Within the first hour of his second term as president, Donald Trump signed 42 executive orders aimed at radically shifting government policy and American culture. Among his edicts demanding that birthright citizenship end and the Gulf of Mexico get a patriotic makeover was Executive Order 14168: “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” EO 14168 orders federal agencies to defer to a person’s sex instead of gender in all situations and restricts sexual identity to “biological classification as either male or female.”

Eight days later on January 28, the president issued EO 14187: “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” This proclamation banned gender affirming care for anyone in the US under 19 years old with the threat of defunding and closing down medical practices that would not comply.

The next day came EO 14190: “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Among other restrictions to what can be taught in American schools and school policies, the order threatens defunding schools “based on gender ideology” and charging school adults accused of “facilitating the social transition of a minor student,” which is defined earlier in the EO as “the process of adopting a ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender marker’ [i.e., pronoun] that differs from a person’s sex.”

Finally (as of now), the president issued EO 14201: “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” on February 3. The order restricts K-12 and college athletes to only be allowed to play in sports that align with their assigned sex at birth. The order also asks that these demands be brought to “major athletic organizations and governing bodies” (e.g., the NFL, NBA, FIFA, IOC).

These four executive orders mark not just a dangerous shift in the battle for LGBTQ+ civil rights but also leave transgender teens in particular at an elevated risk of harm in healthcare settings, schools, and public life.

What Does “Trans” Mean Anyway?

Trans individuals are part of the wider lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and other non-cisgender identity spectrum (simplified as LGBTQ+ for short). Members of this community are defined by a gender identity or sexual or romantic attraction that doesn’t align with their biological sex and traditional social binaries.

A majority of people identify as cisgender: if they are born with male sex organs, they identify as a male and are attracted to and only to women; if they are born with female sex organs, they identify as a female and are attracted to and only to men. This is what EO 14168 means by “immutable biological reality of sex”—only a coupling of a male and female can result in offspring, so this tends to be the default mode for most people.

However, members of the LGBTQ+ fall outside these definitions. Lesbians are women who identify as women but are attracted to women, not men. Gays are men who identify as men but are attracted to men, not women. Bisexuals are attracted to both women and men, and “queer” serves as a blanket term for other variations of identity and attraction (like asexuals, who feel no sexual attraction to men or women, and intergenders, who don’t identify as male or female but a blend of both).

For transgender individuals, their biological sex assigned at birth doesn’t match how they think about themselves and how they want to be identified in public. Historically, trans individuals would either stay “closeted” and not reconcile their body dysmorphia, or they would use clothing and hairstyles to embody the sex that they felt was their true self. The second option wasn’t chosen as often because it opened these individuals up to harassment and ridicule as others saw (and some still see) these attempt as trying to lie or decieve others rather than an attempt to improve one’s own psychological health.

However, modern medicine now allows trans individuals to change their physical bodies through gender-affirming care. This can include the surgical reconstruction of sex organs, though this does not happen in America for children 12 and younger (in rare cases tied to other medical issues, children 13-17 can receive breast reduction surgeries, though the rate is 5 out of every 100,000 trans kids). More often, gender-affirming care for children comes in the form of psychiatric therapy, puberty blockers (which delay puberty until the child is old enough to decide if they want gender reassignment), and hormone treatments (which trigger pubescent changes opposite of the non-biological sex).

The Difficulty of Being Different

For many trans teens, this move feels like a setback in a long struggle for equality and safety. With mental health struggles already high among transgender youth, this order has sparked fear that it will worsen the challenges they face at a critical stage in their development.

Like most teens, the most common issues that trans teens face are depression and anxiety, but unlike most teens, trans teens are five to seven times more likely to face these issues. For trans teens, their body is their main source of these feelings because it isn’t what makes sense to them–they have feelings of body dysmorphia, which is feeling like the person you are on the inside is trapped in a body that isn’t yours. Unlike most sources of teenage depression and anxiety like struggling with school or fighting with parents, these teens can’t ever get even a momentary escape from being in their body.

This isn’t to say that body dysmorphia is the only source of depression and anxiety for trans teens, as they are also exposed to the usual triggers of academic performance, social acceptance, getting along with family, and balancing a busy life. Hiowever, each of these triggers is more severe for trans teens. Take social acceptance: while lots of teens get bullied and have trouble fitting in, trans teens are six times more likely to be bullied than cisgendered teens–and even twice as likely to be bullied as gay or lesbian teens.

The bullying of trans teens is also more extreme, as a study by the Trevor Project found that 1 in 4 trans teens reported being threatened or injured with a weapon while being bullied (compared to 1 in 20 cisgendered teens) and nearly 1 in 3 had experienced sexual assault (compare to 1 in 10 cis youth). Troublingly, this research was conducted in ten states, including Colorado, that are considered safe for LGBTQ+ Americans; a true national survey would likely find much higher rates of violence in states rated unsafe due to laws that limit the civil rights of LGBTQ+ individuals.

Why are Trans Teens a Target?

So, why is President Donald Trump doing this? Simple: he’s a Republican president and curbing the rights of transgendered individuals has become a major talking point by the Republican party over the past decade. In the past two years, over 1,000 bills targeting trans rights moved through state legislatures with Republican sponsors, and Trump made attacking former Vice President Kamala Harris’ embrace of the LGBTQ+ community a large part of his 2024 campaign. This push from Republican politicians has come in spite of the majority of American voters (including registered Republicans) wanting politicians to allow trans individuals the freedom to persue gender-affirming care and worry about the economy instead.

But why target the trans community in the first place? The reasoning behind these attacks mostly comes from religious beliefs—some people believe that God or a similar deity wants every person to be in the body they received at birth and that radically altering that body disrespects their creator. Evangelical Christians usually hold this view, and most political analysts agree that attacks of the trans community serve to get this voting bloc to elect conservatives.

Others justify their rejection of trans identity as based in science: since children can only come as a result of a coupling of a man and a woman, this must be “correct” and “natural.” EO 14168 specifically relies on the scientific merit of its position against “transgender ideologies.” The first paragraph characterizes acceptance of transgender identity as “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex.” It goes on to say that “basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry” and, in the second section, that “these sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

The Actual Biological Reality of Sex

Since basing policy on facts and scientific reality is important, an overview of the science of sexual reproduction easily pokes holes in the argument made in EO 14168. First, every freshman in bio who didn’t sleep through class knows that sex characteristics are genetic: XX results in a girl and XY results in a boy. The EO relies on this fact when it states that there are only “two sexes, male and female.”

However, genetics isn’t always black and white. Due to errors in genetic code, nearly 2% of the US population is neither genetically XX or XY but is intersexed. Intersexed is a broad term for sex chromosomes that, due to an error in replication, are not XX or XY but are X, XXY, XXX, XXXY, XXXXY, XXYY, or XXXYY. This can result in a variety of atypical sex characteristics, including:

• mosaicism, where the genitals at birth are an indiscriminate bulge of skin
• ovotesticular DSD, where a baby is born with both male and female sex organs
• gonadal dysgenesis, where a person with outer female sex organs has testes where her overies should be, or a person with outer male sex organs has ovaries instead of testes

So science says that there are at least seven different sexes, and even if some are rare, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Moreover, intersex individuals typically have sex reassignment surgery so they can become just one sex or, often, just so they can pee without difficulty. While parents historically chose which set of genitals babies with both sets or an unclear set would have, most intersex children today are put on puberty blockers and wait to surgically commit to a sex once they have a clear gender preference—this reduces cases of body dysmorphia later in life.

Trans Teens are Healthier and Happier with Gender-Affirming Care

The point here isn’t that trans teens are all intersex–while they have a higher chance of being intersex than the average population, the vast majority are not. The point is that biological sex is more complicated than just a binary and that it isn’t just transgender individuals looking for treatments that fsall under “gender-affirming care.” Besides intersex children, some cisgender girls need testoterone shots to fight bone and hair loss as a result of radiation, and some cisgender boys that struggle to develop mature heart and brain cells need estrogen injections. The recent executive orders exclude this care under their broad umbrella too.

Trans individuals believe they are no more or less deserving of life-saving gender-affirming care than these others because, like in the cases of radiation girls and cell sick boys, gender-affirming care saves lives. Trans adolescents are more than seven times more likely to consider suicide than their cisgendered peers, with half of those surveyed making at least one attempt on their own life during their teenage years. The increase of anti-trans legislation has also paired with a 72% increase in suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth.

However, receiving gender-affirming care lowers the rate of suicidal ideation among trans and nonbinary youth by 73%–just slightly higher than their cisgender peers. The main cause of suicidal ideation by trans individuals of all ages is a lack of social acceptance and disgust at one’s own body, and gender-affirming care acts as bulwark against these feelings.

Families and Freedom Groups are Fighting Back

On February 4, the ACLU, Lambda Legal, and other civil rights organizations filed lawsuits in federal court in hopes of challenging the Executive Order. On February 6, Attorneys General in 15 states (including Colorado) publicly opposed these anti-trans EOs with their lawsuit.  A day later, three physicians in Washington state filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Order, which the suit calls “blatantly unconstitutional.”

These groups have also taken to social media along with celebrities, medical professionals, and politicians to make the public aware of these EOs. For example, Ariana Grande posted several stories about her support for the LGBTQ+ community on Instagram. She said, “Let’s be very clear: queer and trans people were here before Donald Trump and will continued to be here after he’s dead.”

Fortunately, these Executive Orders are just pronouncements of the president’s intentions for his administration, not actual laws. Only Congress can pass laws restricting or broading civil rights, and Trump’s EOs should be seen less as him making new rules and more him publically telling Congress how he wants them to change the rules. While both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans, this doesn’t guarentee Trump will get his new laws–a bill to ban trans women and girls from competing as part of a high school or college women’s sports team failed in the Senate on March 3.

Meanwhile, parents and guardians of trans youth are doing their best to protect their kids. Families are moving to states like Colorado that have strong civil rights protections for trans youth in droves. A Colorado organization named the Trans Continental Pipeline, which was founded to help relocate trans families to Colorado, has doubled its staff since the election and still has a backlog of families.

If you would like to help trans youth in Colorado, you can donate to an organization fighting Trump’s EOs in court like the ACLU, trans relocation nonprofits like the Trans Continental Pipeline, or LGBTQ+ resource groups like The Trevor Project. Remember when donating online to always research the group receiving the donation to avoid scams and only use the group’s official web donation portal.