President-elect Donald Trump promised throughout his campaign to dismantle the transgender agenda by taking actions to protect women’s sports, remove gender ideology from schools and limit access to dangerous sex change procedures.

On the first day of his second term, Trump has the opportunity to roll back the Biden administration’s four year attempt to weave gender ideology into the fabric of American institutions and government agencies, and set the tone for his administration’s approach to gender ideology, several policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. 

 

“He [Trump] has a clear mandate on this. Ran very clearly on it. Public opinion is waking up to just how hurtful this can be,” Kristina Rasmussen, executive director of the medical watchdog group Do No Harm, told the DCNF.

A recently published report from the American Principles Project revealed that Trump’s pledge to stop the transgender agenda was an “extremely popular” position during the 2024 election that pushed voters towards Trump in many critical swing states.

Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project, outlined the three pledges Trump made during his campaign to stop gender ideology, to the DCNF.

“The first is he has pledged to defund sex change procedures for minors throughout HHS and the federal government — so no more paying for that. And he can do that through executive order, through HHS and Obamacare regulations,” Schilling told the DCNF.

“Secondly, he’s pledged to defund DEI and transgender curriculum in schools — he can also do that through executive order. And then third is women’s sports, interpreting Title IX and instructing every federal department and agency to interpret Title IX as it was intended, which is biological sex.”

“He can do all of those on day one,” said Schilling.

In December, Trump told an audience his administration would get “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools and we’re going to get it out of our schools very fast.”

The DCNF spoke with several policy experts with insights on how Trump can swiftly begin disentangling the transgender agenda from the federal government on day one of his second presidential term.

 

Jay W. Richards, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, told the DCNF that Trump could use the power of executive orders and presidential influence to reverse the impacts of gender ideology in many government agencies.

“There are important things President Trump could do in his first hundred days—whether by executive order or from his bully pulpit—to help reverse the incursions of gender ideology in our laws and institutions pushed by his predecessor [President] Joe Biden,” Richards told the DCNF.

“He could issue an EO providing a solid biological definition of male and female. He could call for restrictions on federal funding of ghoulish ‘gender transition’ drugs and surgery, especially for minors. He could prohibit male prisoners from being housed in female federal prisons. He could call for protecting women’s sports and spaces in institutions that receive federal funding. He could reverse the military accommodations of gender-confused service members, which harms military readiness and morale. And he could direct all agencies in the executive branch to develop a plan to extract gender ideology from all its programs.”

Richards told the DCNF that while a president cannot single-handedly root out gender ideology, Trump has the opportunity to establish the direction his administration takes on this extremely important issue.

“Not everything can be accomplished by the president alone. But, with efforts like these, President Trump could establish the tone and direction of his new administration on one of the most important political and cultural issues of our time,” said Richards.

May Mailman, the director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, described in an op-ed how Trump can protect women’s sports and private spaces by rescinding “all guidance that illegally represents that Title IX covers gender identity.”

“Gender identity” is a term used by transgender activists to describe an individual’s imagined sex. Transgender activists believe a person’s imagined sex is as real as their physical sex, and should hold equal weight in society and law.

In April 2024, the Biden administration expanded Title IX regulations, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, to include “gender identity,” giving men claiming to have a female “gender identity” full legal access to women’s sports and private spaces. A federal judge recently struck down the expanded Title IX regulations in a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by six states, including Tennessee.

Mailman also stated Trump could further protect the sovereignty of the sexes by explicitly defining “female” to mean “an individual belonging to the sex that has the reproductive role of producing ova.”

“The longstanding regulation says that schools ‘shall provide equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes.’ As if that needed clarification, Trump’s Department of Education should add that equal opportunity requires a reasonable number of female-only teams and private spaces (which is how the statute has been understood for decades),” wrote Mailman.

“And as if that needed clarification, the regulation should define female to mean an individual belonging to the sex that has the reproductive role of producing ova,” he added.

 

Rasmussen told the DCNF that Trump has a huge opportunity to remove gender ideology from scientific research and medicine.

“Some of the biggest hammers the federal government has is funding. They can attach a lot of conditions to federal funds flowing to states, flowing to institutions. So I think there is an opportunity to get in there and say ‘Look, if you’re hurting kids by perpetuating extreme gender ideology, maybe we need to rethink our entire relationship, with regards to larger federal funding,’” Rasmussen told the DCNF.

“There’s also research avenues,” she continued. “We’ve seen the NIH fund research that is questionable, dubious, while missing the boat entirely on things like funding research into the harms of puberty blockers or cross sex hormones on adolescents. When it comes to good medical research and science there is a lot that can be done to right the ship there.”

The NIH is currently spending $214,998 to study ways to improve the accessibility of transgender voice training and $267,121 on a study to understand transgender women’s immune and behavioral responses to seasonal COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a prominent pediatric gender doctor, has recently come under scrutiny by the House Oversight Committee for failing to publish the results of a $9.7 million NIH-funded study on “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth.” The New York Times reported that Olson-Kennedy did not publish the study because she believed it could be “weaponized” and fuel “political attacks” from those opposed to pediatric sex-change medical interventions.

Rasmussen believes Trump can have a swift impact through regulations and rule making.

“There’s a lot of leeway within regulatory changes that can happen through rule making and guidance and so forth. So this is something where President Trump can move forward unilaterally and make some big changes pretty quickly,” Rasmussen said.

Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America