President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that seeks to ban transgender athletes from participating in women's sports.
"With this executive order, the war on women's sports is over," he said in a signing ceremony in the White House East Room on Wednesday.
Trump announced the order as dozens of women and girls stood behind him.
"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," he said, referring to the 1972 law prohibiting sex-based discrimination at schools that receive federal funding.
The order calls on the government to "rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities," and also to "prioritize Title IX enforcement actions" against schools that allow transgender women and girls to compete in women's sports.
Keeping transgender women out of women's sports, at all levels, was a key part of Trump's presidential campaign. The pledge regularly drew some of Trump's loudest cheers at his rallies.
Trump and other opponents of allowing transgender women to compete in women's sports argue that they have an unfair advantage and allege they pose a danger to cisgender women athletes.
Opponents of the bans say that disinformation is exaggerating the scope of the issue of transgender athletes in girls' sports. They maintain that trans athletes make up a tiny minority of all athletes, and also that there is a wide variation in athletic ability across both boys and girls.
Public support for the order may be broader than support for Trump himself. The administration has pointed to a 2023 Gallup poll showing that nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe that "transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete" on teams that conform with their sex assigned at birth.
The executive order is focused around Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at schools and school activities. Its passage led to a vast increase in girls and women participating in school-sponsored sports. Under the Biden administration, regulations surrounding Title IX were broadened to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. However, a federal judge last month reversed those changes.
Overwhelmingly, schools get funding from state and local sources. Federal funding usually makes up less than 10% of public school revenue, according to government statistics.
The largest federal education funding source is known as Title I, which goes to schools that serve large numbers of low-income students.
The White House did not respond to NPR questions about which federal funding streams the administration would withhold from schools that violate the new order. It also did not say how the order would be enforced against schools that do not receive those funds.
Trump's order doesn't expressly mention the word "transgender," but at the signing ceremony he said that "In recent years the radical left has waged an all-out campaign to erase the very concept of biological sex and replace it with a militant transgender ideology."
Still, the White House is trying to distance itself from the idea that the order would keep transgender athletes from playing sports.
"I know that there are going to be stories that say this has to do with banning transgender sports or something about that. And this has nothing to do with that," a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity told reporters on a Wednesday morning call.
"There's a complete openness to how you would manage a situation, whether it is a co-ed open category, whether men should also be more open and willing to having people on their teams who might not look like them, might not dress like them," the official continued. "But the burden can't always fall on women."
Transgender people are those who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. Dress is not part of the definition.
Trump has signed multiple executive orders curbing the rights of transgender and nonbinary people. One calls for an end to federal funding of what the White House calls "gender ideology," a term the administration has said includes the idea that gender identity can be separate from biological sex.
Another seeks to remove "gender ideology" from K-12 schools and, like the latest order about sports, threatens to cut off federal funds to schools that promote "gender ideology." The president has also moved to ban transgender people from serving in the military.
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