The power of two: Behind the GOP move to axe ‘transgender’ from language

Trump’s more aggressive rollback of pro-LGBT language was previewed throughout his 2024 campaign, and by the conservatives who wanted to staff a new administration. Trump himself promised to make it “the official policy of the United States” that there were only two biological genders; in Mandate for Leadership, the public manual for Project 2025, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts recommended that a new president start “deleting” terms like “gender identity,” to undo what “woke culture warriors” had wrought.

“Words matter. Change the words, change the culture,” said Bethany Kozma, a former deputy chief of staff at USAID in the first Trump administration, in a Project 2025 training video published last year by ProPublica. “We should never use the word ‘gender,’ as conservatives. It’s not specific, and it’s nonsensical. Instead, use the word ‘sex,’ or ‘biological sex,’ or ‘male and female.’”

Hours after being sworn in, Trump did just that. Some websites with transgender-specific language have been taken offline; some have been edited to remove “transgender” and gender references completely. Sensitivity training sessions, still available off government websites, have been de-linked and scrubbed from official sources.

“We are dealing with an administration that is trying to cloud what reality is to suit its own political agenda,” said Brian Dittmeier, the public policy director at GLSEN. “The administration’s efforts will not be limited to only trying to suppress transgender people’s identity.”

Those changes first affected transgender Americans who were immediately cut off from access to change-of-name or -gender forms. But the rewrite has gone much deeper. In December, HHS recommended getting the monkeypox vaccine if you “are a gay, bisexual, or other man who has sex with men or a transgender, nonbinary, or gender-diverse person” with multiple recent sexual partners. After Jan. 20, this was edited to advice for “a gay, bisexual, or other man who has sex with men or sex-diverse person.” The new language was in line with the official HHS guidance released on Wednesday: “A person’s sex is unchangeable and determined by objective biology.”

The effects of this are being litigated right now. After Doctors for America sued to restore information about trans healthcare on HHS and other relevant sites, a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush ordered the administration to comply. It did so — with banners on each page clarifying that the information did not “reflect biological reality.” Nothing compels the administration, or any administration, to use language that advocates or healthcare organizations say is outdated.

“We are in new territory here, with the government censoring scientists and public heath experts, forcing them to make statements in line with the federal government’s political assertions, rather than scientific facts,” said Jack Turban, a pediatric psychiatrist and advocate for youth gender medicine.

“The government can say whatever it wants, and there’s no real First Amendment prohibition on that,” said Scarlet Kim, a staff attorney at the ACLU. The Administrative Procedure Act set the rules for how language and regulations could be changed, but it was not automatically enforced. One month ago, there was an administration that used GLAAD and GLSEN and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)’s terminology. And now there isn’t.

“The policy change has to be subject to a particular standard, both procedurally and substantively,” said Kim. “But if the government wants to go into an international forum and say, ‘this is the biological reality of sex,’ there’s no real argument that we can marshal against that.”

“As the front door to the White House, the Office of Public Liaison hosts a wide range of groups to bring the public into the fold of the policy process,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly. (As in Trump’s first term, the administration has changed the name of what Biden called “the Office of Public Engagement.”) “There is significant interest from groups around the country to meet with President Trump’s representatives, so those seeking to undermine his widely popular agenda are not prioritized.”

Two years ago, when Trump first laid out how he would restore binary sex definitions in official policy and communications, it was often covered as a wedge issue. I always thought that this underplayed the importance of language to the conservative movement — and the fragility of the changes GLAAD et al had won.

When the Biden administration (and before that, the Obama administration) adopted new definitions of “gender,” it didn’t generate a ton of news. When it did, the coverage tended to focus on how subtly the language had been changed, with massive downstream effects for people who did not identify as their sex assigned at birth. And it comes as some of the groups with influence here, like GLSEN and the Human Rights Campaign, are shrinking staff as a response to decreased donations.

Conservatives saw an existential threat to language, norms, and civilization. Liberals saw the rising number of people identifying as LGBT as progress, as more Americans identified as what they truly were; conservatives and gender-critical liberals saw a “social contagion,” inflamed by the government. For at least the next three years and 11 months, there will be a conflict between the United States, which now officially categorizes gender as immutable and assigned at birth, and non-government institutions like the Associated Press — and the overwhelming majority of medical and science bodies — which don’t.

This happened so quickly, and so definitively, that the politics of the shift are unclear. Polling during the Biden presidency captured a backlash to its positions on gender fluidity, making Republicans more confident that they could roll it all back. But how much public support is there for — to pick one example —refusing to call the first transgender member of Congress “she”? How will the administration’s defense of “free speech,” here and internationally, blend with efforts to force the Stonewall Museum to change its language and limit what flags it can fly? That is going to be tested.