Executive Order 14168
Executive Order 14168, titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government", is an executive order issued by Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States, on January 20, 2025, the day of the inauguration of his second presidency.
Part of a broader targeting of transgender people, the order withdraws federal recognition for transgender people. It requires federal departments to recognize gender as an immutable male–female binary that cannot be changed, replace all instances of "gender" with "sex" in materials, cease all funding for gender-affirming care and the promotion of "gender ideology", cease allowing gender self-identification on federal documents such as passports, and prohibit transgender people from using single-sex federally funded facilities congruent with their gender. It also calls upon the Attorney General to re-evaluate the application of Bostock v. Clayton County as to not provide Title VII protection based on gender identity in federal activities.
Provisions of the order have faced legal challenges, with temporary restraining orders having been issued to suspend the withholding of federal funding to programs that fund gender-affirming care and promote "gender ideology", the forced transfers of transgender inmates to facilities congruent with their sex assigned at birth, the prohibition of gender self-ID on passports, and the mass removal of documents published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, Department of Health and Human Services that mention topics related to "gender ideology".
Background
On June 29, 2023, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump signed the "Presidential Promise to American Women" authored by the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee. According to Penny Young Nance, president of CWA, this was a "pledge to American women stating unequivocally there are only two genders, only women can be mothers and bear children, and as president, he will protect our safe spaces, our locker rooms, bathrooms, prisons, domestic violence shelters, health care, education, and, yes, ban biological men from competing in women's sports".Trump signed the order on his first day as president, as well as more than 25 other executive orders. A Trump administration official said "this is step one" and that more restrictions on transgender people will follow. CWA considers Trump's Executive Order a fulfillment of his Presidential Promise.
Summary
The order attacks what it calls "gender ideology", described as replacing "the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true". The order stated that it would "defend women's rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male".The order additionally defines "female" and "male" as "a person belonging, at conception to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell" and a "person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell" respectively.
The executive order mandated that:
- Federal agencies should use "sex" instead of "gender", remove materials that "promote gender ideology", and halt "funding of gender ideology"
- Official government documents such as passports and visas stop allowing self-selection of gender Existing documents will not be affected unless they are renewed.
- Transgender people not be imprisoned in facilities congruent with their gender identity
- The Bureau of Prisons halt any federal funding for gender-affirming care and that the Prison Rape Elimination Act be amended and Americans with Disabilities Act be re-interpreted to do so.
- Federal funding no longer go to gender-affirming care.
- The attorney general provides guidance "to correct the misapplication of the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock v. Clayton County to sex-based distinctions" in federal agency activities.
- Prior policies and federal government documents that are inconsistent with this order be rescinded, including policies that require the use of names and pronouns consistent with a person's gender identity in federal workplaces.
Analysis
It is not possible to determine at conception which reproductive cells an embryo will eventually create as it takes eight to 10 weeks for genetic signals to stimulate the development of non-neutral gonads.
Intersex people were not included in the executive order. According to activist Alicia Roth Weigel, this order "attempts to negate our very existence".
Some have speculated that the order may be interpreted as defining everyone as female since male genes are not expressed until 6–8 weeks after conception. This was called false by Snopes, referring to recent research that shows that it is incorrect to say that all embryos start as female. Instead, the Snopes analysis points out that since the executive order does not define what "belonging to" means in terms of determining a person's sex, the order could be interpreted as either all persons belong to no sex, or alternatively, all persons belong to both sexes. In early development, human embryos develop both early-stage female reproductive tracts and early-stage male reproductive tracts. It is only later in development that the expression of male or female genes normally causes one or the other of these tracts to further develop into male or female reproductive tracts, and the other to be absorbed.
Writing for The New York Times, Masha Gessen argued that the restrictions of this order, along with those implemented as part of Executive Order 14187 and Executive Order 14183 constituted an effort by the Trump administration to "denationalize" transgender people, much in the way that Jews were in 1930s Germany.
Implementation
Hours after the order was signed, the Trump administration deleted mentions of LGBTQ+ resources across federal government websites.In April 2025, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated, "As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios" in response to a journalist who queried her for unrelated information. She later stated, "Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story."
Department of State
On January 22, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed the Department of State to suspend all passport applications seeking a sex marker change or a nonbinary "X" sex marker. By January 23, 2025, a state department webpage describing how to amend the gender marker on passports was taken offline. According to a White House spokesperson, passports that have not expired will remain valid, regardless of how gender is depicted, but new applications will have to comply with the order and designate sex according to that assigned at birth. Some trans people also allege that upon applying to renew their passports, their documents were seized indefinitely and they were not issued a passport in any form.International travel advisories by the State Department replaced their language on "LGBTQ+ Travelers" with language around "LGB Travelers" and removed reference to issues unique to transgender travelers to other countries.
On February 25, Rubio announced that transgender visa applicants who list a sex other than their assigned sex at birth on their visa application would be permanently banned from entry to the United States, and that applicants who do list their assigned sex on their application but whose home documents list a different sex would have their file marked with the letters 'SWS25' for tracking purposes. The announcement is framed as part of a ban targeting transgender female athletes alongside Executive Order 14201, however according to legal experts, the actual text of the order would apply to all transgender travelers.
Department of Health and Human Services
On February 1, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered its scientists to retract any not yet published research they had produced which included any of the following banned terms: "Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female". Larry Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Center on Global Health Law, said that the directive amounted to censorship of not only government employees, but private citizens as well. For example, if the lead author of a submitted paper works for the CDC and withdraws their name from the submission, that kills the submission even if coauthors who are private scientists remain on it.All references to transgender people and gender identity were also removed from the Centers for Disease Control's website, including survey results lessons on building supportive environments for trans and nonbinary students. The CDC and other federal agencies also directed their employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases's HIV Language Guide, described in its background introduction as being "designed to help NIAID staff communicate with empowering rather than stigmatizing language", was also removed.
On February 19, the Office on Women's Health launched a website entitled "Protecting Women and Children", which featured a one-page explanation of the department's transgender policy, defining a person's sex as "an immutable biological classification" determined strictly by their reproductive function as either male or female, and featured a video of conservative activist Riley Gaines explaining the new policy.
On February 26, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it would stop processing transgender-related identity data.
In March 2025, hundreds of National Institutes of Health grants were terminated for including targeted keywords, including relating to LGBT people and/or gender identity in a biomedical context.
In April 2025, at least 34 online archives placed a disclaimer on their sites that reads, "This repository is under review for potential modification in compliance with Administration directives" as a result of this executive order.
In June 2025, the HHS eliminated from their 2026 proposed budget the "Press 3 option" for LGBTQ youth calling the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline to connect to specialized counselors. Later that month, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration announced that this service will end on July 17. When asked about the proposed budget cut, a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget stated that the youth service was a "chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology".
In July 2025, The Lancet published an investigation which alleged that around half of all US health datasets were secretly and substantially altered in the two months after the executive order was signed, with the alterations being done to remove messages that "promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology".
In April 2025, the Trump administration demanded that states receiving money for sex education under the Personal Responsibility Education Program, a program overseen by HHS, remove all references to gender identity, transgender and non-binary people from the curriculum., at least eleven states have complied with the demands, while 16 other states and Washington DC have filed a lawsuit. On October 27, 2025, the deadline given by the administration to comply or risk losing federal funding, U.S. district court judge Ann Aiken ruled that HHS may not cut funding from states that do not comply.