rights that would work to remove gender ideology from schools and reinforce curriculum transparency, she said.

A future president should also restore the correct uses of the terms “men” and “women” within the federal government and should eliminate terms that reduce women to “birthing people” or “birthing parent.”

Stoup suggested she would like to see candidates commit to signing a federal bill protecting girls’ sports and preserving the integrity of Title IX, and that a future president should take steps to ensure that medical providers cannot be compelled to provide gender-transition procedures that they believe will harm an individual.

Lauren Bone, a lawyer who serves as outside counsel to the Women’s Liberation Front, said a future president should focus more on the “quieter things or the less sexy things” and less on the “gotcha stuff.” She wants to see presidential candidates who are committed to taking action and talking to experts on the issue and who will prioritize the work that has the greatest impact.

“There’s this tendency to really rely — on both sides — on executive orders, guidance documents, and things like that,” she said. “I want to see them double down and . . . make a concerted effort to do some rulemaking and really put these things down that have the force of law, unlike something that’s really easy to sue and get overturned.” She echoed concerns about the housing of biologically male inmates in women’s prisons and suggested that an amendment to the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which currently does not allow the segregation of people who are LGBT, is needed.

She added that there must be bipartisan movement on the issue; if a Republican wins in 2024, he or she should work to recruit moderate Democrats such as Joe Manchin to the cause.

A Deseret News/HarrisX poll from January showed that 55 percent of U.S. voters think hormone therapy should be banned for young people, even with parental approval. Sixty-one percent of all voters said gender-reassignment surgery should be banned for minors. However, 68 percent of Democrats said hormone therapy should be legal, while 57 percent said surgery should be legal.

Joseph Burgo, a psychotherapist who serves as vice director of Genspect, said he’d want a presidential candidate to “say gender-identity ideology is an unproven theory and as such it should not be being rolled out and taught to children as accepted fact.” He added there must be a “greater commitment to science, . . . a greater defense of biological reality.”

He’d want to see a future president follow in Florida’s footsteps and have the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare say that gender-transition treatment is an experimental treatment that will not be covered.

All of the experts I spoke to agreed the tide is turning on the issue, which has gained increasing public attention since 2020. The rhetoric from the 2024 GOP candidates is evidence of the surging prominence of the issue.

Nikki Haley said in August 2022 that America must “snap out of it” when it comes to “woke culture, in our schools, wanting our kids to decide their gender. I look at the fact that we’ve got men playing women’s sports. I look at the fact that we’ve got our military focused on gender-pronoun classes.”

“This is absolute craziness,” she said at the time. “We’ve got enemies trying to come after us, and America has been naïve. It’s been weakened. It’s been asleep at the wheel.”

During a town-hall-style event in New Hampshire last month, Haley said Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law doesn’t go far enough.

“Basically what it said was, you shouldn’t have to talk about gender before third grade. I’m sorry, I don’t think that goes far enough. When I was in school you didn’t have sex ed until seventh grade,” she said and suggested that decisions about sex education should be left up to parents.

Presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile, has warned against the rise of three “secular religions,” including gender ideology, “racial wokeism,” and “climateism,” which he claims stem from a national identity crisis.

Around NR

• Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan announced he does not plan to run for president in 2024. Jeffrey Blehar calls his announcement a “dignified bowing-out that focuses on the best reasons for his not running — unnecessarily crowding the field and thus allowing Trump to triumph again in a divided race — and tactfully omits other very good but more personal reasons for not running, such as (1) he would not win, and (2) would suffer the indignity of getting thrashed in his home state’s own primary provided he survived in the race until that long.” Blehar thanks Hogan for his decision, writing that “presidential electoral politics, like nuclear war, is a strange game; sometimes the only winning move is not to play.”

• On the topic of crowded fields, Jim Geraghty warns that presidential candidates who can’t win almost never realize it until it’s too late. He recaps the failed candidates of 2016, every one of whom “wanted to believe they were about to turn things around”; none of them dropped out “until at least one state later than they should have withdrawn and endorsed their preferred rival.”

• Charles C. W. Cooke decodes Trump’s “recipe for electoral failure,” which involves dismissing any politician or candidate who may appeal to moderate voters, as Trump has recently suggested Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, and Ronald Reagan are examples of what has historically been wrong with the GOP.

As far as I can see, the argument here seems to be that if, in addition to all of the solid conservatives who are backing a given candidate, that candidate also has fans who are more politically moderate, he must, ipso facto, be a fraud. Which . . . well, which is completely backwards, isn’t it?

• Hundreds of thousands of automated bot accounts have flooded Twitter in the last eleven months to boost former president Donald Trump, according to Israeli tech firm Cyabra. The firm told the Associated Press that the accounts, which appear to have been created by an unknown entity in the U.S., have gone on the attack against Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, to seed negative rhetoric about Haley and to suggest DeSantis would be more fit to serve as Trump’s 2024 running mate than as president. More here.

• New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu (R.), an expected 2024 GOP presidential contender who has not yet declared his bid, said Sunday that DeSantis would win his home state if the presidential election were held today. Sununu said DeSantis is the effective, electorally competitive “alternative” to former president Trump that the GOP has been seeking to lead the party.