Transgender and nonbinary students at the University Wisconsin-Madison feel angry and terrified of future impacts of President Donald Trump’s executive order only recognizing “two sexes.”
Trump issued an executive order Jan. 20 requiring the federal government to only recognize genders “male” or “female,” removing other options like “X” or “other.” The U.S. government will only recognize someone’s sex assigned at birth, rejecting the idea of “gender identity” in the name of protecting cisgender women from transgender women.
The order states those “who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers.”
Sex and gender are often used interchangeably, but “sex refers to the biological differences between males and females whereas gender refers to the differences between males and females that are determined by cultural and societal factors,” according to a paper by Eleanor Fish, an immunology professor at the University of Toronto.
There is no evidence that trans women are a threat to cisgender women, according to UW-Madison sociology professor Cabell Gathman. Data shows that transgender people are four times more likely to be “victims of violent crime” than cisgender people.
“[The executive order is] not really protecting women,” said Eden Shimon, a nonbinary UW-Madison junior studying genetics and genomics. “The order said federal agencies have to remove extensive public health data related to transgender and LGBTQ+ communities from their websites. A lot of it is really critical information on HIV prevention and contraceptive guidance — a lot of that pertains to women.”
Statistics related to transgender and LGBTQ+ communities have already been removed from resources like the nonprofit Trevor Project and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but these resources can still be accessed through archives like the WayBack Machine, which is how data will be linked in this article.
Sex vs. gender
Trump’s order claims biological sex is determined immediately “at conception” and belongs “to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” or the sex which “produces the small reproductive cell,” essentially saying those with a uterus and ovaries are female and those with a penis and testicles are male.
While embryos’ sex chromosomes are determined at conception, sexual differentiation doesn’t take place at conception. During early development the gonads of fetuses are undifferentiated and all female. Other sexual characteristics are developed in the womb, but “sex differences develop and change across the lifetime,” according to the Institute of Medicine Committee on Understanding the Biology of Sex and Gender.
Sex can be ambiguous — anatomical, hormonal and genetic variations create each person’s sex, with mutations resulting in intersex people.
“[Trump] definitely didn't have a scientist with him when he was constructing this order,” Shimon said. “Ignoring the existence of intersex individuals makes this policy scientifically reductive and exclusionary.”
Camren Livermore, a UW-Madison sophomore and equity and inclusion chair of the Associated Students of Madison, feels the executive order affects all aspects of their life, including studying pre-med and identifying as queer and nonbinary.
“Declaring two sexes comes across as declaring two genders. [...] Gender is a social construct,” they said.
Negative impacts on trans people
Trump’s executive order also eliminated government programs set up to research and address disparities between transgender and cisgender people and claims that civil rights protections do not extend to transgender people.
Gathman said this reinforces hostility and interpersonal violence toward transgender people, worsening their already disproportionately high rates of health issues, unemployment, poverty and harassment.
“You can make this order, but you can't actually get rid of trans people,” Gathman said.
“[However], if people pass laws that say you're not a real person, you can't have health care, and people are required to call you by the wrong name forever, that's going to have a severe negative effect on you.”
Anti-transgender legislation can cause up to a 72 percent increase in suicide attempts among nonbinary and transgender youth, according to the Trevor Project, but statistics from the Trevor Project are already gone due to the executive order.
“The fact that people would rather not be alive than have to essentially be told every day that your existence is not real or people want to harm you because you exist, is horrendous,” Shimon said.
The same goes for bullying and harassing LGBTQ+ students in public schools. Legal protections are no longer under the order, so any students not upholding the gender status quo, like girls bullied for being “tomboys” or boys for being “girly,” could be subject to further abuse, according to Gathman.
LGBTQ+ students are excluded under Trump’s order, but the university can protect them
LGBTQ+ students are no longer protected from discrimination by Title IX under Trump’s order, but Steph Tai, a UW-Madison professor of law, told the Cardinal the university can still independently protect LGBTQ+ students, citing Bostock, the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that discriminating against a person for being homosexual or transgender is simultaneously discriminating against them for their sex.
UW-Madison's non-discrimination policy prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation among other protected classes.
“A lot of my work has been involved in making sure that UW-Madison is a safe space for queer and trans students on campus,” Livermore said. “Seeing this executive order come through that essentially erases the identities of many of my peers is disheartening, scary and very disappointing.”
Tai said the decision applies specifically to Title VII on workplace discrimination, meaning the Trump administration will likely argue that Bostock does not apply to Title IX education regulations. Already, several of Trump’s executive orders are being criticized as illegal and unconstitutional by legal experts, and the ACLU referred to the gender order as sex discrimination.
Executive orders must align with applicable laws, and this one doesn’t, according to Suzanne Eckes, UW-Madison’s Susan S. Engeleiter Chair in Education Law, Policy, and Practice in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana are legally obligated to protect students in public schools according to two Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decisions.
