NWL Joins National Women’s Law Center and 170+ Orgs to Condemn Trump Anti-Trans Executive Order

We joined National Women’s Law Center and 170+ organizations to condemn Trump’s cruel and lawless anti-trans executive order. This order doesn’t “protect” women from any real threat, but actively endangers all women. Read the full letter below.

Learn more and view all signing organizations at National Women’s’ Law Center and read media coverage of this letter at USA Today.

January 28, 2025
President Trump,

We, the undersigned organizations that advocate for and support women’s rights and gender
justice, strongly condemn the cruel and lawless executive order (Executive Order 14166) you
issued on January 20 that claims to “defend[] women.” The order, which directs the federal
government to regulate, control, and police gender, does absolutely nothing to protect women
and girls. We know that the true intent of this order is to demonize, stigmatize, and discriminate against transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people and to enforce gender roles and gender stereotypes. It is appalling you wage these attacks in the name of “defending women,” and particularly because of your repeated attacks on women’s rights.

We reject your false and harmful assertions that cisgender women and girls need to be
protected from sharing spaces, such as housing and bathrooms, and activities like sports, with
transgender women and girls. As advocacy groups with long histories of advocating for and
supporting the rights of women and girls, we unequivocally affirm that transgender, nonbinary,
and intersex people, including women and girls, deserve the same basic rights and respect as
everyone else.

Far from “protecting” women from any real threat, your order actively endangers women,
including both cisgender and transgender women. Through stereotypes and disinformation, it
attempts to exploit unfamiliarity with transgender people to promote the myth that the rights and safety of cisgender women and girls are somehow in tension with the rights of transgender
women and girls. We know this is untrue, and that the safety of all women and girls indeed
depends on reaffirming that transgender women and girls are treated with equal dignity. We are
not fooled by your administration’s attempts to undermine transgender people’s rights, as an
invitation to perpetuate wider attacks on sex discrimination protections for everyone.

This is so because the divisive policies espoused by the order would endanger women and girls
by aggressively subjecting anyone who doesn’t conform to sex-based stereotypes to invasive
scrutiny to verify their gender, leading to privacy violations and harassment. Indeed, there have
already been numerous, alarming examples of cisgender women in public bathrooms being
threatened, or cisgender high school girl athletes being investigated and harassed, because of
questions about whether they were transgender after anti-trans policies were enacted in their
states.

The executive order’s definitions of “women” and “female” as “belonging, at “conception”, to the sex “that produces the large reproductive cell” are not only scientifically incoherent; they also reduce women to their reproductive traits and disregard the existence of many women, including intersex women who are born with variations in sex-related traits. And by suggesting that a fertilized egg is a person, the executive order advances the anti-abortion extremist strategy to assign rights and benefits to fetuses and embryos, with the ultimate goal of banning abortion
nationwide and sharply undermining a range of other reproductive health care, from maternal
care to fertility care to birth control.

Furthermore, the flagrant hypocrisy of the claim that this order protects women coming from a
president who has a long track record of attacking women’s rights, is astounding. You have
boasted of your role in taking away the federal constitutional right to abortion–a foundational
right women relied on for nearly five decades. You have been accused by dozens of women of
sexual assault and harassment and found liable by a jury in one case. In both this administration
and your previous one, you have nominated men to powerful positions despite reports of their
harms to women, including sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. And you
have repeatedly demonstrated your hostility to core sex discrimination protections and to
programs that mostly women – particularly single mothers – rely on to make ends meet.

We will not let this executive order deter us from fighting for the rights of all women. We will
strive to ensure that this executive order, the cruel policies it proposes, and the false narrative it
tells about our rights will not last.