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In yet another sign that gender ideology is in retreat, a federal court on January 9 blocked President Joe Biden's Title IX rewrite. This 2024 federal rule, which U.S. District Judge Danny Reeves said turned Title IX "on its head," would have let males into female spaces in virtually every public school in the nation. Its defeat was well deserved.
As Pew studies have shown, Americans are souring on the idea that boys can somehow become girls. They've seen this lie corrupt women's sports, rob women of privacy, and create a toxic culture of fear surrounding pronouns. Parents are also rejecting this ideology. Some, to their shock, have found that their children have been treated as the opposite sex in school—without their knowledge or consent.
Perhaps most tragically, this ideology has maimed thousands of young people for life. Doctors have performed some 5,700 transition surgeries on American children since 2019. For many, these experiments are permanently sterilizing. Even as European countries put a halt to these procedures for kids, America's medical establishment has refused to return to sanity. We are now a global outlier.
Fortunately, a moment of political reckoning has come. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to uproot gender ideology from the law, education, and health care. With a Republican-led Congress, it is imperative that our leaders put an end to these cruel experiments on children. Here's some of what they should do.
On day one, the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) should reverse all Biden litigation efforts to harm kids and allow men into women's spaces. In six states, the Biden DOJ either sued or backed efforts to block states from banning transition drugs and surgeries for minors—one of which is pending at the Supreme Court. It also supported the ACLU's challenges to wipe out state laws protecting women and girls from West Virginia to Idaho. Those states, along with my firm, Alliance Defending Freedom, asked the Supreme Court to right the wrongs of the lower courts. The DOJ's senseless legal positions should go on day one.
The Trump DOJ should also announce it will no longer defend the string of Biden regulations that injected gender ideology into federal law and policy. This includes not just the Title IX rule (which is still being litigated in other federal courts), but a Department of Health and Human Services rule that tried to force medical professionals and insurance companies to perform or pay for gender-transition procedures. In place of such policies, Trump officials should create rules that protect fairness, privacy, and conscience in health care. The Trump Food and Drug Administration should also ban the off-label use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the purpose of transitioning children.
Parents play a leading role in protecting their children, and federal law gives the president powerful tools to protect parental rights. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, for instance, Trump can hold schools accountable for lying to parents about their child's well-being—or for refusing to let them review curricula. These rights would be further enhanced by Congress passing the Families Rights and Responsibilities Act, which recognizes that parents, not government, have primary rights in raising their children.
Additionally, Trump should turn off the spigots of federal funding that support the gender madness. HHS should reinstate its ban on Medicaid dollars being used for child gender transitions, and should block states from using federal money to finance these experiments. Cabinet officials should remove all transgender propaganda from federal websites. And just as European countries have conducted systematic reviews of these procedures—finding a complete lack of high-quality evidence supporting their use on children—Trump should direct the National Institutes of Health to fund an unbiased, evidence-driven study to provide more data.
Congressional action is needed on multiple fronts. Congress should pass a law clarifying that "sex," "male," and "female" are defined by biology, not self-declared identity. One important step in this regard would be adopting the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act—as the House recently did—which would define sex according to biology and keep men out of women's sports. Additionally, Congress should restrict tax dollars from funding gender-transition drugs and surgeries or any group that pushes gender ideology in public schools. Chiefly, this would include defunding Planned Parenthood, which is one of the nation's largest purveyors of transition drugs for young people. But it should also include a moratorium on any federal funds going to clinics that profiteer off these experiments on kids.
Gender ideology is at war with truth and basic common sense. It has set back the rights of women and girls, put thousands of children in harm's way, and created a culture of coercion and fear. Voters delivered a powerful verdict in November. President Trump and Congress must now do what is needed to leave "gender-affirming care" on the ash heap of history.
Kristen Waggoner is CEO, president, and general counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Editor's note 1/17: This piece has been updated to reflect the passage of the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.
