by Teresa R. Manning
With this administration, the grown ups are back: Trump is replacing confusion and chaos with clarity and common sense—not just for women’s sports but also for America.
Last week, the Trump Administration continued its campaign for common sense: On February 5, the President signed the executive order (“EO”) Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports, restoring sanity to athletics not just in college and high school but also at the Olympics. As they say, Go Big or Go Home. It could be Trump’s motto.
The EO pulls no punches. After noting how men in women’s sports is unfair, incoherent, and destructive—depriving women of meaningful competition and also of privacy—it explicitly states: “It shall … be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports … as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”
It points out that Title IX, the Congressional ban on sex discrimination in federally funded education, guarantees equal athletic opportunity. Schools violate Title IX when they allow men who pretend to be women to join female teams.
The EO then directs the Education Secretary and the Attorney General to “take all appropriate action … to affirmatively protect all-female athletic opportunities,” as well as single-sex locker rooms, and to prioritize enforcement against schools and athletic associations that hesitate to comply.
The Order also notes that some athletic organizations and governing bodies are neutral on this topic, or they allow men on women’s teams when men reduce their testosterone levels or sincerely believe they are in the wrong body.
The Trump team won’t accept this. The Order states that such policies “are unfair to female athletes and do not protect female safety.” To counter them, the EO directs the President’s Assistant for Domestic Policy to convene these organizations with female athletes “to educate [the organizations with] stories of women and girls who have been harmed by male participation in women’s sports.” State Attorneys General must also join to devise best practices to protect women.
Last, the Order directs the Secretary of State and the American representative to the United Nations to rescind support in international athletics where the sports category allows or “is based on identity and not sex.” It directs the Homeland Security Secretary to issue guidance with the State Department to block entry into the U.S. of men intending to participate in women’s sports, stating that these departments “shall issue guidance to prevent such entry [into the U.S.] to the extent permitted by law …”
Comprehensive!
As newsworthy as this Order is, it’s actually a total no-brainer. Polls say that Americans overwhelmingly oppose men in women’s sports—“nearly 80%” of the public by last count—but even that figure probably understates it. That the gender movement got this far only proves it has money to promote and impose its pathology, not that it has popular support.
The February 5th Order also references EO 14168, Trump’s more fundamental statement on gender politics, signed on January 20, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. It’s more fundamental because it addresses the basic divide between ideology and reality. Indeed, it begins, “[I]deologues … deny the biological reality of sex.”
It then spells out the harm of promoting delusion, especially when done by governments, noting that both the credibility and legitimacy of government depend on its connection to reality and truth. It states: “Basing federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
It should be obvious that when a government openly lies, it is in the process of destroying itself. But these are confusing times—by design, of course—so reminders help. The quotes attributed to Alexander Solzhenitsyn about the collapsing Soviet regime say it best: We know they lie. They know we know they lie. We know they know we know they lie. And still, they lie. The Soviet Union was gone shortly thereafter, of course. Once people see through deceit, deceit loses all its power. And so it goes also with governments.
Solzhenitsyn also exhorted: Live not by lies. And the Trump team really gets that. EO 14168 actually discusses the importance of language, stating plainly that it will protect rights “by using clear and accurate language …” clarifying, again plainly, that “sex is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.” Accordingly, the federal government will now use the word “sex” for male and female, not “gender,” in its official documents, including identification forms such as passports and visas.
But the directive is even broader: Agencies must now remove any content “that promotes or otherwise inculcates gender ideology.” That could be interpreted as an almost completely discontinued use of the word “gender.” Let’s hope so. Good riddance!
Today, the word “gender” seems to be everywhere. It wasn’t always like that. Not long ago, “gender” was heard almost exclusively in grammar lessons, including pronoun-antecedent agreement, and also for foreign languages since their nouns often have genders. For example, “fork” in French is feminine (la fourchette), while “knife” is masculine (le couteau). Nouns in German can also be neutral such as the word “child” which is das kind.
When officials replaced the word “sex” with “gender” on government forms, they were intending to signal that “male” or “female” are also man-made, the way grammar rules are. In this way, they set the stage for the larger “gender identity” movement, which is really a war on reality, though it’s marketed as a war on man-made power structures or “social constructs.” This obsession with power by the political left, including the gender movement with its manipulation of language, is distorted and destructive. Any doubt about that is resolved when one sees how the movement has metastasized to the point of falsely claiming that mutilating an individual’s genitals can change his or her sex. It can’t.
Even on this aspect, Trump is doing what can be done: EO 14168 not only bans federal funds for these “transition” procedures (on inmates, subject to the Bureau of Prisons, for example) but also points out the movement’s internal inconsistencies: It insists one’s sex is fluid—“an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity”—but at the same time insists that one must have access to clinical and chemical castrations because someone was born in the “wrong sexed body.” (Maybe the body will be correct next year?)
In sum, with this administration, the grown ups are back: Trump is replacing confusion and chaos with clarity and common sense—not just for women’s sports but also for America.
***
Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National
Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of
Scholars, and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School,
George Mason University. She authored the 2020 Report, Dear Colleague: The Weaponization of Title IX.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/11/the-grown-ups-are-back-on-gender-trump-replaces-confusion-and-chaos-with-clarity-and-common-sense/
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