Redrawing the lines

The first several weeks of Donald Trump’s new administration have been a blitzkrieg of executive actions, but perhaps none more satisfying than the string of orders confronting transgenderism. Nearly seven weeks into Trump’s second term, it is worthwhile to take stock of the extent of President Trump’s all-out assault on radical gender ideology.

Week one gave us an order “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” Week two brought a trio of orders, one banning transgenderism from the military, another protecting children from chemical castration and surgical mutilation, and yet another designed to ban federal funding from K-12 schools indoctrinating children in radical gender ideology. Finally, week three brought forth one final order designed to bar men from playing in women’s sports.

It is hard to overstate the impact these orders are having on the national conversation about transgenderism. For example, the most recent order is titled “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” and it threatens to remove Title IX funds from any public institution that permits males to compete in female sports and that allows men into women’s locker rooms. The order reads, “It is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.”

President Trump was flanked by female athletes from a wide range of ages and sports, all of them beaming with approval and applause as he signed the order on Feb. 5. In his signing statement, President Trump said, “the radical left has waged an all-out campaign to erase the very concept of biological sex and replaced it with a militant transgender ideology.” He declared that the war on women’s sports is over and warned,

With my action this afternoon, we’re putting every school receiving taxpayer dollars on notice that if you let men take over women’s sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of Title IX and risk your federal funding. … This will effectively end the attack on female athletes at public K-12 schools, and virtually all U.S. colleges and universities.

The response to the order has been fairly positive. A day after President Trump signed the order, the NCAA board of governors approved a new policy for transgender student athletes—one that “limits competition in women's sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only.” The Department of Education released a statement declaring, “This Executive Order is both a demonstration of common sense and a restoration of our country’s promise to give women equal opportunities.”

The usual suspects on the left doubled down on nonsense in response to the president’s action. But at this point their arguments are—shall we say—a bit forlorn. Karla Gonzales Garcia of Amnesty International told The New York Times that “the policing of who can and cannot play sports could lead to problematic invasive testing of all athletes.” Really? This is the best that opponents can come up with? That it is somehow illusive and impossible to discern the sex of human beings? The vast majority of people on the planet have no problem discerning such things, and they don’t need a medical doctor to do so. It’s this kind of defiance of common sense that has put the left on the wrong side of history on this issue. It’s also why a majority of Americans aren’t buying what the left is selling.

CNN reports that 62% of Americans opposed men in women’s sports in 2021, and that opposition has increased to 79% in 2025. Moreover, 67% of Democrats and 64% of independents oppose men competing against women in sports. This is not an issue upon which Americans are evenly divided. The vast majority of Americans from both sides of the partisan divide have been mugged by the reality that the human species comes in two genres—male and female. It's a sturdy binary that only the most unreasonable and irrational ideologues can fail to see. It turns out that “Don’t believe your lying eyes” is a bad argument when it comes to discerning biological sex.

It has been ten years since Bruce Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair dressed in drag as a sort of coming-out party for the transgender cause. From that time until now, the woke left has been doing its level best to force-feed transgenderism to the American public. They have been brow-beating ordinary citizens with speech codes and logic-defying pronouns, and they’ve been threatening to cancel anyone who doesn’t go along.

Well, it looks like the normies have had enough and are ready to cancel the cancellers. That is why the president’s all-out opposition to the woke identity regime is a breath of fresh air. I don’t know if I’d call it a “vibe shift.” It’s more like a repudiation of a decade-long descent down the transgender rabbit hole, and it could not have come soon enough.