New Trump Administration Rule Aims to Erase Trans People from Many Areas of Public Life

The rule broadly targets ‘gender ideology’ in all entities that receive federal funds, including in academia, education, healthcare, governance, advocacy, discrimination protections, and more.

Project 2025 architect Russell Vought is leading the aggressive push to target funding for ‘gender ideology’ | Image: The White House

Today, the Trump administration released a new proposed rule titled “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.” The rule, spearheaded by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and published jointly by every federal agency, aims to “ensure that Federal awards and subawards are not used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” “’diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) policies, principles, or practices,” “gender ideology,” and “the so-called ‘transition’ of a child under 19 years of age from one sex to another.”

In doing so, it will formally codify and broaden the funding prohibitions that were originally established by Executive Orders 14151, 14168, and 14187 in the first few days of Trump’s second term. However, it also directs government agencies not to discriminate against organizations on the basis of their “religious character, affiliation, exercise, or lack thereof,” which legalizes anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in some contexts. And even worse, it repeals the Biden-era rule mandating that recipients of federal funding not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity if they are subject to federal discrimination law. These changes are planned to take effect by October 1st.

Make no mistake: this proposal is extremely destructive. The regulation in question, 2 CFR 200.300, governs virtually all federal funding awards, which, as per 31 U.S.C. § 6401, include “the transfer of anything of value for a public purpose of support or stimulation authorized by a law of the United States, including financial assistance and Government facilities, services, and property” as well as “a grant, a subgrant, a cooperative agreement, or any other transaction” outside of government loans, insurance, and subsidies. In practical terms, this encompasses state & local governments, universities, K-12 schools, healthcare providers, research institutions, non-profit organizations, museums, public libraries, many private businesses, and more.

Seemingly the most straightforward of the three prohibitions is the one on DEI. According to the rule, it’s meant to ban funding from going towards supporting “racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination used by the recipient or subrecipient that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws, including activities where race or intentional proxies for race will be used as a selection criterion for employment or program participation.” Read plainly, this is primarily meant to target DEI hiring practices and some cultural programs as well as to eliminate federal grants that are intended for minorities.

However, the second provision—the ban on ‘gender ideology’—is much more vague. It directly relies on EO 14168, which defines the ‘gender ideology’ as “[replacing] the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.” In the rule, this is expanded to also include “theories or ideologies that deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans, or endorse or advocate for the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic.”

And in its policies, the Trump administration has already interpreted gender ideology extremely broadly, construing it to mean any acknowledgement of trans people in virtually any capacity. Because of this, his government has stopped enforcing federal gender identity discrimination protections, removed all mention of ‘gender identity,’ ‘transgender,’ and even just ‘gender’ from all federal regulations and rules, implemented a bathroom ban in federal buildings, cut gender-affirming care from federal employee insurance plans, banned gender changes on passports, updated federal forms, and tortured trans prisoners, among other things.

As a funding ban, this gets more complicated. The language used—”fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate”—significantly expands EO 14168’s ban on funds directly being used to ‘promote’ gender ideology, and it provides the Trump administration with extensive authority to condition funding. This is especially true given the inclusion of the word ‘facilitate,’ which has been used to justify broad enforcement action against trans people by figures like Texas AG Ken Paxton.

So, for example, if a federally funded high school mentions trans people in lessons, and if the school cannot operate without that funding, is that funding ‘facilitating’ ‘gender ideology’? How about if a federally-funded museum organizes a pride display? Or if a city flies a pride flag at a building that receives federal funds? Or if a university funds research into gender-affirming care? These remain open questions, and that’s a problem. As has already happened with many colleges and youth gender-affirming care providers, entities afraid of losing their funding will likely overcomply in advance.

As a result, trans people will be erased from many areas. American research into trans healthcare may stop almost entirely. Many museums and libraries could drop any mention of trans people. City governments might stop celebrating pride and repeal nondiscrimination ordinances. Larger advocacy organizations may stop addressing the needs of the trans community. And across the board, many entities will likely implement the DOJ’s bathroom guidance, which states that failing to segregate bathrooms by ‘biological sex’ violates federal discrimination laws. Worse, because the rule would also give the existing funding bans more teeth, compliance with those narrower provisions—which some entities have avoided thus far—will become the new bare minimum.

Another big question mark is Medicaid, which is a joint state-federal program that provides health insurance for lower-income Americans. Unlike some other federal funding that is sent to states, funding for Medicaid is considered a federal award, and as a result, it’s possible that the federal government may use this rule to condition that this funding is not spent on gender-affirming care. If this occurs, it’s entirely possible that the handful of GOP-led states that do cover this care—Georgia, Indiana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Utah—will use this to justify ending their coverage. In fact, in the past few years, many states, including Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Ohio, and Wyoming, have already done so as a result of similar political pressure.

Unfortunately, this idea isn’t entirely out of the question. The third provision, the ban on funds being used for gender-affirming care for minors, is the most similar to existing prohibitions. Over the past 16 months, the Trump administration has threatened providers’ entire funding streams over providing this care and has justified doing so through similar language—”fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support.” At the very least, this rule will likely bar the states that do cover gender-affirming care for minors through Medicaid and another similar program, CHIP, from using federal funds for that purpose.

To justify these broad anti-trans funding conditions, the Trump administration wrote that “divisive gender ideologies…harm women, have a corrosive effect on public trust in Federal grantmaking agencies, infringe on religious liberties, and fall outside of specifically enumerated purposes of authorizing legislation.” Furthermore, it states that “ending government-sponsored promotion of divisive gender ideology is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, and trust in government.”

Ironically, it is these very actions that have corroded trans people’s trust in the government, stifled scientific research into trans people’s needs, and made trans people feel much less safe. But therein lies the point: when the Trump administration says ‘public,’ that doesn’t include trans people. Through this rule, it will attempt to leverage the collective might of the federal government in order to impose that worldview onto this nation as a whole. And in many places, it might work—at least for a time. But they should know: trans people can never really be erased.

If you want to read the full rule for yourself and submit a public comment on the proposal, you can do so here. Comments will be accepted until July 13th.