United States: Following the inauguration ceremony, President Trump signed an executive order to declare that the US government would only recognize a person’s sex as what doctors said when they were born.
This would limit the definitions of a “male” or “female” to their reproductive cells and, furthermore, withhold federal funding from programs that consider transgender people or “gender ideology.”
More about the news
Medical and legal authorities see this executive order ignores diversity of gender and sex identity, which worries them about its impact on intersex transgender and nonbinary individuals.
The Trump campaign focused heavily on opposing transgender rights throughout their campaign. The 2024 election campaigning and Republican groups pumped money into anti-trans television commercials throughout the election period.
Trump said he would impose sporting and medical restrictions on transgender individuals.
Trump’s executive order
As per the ABC News reports, Trump’s executive order has declared sex as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female,” describing that “gender identity” cannot be included in the definition of “sex” and that “sex” and “gender” cannot be used interchangeably.

The executive order does not mention intersex populations, as it only talks about Intersex people representing those whose sex traits differ from standard male and female anatomy through birth variations in their reproductive and genital organs hormones or genes.
According to the executive order, it is declared that there are only “two sexes, male and female,” defining a “female” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.”
Furthermore, the order also defines “male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
What more are the experts stating?
According to Kellan E. Baker, executive director of the Institute for Health Research & Policy at health services network Whitman-Walker, “This one is shockingly out of step with what we know from science,” ABC News reported.
Furthermore, Baker also mentions that we are used to thinking of sex “as a fairly simple, binary, immutable thing,” but said science tells us it’s not that simple.
“Sex is not a singular, binary, immutable trait,” he noted.
“It is, in fact, a complex cluster of multiple traits, some of which align with each other and sometimes some of which do not align with each other,” he added.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sex is “an individual’s biological status as male, female, or something else. Sex is assigned at birth and associated with physical attributes, such as anatomy and chromosomes.”
About intersex population
The executive order does not mention intersex populations. Intersex people represent those whose sex traits differ from standard male and female anatomy through birth variations in their reproductive and genital organs, hormones, or genes.
Also the term intersex may also be categorized as “differences of sex development.”
People often discover their medical conditions after birth, as explained by MedlinePlus, which distributes National Library of Medicine research data.
“There are multiple different sex traits that make up this concept that we think of as sex,” Baker stated.
“They include, for example, chromosomes. They also include external genitalia, gonads, hormones,” he added.
Baker confirms reproductive cell sexual differentiation starts six weeks post-fertilization despite the definition in the executive order.

Furthermore, the order stated that the definition of sex is a response to “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex,” ABC News reported.
“Invalidating the true and biological category of ‘woman’ improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept,” as the order states.
As chief legal officer of LGBTQ civil rights group Lambda Legal, Jenny Pizer tells ABC News she prepares lawsuits to challenge the executive order.
Jenny Pizer, chief legal officer at LGBTQ civil rights group Lambda Legal, declared that her organization is preparing for legal action against the executive order.
As per her, the order states that gender ideology “is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.”
It further states, “Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female and shall not request gender identity.”