President-elect Donald Trump will sign an executive order on his first day in office making biological sex, as opposed to gender identity, a foundation for all federal policy, a drastic shift from the rules established under the last four years of the Biden administration.
Incoming Trump administration officials told reporters Monday morning that the executive order, one of an estimated 200 anticipated on Trump’s first day in office, will prevent all federal funds from being “used to promote gender ideology.”
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The policy will require a review of all federal contracts and grants to ensure that they are using the definition of biological sex set forth by the executive order, as opposed to gender identity. This will most saliently affect female-only federal prisons, migrant shelters, and any other “intimate space that requires single-sex protection in order to provide dignity to women.”
An incoming Trump administration spokesperson told reporters that the executive order “recognizes that the erasure of sex and language and policy has had a corrosive impact, not just on women, but on the validity of the American system.”
“When women are not allowed to have single-sex spaces, and that extends, then to trust in government itself,” said the Trump spokesperson. “When the government fails to recognize the truth and treat self-identification as more important than biological sex, people can no longer trust their government.”
According to incoming Trump administration officials, the executive order defines biological sex on the basis of gametes, reproductive cells that come together for sexual reproduction.
Under the anticipated order, women or biological females are defined as having the larger reproductive cell, the ovum or egg. Men or biological males are defined as having the smaller reproductive cell, the sperm.
Feminist advocates have argued in the debate on how to define sex that using egg production as the central feature of female identity makes defining a woman difficult after menopause, which is when a woman stops releasing her finite amount of eggs.
However, the executive order does not define male and female based on sex chromosomes, XX for female or XY for male, partly to account for genetic conditions in which someone can be phenotypically male or female without having the standard sex chromosomal pair.
“Chromosomes are characteristic of your sex, but the binary nature of sex, the reason you and I are all here, is deeper than that,” said the Trump spokesperson. “It is the large reproductive cell, the small reproductive cell, working together in a binary function in order to perpetuate the species. This is not unique to humans.”
In addition to affecting sex-specific spaces, the order will also mandate that passports and visas recognize biological sex as defined by the new policy, as opposed to gender identity.
On the campaign trail, the president-elect promised to act on the matter of “radical gender ideology” on Day One.
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One of the most expensive and widely disseminated campaign ads for Trump against outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris highlighted a clip of Harris as California attorney general supporting providing transgender medical treatment to transgender-identified inmates in state prisons so that they could serve their time in facilities that corresponded with their gender identity.
The commercial with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” aired more than 30,000 times in key swing states to the tune of an estimated $11 million.