President Donald Trump sought to ban transgender student athletes from playing women’s sports and cut off federal funds for schools that don’t comply. His executive order Wednesday also could block transgender athletes from entering the country for the 2028 Olympics.
Schools receiving taxpayer money are ‘on notice’ that they could lose federal funding if they are out of compliance with the order, Trump said before signing the document amid a crowd of supporters at the White House.
“From now on, women’s sports will be only for women,” he said.
‘Trump is giving his opinion about his interpretation of Title IX,’ said Scott Schneider, a Texas attorney who handles Title IX cases. ‘Ultimately, it’s an issue that is in litigation and in which courts have taken certainly contrary views to what’s in that executive order.’
The Biden administration expanded protections for transgender students with new Title IX rules, but they recently were overturned by a federal judge. Now Trump wants to use the law to go after schools with trans-inclusive policies.
Every executive branch agency is tasked with reviewing educational grants under the order and withholding funding from programs that don’t comply.
The order calls for the departments of Homeland Security and State to police transgender athletes. The agencies will seek to prohibit transgender women from entering the country to participate in athletic competitions. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will ‘deny any and all visa applications’ made by transgender female athletes, Trump said Wednesday, which could impact the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio also will be pressing Olympic organizers on transgender policies. The International Olympic Committee allows each sport’s governing body to set rules on transgender participation.
Trump campaigned on opposing transgender athletes in women’s sports and pitched the executive order as delivering on that promise. He gathered lawmakers in the East Room of the White House to celebrate Wednesday and was surrounded by children in athletic jerseys as he signed the order. The order is among several early measures Trump’s administration has taken targeting transgender individuals.
Legal and civil rights experts have said it’s not clear Trump has the authority to implement such broad restrictions immediately and unilaterally at the federal level. To prevent transgender students from playing school sports legally, Congress would likely have to amend the 1972 sex discrimination law known as Title IX, or the Education Department would have to process new regulations.
The question of whether transgender student-athletes have a right to play on their chosen team has remained unresolved by the courts, Schneider said. For that reason, he said, the president’s announcement won’t have wide-ranging implications.
‘There is no real practical significance to it,’ he said. ‘Absent a court decision in your jurisdiction, or a change in Title IX, the status quo is maintained.’
While many states already have restrictions in place to curb or block trans athletes’ participation in school sports, others provide explicit protections for them.
“Make no mistake, multiple states have attempted to enact similar bans. We’ve confronted them in court repeatedly and have won repeatedly,’ Carl Charles, a Lambda Legal senior attorney, said in a statement. ‘There is no reason to think a national ban will avoid being similarly squashed.
The president and other Republicans in recent years have exaggerated the extent to which trans youth, who make up only 1.4% of American teenagers according to federal survey data, participate in sports. A 2017 study of 17,000 young people found that about one in 10 trans boys said they played sports, and the statistic is roughly the same for trans girls.
The GOP-controlled U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill seeking to accomplish the same objective as Trump’s order. Curbing civil rights for transgender people came up often in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and after his victory, it became a point of contention for some Democrats as well.
The order this week comes after former President Joe Biden tried to bolster protections for queer and transgender students, who face disproportionate harassment and barriers to education, research shows. His administration’s efforts, which involved rewriting Title IX, met conservative opposition at every turn.
Just before Trump took office, a federal judge vacated the Biden administration’s revisions to the regulations, which temporarily expanded the definition of sexual misconduct in schools in some states to include gender identity.