Donald Trump’s attack on transgender Americans is unconstitutional, illegal and mean | Opinion
No president in history has issued so many illegal and unconstitutional executive orders as Donald Trump did in his first month in office. None were as mean-spirited as his targeting of transgender individuals.
It is common for authoritarians to look for scapegoats. Sadly, trans individuals have been that for Trump.
In his inaugural address, Trump declared that “it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” In one of his first executive orders on January 20, Trump declared that the federal government would recognize only two sexes, which he said is determined at birth by the reproductive cells in the body.
This denies the existence of an estimated 1.3 million transgender people in the United States, to say nothing of millions of intersex and non-binary individuals. Gender dysphoria is recognized by medicine and is real, no matter what Trump says.
Nevertheless, Trump has issued a series of executive orders, almost all of dubious constitutionality, targeting transgender individuals. One executive order seeks to withhold federal funding to medical institutions that provide gender affirming care — including puberty blockers, hormone therapies and surgeries — and calls on the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to “take all appropriate actions to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.” The executive order had immediate effects as medical centers across the country, including in California, began to cease providing this essential medical care.
What are transgender teenagers and their parents to do when medicine they have relied on and have been taking ceases to be available?
Major national medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and more than 20 others, have concluded that gender-affirming medical care is safe, effective, beneficial and medically necessary.
The Trump executive order is illegal. The president cannot impose additional restrictions on federal grants (it is for Congress to determine the conditions on federal money). Moreover, the executive order should be deemed unconstitutional in its discrimination against transgender individuals. In December, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments as to the constitutionality of a Tennessee law prohibiting gender-affirming care.
On Feb. 13 and 14, two federal district courts in Baltimore and Seattle issued temporary restraining orders keeping Trump’s executive order prohibiting gender affirming care from going into effect. Hopefully, higher courts will affirm these rulings and health care providers will continue to provide gender affirming care.
Another Trump executive order requires that transgender women in federal custody be moved to men’s prisons. This will put them at great risk of harm and violence, and it also blatantly violates federal court orders requiring that trans women be housed in women’s prisons.
Trump has also indicated that he wants to ban transgender individuals from serving in the military. In his executive order, the president asserted that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” There is no basis for this insulting statement. Transgender individuals serve the country honorably and with distinction. When the military banned gay and lesbian individuals, several federal courts declared this discrimination unconstitutional. Federal courts should likewise declare any ban on military service by trans individuals to be unconstitutional.
Another executive order instructs the Department of Education — which Trump wants to eliminate — to block schools from requiring teachers and other school staff to use names and pronouns that align with a trans students’ gender identify and chosen name. What business is it of the federal government to regulate what names children are called in schools?
The attack on trans individuals include prohibiting federal employees from stating their gender identity in their emails, preventing passports from having an alternative to male or female sex categories and barring trans women from participating in women’s sports. In December of 2024, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Charlie Baker, told a Senate committee that there are less than 10 trans athletes in college sports out of 510,000 collegiate athletes.
Why is the Trump administration targeting trans individuals in this way? Obviously, Trump sees this as an issue to appeal to his political base. Every authoritarian bully wants someone to scapegoat and attack. For Trump, it is trans individuals and undocumented immigrants.
The only way to stop a bully is to push back. All of these executive orders are being challenged in court. Hopefully, the courts will stop them from going into effect.
All who care about equality and basic human decency should speak loudly against Trump’s targeting of trans people.
This story was originally published February 20, 2025 at 6:00 AM.