Trump signs executive order to restore ‘biological reality’ in federal policy
The Catholic Herald• January 22, 2025
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that aims to restore “biological truth to the federal government” of the United States.
It accompanies a pledge by the new administration to “defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognise women are biologically female, and men are biologically male”.
Trump, who during his 2024 presidential campaign focused much of his criticism on transgender issues and the handling of them by the Biden administration, signed the order on the very same day as his inauguration as the 47th US president on 20 January.
The executive order states: “Across the country, ideologues 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. This is wrong.”
The order is sweeping in nature, reports the Catholic News Agency (CNA). Its application will include removing gender ideology guidance, communication, policies and forms from governmental agencies.
“The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system,” the executive order states. “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
It adds: “This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.”
The move by the new Trump administration is a stark reversal of former President Joe Biden’s directives on gender and how it relates to biological sex. After he became president in 2020, Biden ordered the federal government to “review all existing orders, regulations, guidance documents, policies, programs, or other agency actions” in an effort to bolster transgender “rights” – Biden’s order was formally rescinded by Trump at the same time as he made his executive order.
Trump also rescinded rules set by Biden that withheld federal money from schools and colleges that failed to adhere to the government’s gender ideology.
The change of tack has been hailed by conservatives, including notable Catholics, in the US, CNA reports.
“We have been living under a lawless regime for quite some time,” political theorist and University of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen commented on X, decrying the outgoing Biden administration and praising the new president for adopting a “common sense” approach to public policy.
Catholic columnist and editor Sohrab Ahmari noted that the crowds gathered in a stadium to hear Trump’s inauguration address “roared loudest at the pledge to uphold two sexes”.
Trump swiftly followed his executive order by putting all US government staff working on diversity-related issues on paid leave, starting, he said, “immediately”, reports the BBC.
The new president also called for an end to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes and initiatives, calling them “dangerous, demeaning and immoral”.
Photo: US President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 20 on January 2025. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images.)