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Trump’s Anti-Trans, Anti-Gender Executive Orders, A Conversation with Libby Adler and K.J. Rawson

Libby Adler, K.J. Rawson, and Carla Kaplan

The following conversation took place at Northeastern University in March 2025. An edited transcript is below.

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Carla Kaplan (CK): Thank you both so much for being with us today to talk about this executive order and its many, many implications. We’re here to talk about the implications, consequences, issues that come out of the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order.

Just to begin, can you unpack for us what that executive order actually says (including even for people who think they’ve read it) and what we think it can and can’t legally actually accomplish? In your minds, what are the most pressing questions about this executive order that need answering? When the order calls for an end to the federal funding of “gender ideology,” what do you think it’s trying to do?

K.J. Rawson (KJR): One of the things that I think is important to first point out about this executive order is that it’s framed in terms of defending women.

And since this is an executive order, it is told in the first person, right? It’s drafted from the “me” perspective of the president. And so right from the start, it just smacks of this patriarchal protection of women that is really unsettling, I think, because what it’s trying to do right from the start is connect defending women with biological truth. And decades of feminist thinking have taught us that this is a very slippery slope and one we’ve been trying to argue against and complicate for decades if not centuries at this point. 

So what this executive order sets out to do is limit the definition of sex to two and only two sexes that are not changeable and that are defined by “sex at conception.” It outlaws the use of gender as a term in any federal language (so any policies, any written spaces) and then it suggests all the ways that that needs to be taken up and implemented. And I can let Libby take it from there.

Feminist Coalition Archival Project: The Anti-Trans Executive Orders

Libby Adler (LA): Sure. Thank you for having me. The executive order, as K.J. said, gives us a federal policy that states that there are only two sexes, that they are determined biologically at birth, that they cannot change, that there is no variance outside of the two categories of male and female, and that any challenge to that edict is deemed “gender ideology,” which is now banned. Beyond that, it’s a comprehensive effort to negate the existence of transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people in basically every aspect of federal governance. This includes health care, military service, prison placement, passports and visas, research funding, and messaging from any federal agency. It contains a directive to all agencies to interpret the word “sex” in conformance with the order, which means that the Department of Education, for as long as it continues to exist, and the Department of Justice, in their capacities as enforcers of Title IX, are so instructed. And this could impact any educational institution, the regulation of its bathrooms, locker rooms, dormitories, and so on. Also in February, Trump followed up with a separate executive order directed specifically at athletic participation.

CK: When I read this, when I hear this, when we talk about it, this idea of using the defense of women in the claim of this notion of biological truth, it’s really not hard for me not to hear, as precedent for this, the most venal, extreme versions of racism, particularly the Black Codes, which always claim the biological truth of race difference and use the defense of white women to demonize black people, to criminalize black people, to endanger black men in particular, to encourage violence. Do you think it is coincidental that it resonates with that kind of history? Or is this built in to this attempt to legislate thought and speech?

KJR: Well, I think if we look at the way that sex is defined in this executive order, you can see that they’re tying it directly to reproductive capacity. And that’s a clear example of the way the nation-state is trying to insert itself in the reproduction of a particular kind of populace and citizenry. In this case, “female” is defined as the sex that produces the large reproductive cell, and “male” is defined as the sex that produces the small reproductive cell. And as gender scholars, we could take this apart, right? We can talk about the ways that sex cannot actually be determined at conception, which is how it’s defined here. Instead, reproductive cells are shown later as the embryo develops; that’s one biological point to pick with this. But I think more importantly, we see the way that it’s distilling “women” down to their reproductive capacity. You’re right to point to the ways that this is resonating with eugenics, really limiting the ways that we imagine people being able to reproduce and positing that their entire function, that the structure of society that this is putting forward, is really dimorphic and based on sexual purpose.

Within the culture-war framework, I would read this petty attempt to limit language use in practice as actually a sign that they don’t have control over it. Right? That as soon as you start banning books, you’ve lost the fight of knowledge circulation and access because then everyone wants to read them. So similarly, there’s a part of me that wants to read this and think, Oh, you want to ban gender? Well, now you’re going to get more people talking about gender. Thank you. Of course, that needs to also take into account the very real material and on-the-ground implications and applications of this executive order, which are already having profound effects. 

LA: I did want to just frame the issue of protecting women in a way that’s more familiar to the legal mind, which is as a classic conflict of rights. Rights have so much purchase in our system. People think of them, pardon the expression, as trump cards, right? The problem is that rights very often conflict, and a method of undercutting the power of rights that has both legal significance as well as power in political discourse is to identify a competing right. So I do think this is happening because of the political traction that trans constituencies have actually been able to achieve in recent years. 

This dynamic has been and continues to be a central strategy in the sexual-orientation domain. So, for example, under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the military asserted a competing privacy right of straight service members to not to feel leered at in the shower by gay and lesbian service members. When the St. Patrick’s Day parade organizers were excluding a gay and lesbian Irish group from marching and the Boy Scouts were excluding gay Scouts, they defended themselves by asserting a countervailing right of their organizations to express a message like family values or morality, that gay participation purportedly undermined. Now, of course, we’re seeing all the lawsuits of wedding vendors who have religious and speech rights so that they don’t have to bake cakes or provide other services for same-sex weddings. 

There’s something very, very predictable about this. There was always going to be a counter-rights assertion. It is simply the dynamic that civil rights movements both in law and I think also just in political discourse face. This is not to credit those counter-rights as valid; there’s no evidence at all that trans people pose a threat to anybody in the bathroom, if that needs to be said. But it’s just to urge that people not be surprised by the assertions of counter-rights—in this case women’s right to safety or privacy or what have you—as a strategy for engaging one of the most powerful tools that they have legally as well as rhetorically.

CK: That’s so helpful to have that larger context. Would you say that the counter-rights that this order imagines protecting are largely about safety and privacy? From nonexistent threats? 

LA: Those are the ones we’ve seen. The one other one that I saw, this is much earlier in the story, but when New Hampshire was considering a so-called bathroom bill to provide antidiscrimination protection to trans people in New Hampshire, one of the state legislators in New Hampshire offered up children as the people that need to be protected and specifically said, this could mean that a school would have to hire a transgender bus driver, who could confuse the children! As if there were a counter-right to not be confused by someone else’s gender presentation.

CK: Let’s go back to this other question of the range of actual harms that an executive order like this both has the power to create. But also just the fact that it seems to be an authoritative statement. It’s coming from the executive branch. What other kinds of harms can it encourage? Can it perpetuate? Can it reproduce?

KJR: Well, I would name two very specific material harms that I’ve been seeing people in the trans communities that I’m part of and that I move through talking about a lot. And then I also want to point to a broader harm, to a longer game. 

The first is prisons, right? The treatment of trans people within the prisons. And what we’ve seen so far is the intentional and very harmful movement of trans women from women’s prisons into men’s facilities. And this seems designed to really focus on those who have the least legal rights or the least sympathy from a public perspective; they’re putting trans people in very unsafe and precarious positions. And within the prison systems, there seems to have already been an immediate loss of access to gender-affirming care. So, it’s not even just exposure to physical harm but also to mental and emotional distress and going backwards in terms of your treatment as a trans person. 

The second material harm that I would point to is documentation. And that has been tremendous, and it has impacted so many trans people that I know. I think while the sports issue takes up a lot of airwaves, I actually, in general, find that to not be the most salient or oppressing issue. And in many ways, it becomes a distraction. As someone who was a college athlete myself, I say that with a bit of trepidation. But when we’re looking at people who are receiving their passports back that have been burned–so, intentionally and viciously harmed—to send a message to trans people that they are not welcome? I think that is a real problem. And not having documentation that matches your gender presentation and identity is a material harm that restricts people’s movement. 

And this really ties into the broader thing that I wanted to point to, which in a recent New York Times article by M. Gessen, they talk about as denationalizing trans people. And I think that’s what we’re working toward here, is that this executive order isn’t just about very particular rights, but it’s about a larger project to denationalize trans people by rescinding their ability to take part in a larger state or a political system that grants them those rights. So, if they are no longer part of this nation, then we don’t have to extend human rights to them.

LA: Can I just add one big harm that I think should not go forgotten? That has to do with the military. The military is the biggest employer of trans people in the country. Currently, they are enjoined from discharging people for being trans. If the ban continues, it’s going to have a huge impact on a population that faces massive, massive obstacles to employment—pushing people into underground employment, including sex work, which then in turn subjects them to an excess of police attention, which brings us back exactly to where K.J. started about incarceration, including both placement and denial of medical care.

CK: It seems that underlying all of this is a way of thinking that has to be constructed, which is this competitive thinking. And that everything has to be imagined as a zero-sum game. Because the cruelty of this executive order is manifest even to people who don’t completely get it. The cruelty in prisons, the cruelty in turning people back at airports, the cruelty in giving people back their passports damaged. All of the denial. I mean, my students keep focusing on the cruelty that’s in this kind of executive order or this sudden defunding of USAID; everybody knows thousands of children are going to die. They don’t deny that. The argument keeps being about competing needs, competing crises; that yes, this is going to hurt trans people or yes, this is going to hurt children in another country, but it’s America first. We have to put the real people first. And it seems to be part of a whole way of thinking that is zero sum.

LA: I want to recommend the first chapter of Judith Butler’s book that came out last year, Who’s Afraid of Gender? They survey the current landscape of right-wing anti-trans hysteria, and they discuss how heavy is the psychic weight of gender and gender’s place in many people’s sense that the world is either in order or in chaos. And how that makes it a really potent tool in the service of autocracy. And it’s certainly not the only tool, but the recurrence of attacks on what has come globally to be called “gender theory” or “gender ideology” suggests that demonizing people who are gender variant in some way is a very important weapon of fear that can be vested with an array of insecurities about the world, from economic precarity to climate disaster to whatever other looming threats are out there. And so I think the framing of it as zero sum—someone else’s gender threatens the order of the universe in which you live—is, I think, exactly what’s happening.

Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender

CK: Can either of you say a little more about why the first sort of shot across the bow in this took the form of a language policing? It’s framed not only in terms of defending women but as the policing of language: here’s what you can and can’t say. Why do you think this larger attack starts with that? 

KJR: I would say that if you get to control language, you get to control reality. And as a scholar of rhetoric, I’m always interested in this close interplay between how language is representing the world and then how the world comes to be represented through language, right? This back-and-forth dialectic of the things that are expressible versus things that are not expressible in language. One of the things that I find particularly interesting about this is the redefinition of things like “gender ideology” to such an extent that any of us who studied feminism don’t even recognize that version of gender ideology. 

And I first started seeing it crop up a lot within Catholic contexts, actually—to be used to discuss everything trans, but almost in a euphemistic way, because they didn’t want to talk about actually trans people. So, “gender ideology” became this proxy for transness. For most feminist folks, we talk about gender ideology as a way to account for the power of gender expression and the ways that valuation is placed on masculinity and femininity. And what this is doing is evacuating that language from the power and the way that gender is actually operating in the world. So if you distill it down to sex, and sex is purely defined based on biology, then why would we even have to talk about patriarchy or women not having power or wage gaps or reproductive justice? We couldn’t talk about any of those things because there’s no power inherent in sex.

CK: So given that—it was a wonderful description—what’s the most effective way to push back on this? Is the most effective way to push back on this to say, “We have to talk about the actual trans people and the harms they’re experiencing”? Is the most effective way to push back on this to unpack what it’s doing with language and try to explain how convoluted the sort of rhetorical thinking? What’s the best way in a climate where everyone keeps saying it’s a fire hose, right? 

LA: Well, one thing I would say is that the seeds of resistance are planted in the strategy that they’re using, right? Certainly controlling what can be acknowledged is powerful, but imposing a silence has the capacity to backfire. And Michel Foucault taught that silence is part of discourse: “There is not one but many silences.” And it’s a form of power, certainly, to prohibit the acknowledgement of an experience or of a group of people, but it introduces its own form of resistance as well. The one little bit of good news in here, I think, is that as the autocratic right finds itself having to defend the patriarchal arrangement—if they have to shout over and over again, There are only two sexes and sex is final when it’s assigned at birth!, they’ve kind of given away the ending. During the same-sex marriage campaign, one of the best ideas that was circulating was that as soon as the anti-gay right had to insist that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, it was clear they were going to lose. And I think that’s where we are when it comes to gender identity right now. It doesn’t mean the fight’s over or that there’s not going to be a lot of suffering along the way, but that if they have to keep saying it, they’ve given away that it’s not an assumption anymore, that it’s not uncontestable.

KJR: I would add here, too, that though our inclination as scholars might be to jump in and argue semantics, I actually think that would probably be the least productive thing we could do right now. I think, instead, focus on material harm, on people’s experiences, on stories. And again, for so many of us speaking from a humanities perspective, this is what we work in. We understand the compelling power of stories. And I think that is probably a more strategic angle than trying to reclaim gender ideology from this really impoverished definition that they’re using here, or any of these other terms. We want to continue doing our work and continue complicating these terms, but I don’t think that is the fight that we bring to them.

CK: So the other question I want to ask about this is in terms of the sort of legal context for this and other legal cases, either how the groundwork has been laid for this order legally or how it conflicts with existing other cases, a case like Bostock v. Clayton County, for example. Maybe you could explain that to people and talk about how it might supersede this executive order, or what the relationship of other cases to this is.

LA: So Bostock is the 2020 case in which the US Supreme Court found that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination because of sex (as well as some other protected categories) does protect against employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Sexual orientation and gender identity both are rolled into the prohibition against discrimination based on sex in employment. And Trump’s executive order should not be able to constitutionally force an interpretation of Title VII that contradicts what the court has said.

CK: So does that mean we have a Supreme Court precedent that essentially nullifies this EO? I mean, can we—

LA: No. That has to do with the limits of what it says, right? So if there was an EO that said that agencies—and it would mainly be the Equal Employment and Opportunities Commission—should interpret Title VII to exclude protections for gay and trans people, that would be patently unconstitutional. But the case is limited in its effect for a number of reasons. First, it only regards employment discrimination. So, it tells us nothing about passports, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention health data, National Institutes of Health grants, prisoner placement…. It doesn’t tell us anything about any of those things. Second, it does not tell us precisely what discrimination entails. The facts of Bostock concerned three employees, two gay men and one trans woman who lost their jobs because they were gay or trans. But that tells us absolutely nothing about, for example, who can use the women’s restroom in a workplace and whether it would be discrimination to exclude someone by relying on their assigned birth sex. 

It also doesn’t tell us how trans people will be understood constitutionally. The pending case, Skrmetti, the challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, could tell us more. We’re waiting. We should hear about that in June. The plaintiffs in Skrmetti have asked the court to either consider trans status to be subsumed under sex-based classifications generally or considered on its own to be what we call quasi-suspect. Either of those outcomes, if the court agreed, would force the Trump administration to come up with a justification for its treatment of trans people that was more than merely “rational and legitimate.” It would have to assert an “important governmental interest.” But we just don’t have an answer to that. And while Bostock is hugely important, it is quite limited in what it reaches, and the EO is much broader.

KJR: I would also say that there’s the question about what protections the law has, and then there’s the question of what practices people are actually engaging in. And those two things are often not running in parallel. We can see a lot of workplaces that will go out of their way to not only obey in advance, but go even beyond what is being called for here. They’re kind of anticipating the potential consequences to not being obedient in following these kinds of directives. The question of what’s happening in the courts is almost separate from what’s actually happening in practice, because it will take such a long time, too, to marshal these legal responses. And in the meantime, people are suffering and changes are happening.

CK: And also the courts have changed. One of the things that we’re facing is the extent to which feminism learned from the Civil Rights Movement to think of the courts as an ally, to think of the courts as one of the tools in our political tool chest. And that way of thinking may have to shift because we don’t know how this is all—we’ve seen some cases in the Supreme Court that are really alarming. You know, certainly the cases that granted these incredible powers to the presidency and this immunity from prosecution suggests that the whole strategy of looking to the courts to fix this is not something we can rely on. Right?

LA: Right. Rely on? Absolutely. I do think there have been some successes in the lower courts, but I think everyone is quite anxious about what happens as things move up the chain. 

CK: K.J. was suggesting that he takes some hope from the way people respond to real stories of harms and that if we can intervene in the information stream, there may be some hope there, some cause for optimism. Where do you, if anywhere, find any hope, cause for optimism? You know, is there anything that’s cheering you at this moment?

LA: Yeah, I mean, at the risk of repeating myself, the thing that cheers me is that resistance that’s built in to the strategy of invisibilizing. That the strategy of silence always carries with it, or always has the potential to carry with it, the seeds of resistance. And so that, to me, tells me sort of where we’re headed longer term, but I do think it’s going to be a pretty bumpy road from here to there.

CK: Anything you want to add to the bumpy road? 

KJR: I think that’s right. And I think the more that we can do to solidify our mutual aid networks to deepen our community commitments and our community ties, the more resilient we’ll be as we navigate this terrain together.

CK: Are there any moments or movements here or in other countries you too look at as models either of what we can’t, the mistakes we shouldn’t make or effective resistance. People talk about South Africa, people talk about Germany in the ‘30s, people talk about Hungary. Are there any places or moments that either of you are specifically focused on as you think this through? 

Materials from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft are burned, May 6, 1933. Via Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

KJR: I think a lot about that iconic image of the burning of [Magnus] Hirschfeld’s library. And the way that that was an early and targeted attempt to erase knowledge about queer and trans people and gender difference. And we see that happening in parallel with the erasure of trans people from federal websites. Data about our communities has been completely erased, if not lost altogether. For me as a scholar and as someone running the Digital Transgender Archive, this just demonstrates with so much urgency how important it is to continue to provide access to this information. 

And in some ways, we talk about the vulnerabilities of digital spaces and the sort of networks and systems. But at the same time, I can’t even quantify how many emails I’ve received from people who are telling me about how they are downloading resources from our site as a way to disperse our materials and content and make it more resilient. And so I do think that we have learned some important lessons about information security and though the digital can be precarious, it also allows us to have dissemination and make copies and have those copies be in many places. And I take a lot of optimism from that because like Libby I see this as a bumpy road but I try to maintain an optimistic overall view.

CK: Yeah. You’ve both provided some things to look for that are slightly hopeful. So I’m going to end us on that note, unless there’s anything you two want to add.

KJ: I’m just grateful to have the chance to have this conversation.

LA: Yeah, it’s great.

CK: Oh, me too. This was great.