International trans athletes to be investigated for ‘fraud’ under Trump executive order

President Trump will sign an executive order Wednesday delivering on a key campaign promise to ban transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports, a directive that will also extend to trans athletes visiting the U.S. from abroad, a White House official said.

The order, which Trump will sign at a ceremony in Washington, will target visas issued to transgender professional and elite athletes traveling to the U.S. to compete in women’s athletic competitions. Among other events, the U.S. is set to host the Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028.

“If you are coming into the country and you are claiming that you are a woman, but you are a male here to compete against women, we’re going to be reviewing that for fraud,” an administration official told reporters Wednesday. They did not provide additional details about what fraud investigations will look like.

A fact sheet for Wednesday’s order obtained by The Hill says the Department of Homeland Security “will review visa policies to address males falsely asserting they are females when entering the United States to compete in women’s sports.” The State Department has similarly stopped issuing U.S. passports with “X” gender markers and suspended processing applications from Americans seeking to update their passports with a new gender marker.

Wednesday’s order charges Secretary of State Marco Rubio with demanding changes within the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to bar transgender athletes from single-sex sports. As a Florida Republican senator, Rubio had said the concept of gender identity is “unscientific, subjective, and political.”

The IOC issued new guidelines for transgender and intersex athletes in 2021, abandoning a prior framework that required competing athletes to undergo hormone treatments and procedures the new policy called “medically unnecessary.” The 2021 guidelines are not legally binding and are meant to help international sporting bodies determine eligibility criteria.

The IOC, headquartered in Switzerland, did not immediately return a request for comment on Trump’s forthcoming executive order, which the White House official repeatedly told reporters Wednesday was targeted at “men” in women’s sports, not transgender athletes.

“I know a lot of headlines are going to use the word ‘transgender,’” the official said, “but this has nothing to do with that.”

They added that the order will require the Department of Justice to abide by the nationwide vacatur of Title IX rules established under the former Biden administration. The Biden-era regulations, which a federal judge struck down in January, included protections based on gender identity and sexual orientation for the first time.

The Education Department formally announced last week that it would return to an interpretation of Title IX — the federal civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination at schools and education programs that receive government funding — instituted by Trump’s first administration in 2020.

Trump’s executive order Wednesday will require the Justice Department to take immediate action, including enforcement actions, against schools and athletic associations that allow transgender girls and women to access sports teams and facilities like locker rooms that match their gender identity, the White House official said Wednesday.

It will also call for private sporting bodies to convene at the White House to hear, in person, stories from female athletes who have been harmed or physically injured by a transgender athlete. State attorneys general will also be responsible for highlighting those accounts and identifying best practices to guarantee equal opportunities for women in sports.

“If you are not a woman, you should absolutely have opportunities in sports, but the burden should not always be on women to accommodate that,” the administration official said. “Maybe it is on the schools to create an open category. Maybe it is on the men to be inclusive. But women's sports will be preserved for women.”

Trump’s latest order coincides with National Girls and Women in Sports Day, which is recognized annually in February to celebrate the accomplishments of female athletes. The Women’s Sports Foundation, which co-founded National Girls and Women in Sports Day in 1987, has opposed categorical bans on transgender athletes, saying such policies “limit opportunities and harm the development of both cisgender and transgender girls and women.”

The group’s founder, tennis great Billie Jean King, who spent much of the 1960s advocating for the passage of Title IX, signed a friend-of-the-court briefing in 2020 calling for a federal appeals court to prevent Idaho officials from enforcing a law that effectively banned transgender student-athletes from competing in girls’ sports.

A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel refused to allow Idaho to enforce the first-in-the-nation ban in 2023, saying the measure is likely unconstitutional.

Since returning to office on Jan. 20, Trump has signed a string of executive orders targeting transgender rights, including one declaring the government recognizes only two sexes, male and female, and broadly preventing federal dollars from being used for what he and his administration call “gender ideology.”

Other orders seek to bar transgender people from serving openly in the military and defund schools that promote “gender ideology,” which the White House has broadly defined as “an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.” A Jan. 28 executive order aims to end federal support for gender-affirming care for transgender minors, which the order says includes 19-year-olds.

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