A few hours after taking the oath of office as the 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump signed an executive order (EO) officially requiring federal agencies to recognize that there are only two sexes, male and female, and clearly define what they are. There will be no more guidance for ‘trans inclusion’ and federal employees will no longer be encouraged to identify their “preferred pronouns.”
The order also directs agencies like the State Department and Homeland Security to use immutable sex designations and aims to block taxpayer-funded gender transition treatments for federal prisoners, while increasing privacy protections in women’s spaces like prisons and shelters. Finally, it ends the forced use of preferred pronouns, including in the workplace and schools.
The executive order states in section one:
Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts. Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.
President Trump emphasized these facts in his second inaugural address, promising to:
“end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit based.
As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
Church of Christian Liberty‘s Pastor Calvin Lindstrom celebrates Trump’s action for gender clarity, saying:
There is a tendency we have as Christians to be overly pessimistic. Certainly, we don’t want to be naive. Scripture tells us to watch and pray. However, there are times when we must simply rejoice in answered prayer and God’s goodness. President Trump’s Executive Order declaring that there are only two genders is something that reflects the truth of God’s Word from page 1. Give thanks and praise for a return to truth in this respect!
IFI Senior Counsel James Odom points out:
President Trump is only returning to the Rule of Law enshrined from the beginning in the U.S. Constitution and laws of our Nation; that all human beings are created equal (though very different from one another, for example, Genesis 1:27 “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”) and endowed by God with rights, and that government’s only purpose is to secure those rights. The rights God gave include equal treatment despite those differences between us, particularly including gender and national origin. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one…” Galatians 3:28. U.S. law is fixed, and its origin is God, not man. Trump is just returning to this bedrock legal principle from the absurdity of the last 4 years, as even a majority of the People have recognized.
In an interview with the Morning Wire podcast, Alliance Defending Freedom president Kristen Waggoner points out:
We’ve been fighting it for over 10 years now with regard to bathrooms, locker rooms, and more recently, eight or so years, on the sports front. I think we’re turning the page, but again, we have half of the states that have adopted laws to protect women and girls in sports, as an example, and these are state laws. Those are being challenged and argued that they’re unconstitutional. So those cases will continue, but we will continue now to have the federal government on the side of women and girls, rather than against us.
The difference here is they can no longer say that federal law requires this in terms of the agency action. And now the power of the federal government in all of the places that it shows up is actually on the opposite side of this fight. And in addition, the Trump administration can go a step further and it can deprive institutions as well as state governments of federal funding when they refuse to recognize biological reality and common sense.
Cultural writer, author, and speaker Alex Newman points out:
President Trump’s order is a welcome relief from the madness and wickedness that was illegitimately imposed on Americans by edict. Hopefully Trump’s action on this front will be followed by many more. But we must not fail to recognize how far we have fallen as a people. The fact that a presidential executive order was needed to re-introduce reality and basic biology into federal policy is a testament to how dangerously off course the United States has veered.
Moreover, we must not forget that millions of children are still being indoctrinated in government schools to believe this gender foolishness and many other absurdities, too. Over the long term, if this is not addressed, Trump’s executive orders will be merely a small stumbling block to those who would destroy Christian civilization. I hope all Americans will pray for God’s mercy on the nation as we work—with God’s help–to rebuild its biblical foundations over the long term.
For Christian conservatives, Trump’s immediate action to address the lies of trans ideology and gender theory which has been foisted on our culture is an answer to prayer. Scripture teaches us:
So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. ~ Genesis 1:27
“Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’
Moody Bible Institute’s Professor Christopher Yuan fleshes this out in an article for DesiringGod.com, saying:
Being created in the image of God and being male or female are essential to being human. Sex (male and female) is not simply biological or genetic, just as being human is not simply biological or genetic. Sex is first and foremost a spiritual and ontological reality created by God. Being male or female cannot be changed by human hands; sex is a category of God’s handiwork — His original and everlasting design.
As hard as anyone may try to alter this fact in his or her own body, the most that can be done is to artificially remove or augment body parts or use pharmaceuticals to unnaturally suppress the biological and hormonal reality of one’s essence as male or female. In other words, psychology usurps biology; what I feel becomes who I am. When denying this physical and genetic reality, we allow experience to supersede essence, and more importantly, the image of God.
We recommend reading the entire article when you are able.
