President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday barring transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports, fulfilling a key campaign promise that could also complicate the nation’s role as host of the next Summer Olympic Games.
At a signing ceremony in Washington on Wednesday, Trump said his administration will not allow transgender athletes to compete in the Summer Games, which are set to take place in Los Angeles in 2028.
“We’re just not going to let it happen,” Trump said Wednesday, flanked by supporters including Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer who has crisscrossed the nation testifying against policies that allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. “It’s ending right now, and nobody’s going to be able to damn thing about it because when I speak, we speak with authority.”
“And for the same reason, I am also directing our Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem … to deny any and all visa applications made by men attempting to fraudulently enter the United States while identifying themselves as women athletes to try and get into the Games,” Trump said.
He repeated the false claim that two female boxers who competed in last year’s Paris Games, Imane Khelif of Algeria, where it is not legal for a person to change their gender, and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, are transgender.
A fact sheet for Wednesday’s order states the Department of Homeland Security “will review visa policies to address males falsely asserting they are females when entering the United States to compete in women’s sports.” The State Department has similarly stopped issuing U.S. passports with “X” gender markers and suspended processing applications from Americans seeking to update their passports with a new gender marker.
Trump’s order charges Secretary of State Marco Rubio with demanding changes within the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to bar transgender athletes from single-sex sports. As a Florida Republican senator, Rubio had said the concept of gender identity is “unscientific, subjective, and political.”
The IOC issued new guidelines for transgender and intersex athletes in 2021, abandoning a prior framework that required competing athletes to undergo hormone treatments and procedures the new policy called “medically unnecessary.” The 2021 guidelines are not legally binding and are meant to help international sporting bodies determine eligibility criteria.
The IOC, headquartered in Switzerland, did not immediately return a request for comment on Trump’s executive order or his remarks on the Summer Games.
Trump’s order coincides with National Girls and Women in Sports Day, which is recognized annually in February to celebrate the accomplishments of female athletes. The Women’s Sports Foundation, which co-founded National Girls and Women in Sports Day in 1987, has opposed categorical bans on transgender athletes, saying such policies “limit opportunities and harm the development of both cisgender and transgender girls and women.”
The organization, founded by tennis legend and equal rights advocate Billie Jean King, who has also voiced strong opposition to policies barring trans athletes from sports, did not immediately return a request for comment on Trump’s order.
In a statement, Kelly Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy group, said the order is part of a broader administration effort to “distract and divide” the country.
“We all want sports to be fair, students to be safe, and young people to have the opportunity to participate alongside their peers,” Robinson said. “But an attempted blanket ban deprives kids of those things. This order could expose young people to harassment and discrimination, emboldening people to question the gender of kids who don’t fit a narrow view of how they’re supposed to dress or look.”
Arguing against a proposal to ban transgender student-athletes from girls’ and women’s sports in January, House Democrats said such legislation would inevitably fuel speculation about whether female athletes look feminine enough to compete in women’s sports without having their gender questioned.
Since returning to office on Jan. 20, Trump has signed a string of executive orders targeting transgender rights, including one declaring the government recognizes only two sexes, male and female, and broadly preventing federal dollars from being used for what he and his administration call “gender ideology.”
Other orders seek to bar transgender people from serving openly in the military and defund schools that promote “gender ideology,” which the White House has broadly defined as “an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.” A Jan. 28 executive order aims to end federal support for gender-affirming care for transgender minors, which the order says includes 19-year-olds.
