Trump set to ban transgender girls from women’s sports
President Donald Trump will sign an executive action that bans transgender female athletes from participating in women’s sports, setting up a legal and political battle over an issue that became a flash point in the 2024 presidential election.
Trump will finalize the measure, which allows the Department of Education to investigate schools and possibly withhold their federal funding, at an event on Wednesday, according to a White House official.
The administration will also look to roll back rules passed by former President Joe Biden’s administration interpreting Title IX provisions to offer protection for transgender students. And the Trump administration is warning that athletes coming into the country on visas denoting a sex other than that assigned at birth could be investigated for fraud.
Separately, the US State Department will ask the International Olympic Committee to take steps to preserve single-sex sports, the White House said in a factsheet on the action.
Trump on the campaign trail vowed to roll back protections for transgender people, promising to bar them from women’s sports. His campaign spent millions highlighting the issue in campaign ads and at rallies, where Trump regularly claimed transgender athletes had an unfair advantage over their competitors.
Critics of the move said that the policy unfairly targeted students who just wanted to participate in normal high school activities.
“Trans kids are so often denied autonomy over their bodies, over their lives, over their joy,” said Angelica Christina, board director of The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, which supports LGBTQ nonprofits globally. “And so to just simply want to do something like playing sports and to criminalize that is insane.”
Trump last month signed an executive order saying it is “the official policy” of the US that there are only two sexes, male and female, and requiring agencies to give force to the definitions when applying statutes and regulations. The order mandates that agencies will use the term sex, not gender, and would have the secretaries of State, Homeland Security and other agencies ensure that official documents, including passports and visas, reflect sex.
Republican Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who has been fiercely critical of transgender people’s access to bathrooms that align with their gender identity, announced Trump’s plans for the order on Tuesday and said she would join him at the White House for the signing.
Republican-led states in recent years have passed laws targeting transgender health care, limiting discussions of gender in classrooms and barring transgender athletes from participating in sports that match their gender identity. In 2024, 672 anti-trans bills were introduced across the country, the fifth year in a row to break records, according to Trans Legislation Tracker, a research organization that follows lawmaking impacting the community. About 9% of those proposals were sports-related.
More broadly, Trump has promised a massive overhaul of education policy, including plans to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory and what conservatives cast as inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on children.
The exact number of transgender athletes actively competing in college sports is unclear as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the organization that regulates student athletics, does not track data on transgender participants.
NCAA President Charlie Baker told a Senate panel recently that there are fewer than 10 transgender people in college sports out of 510,000 athletes that he’s aware of.
Legal challenges to the order could hinge on the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX, a federal law which banned gender-based discrimination in schools, and which is known mostly for its role in expanding gender equity in sports.