President Donald Trump signed an executive order Feb. 5 barring biological males from competing in women’s sports.
“Under the Trump administration, we will defend the proud tradition of female athletes, and we will not allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and our girls,” the president said at the signing ceremony, surrounded by female athletes. “From now on, women’s sports will be only for women.”
The order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” stated that allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports is “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”
Under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the order says, educational institutions that receive federal funding “cannot deny women an equal opportunity to participate in sports” adding that, as some courts have said, “ignoring fundamental biological truths between the two sexes deprives women and girls of meaningful access to educational facilities.”
The administration will “prioritize Title IX enforcement actions against educational institutions” that “deny female students an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletic events by requiring them, in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.”
Additionally, the order called for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to use “appropriate measures” to see that “the International Olympic Committee amends the standards governing Olympic sporting events” so that “eligibility for participation in women’s sporting events is determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that President Trump “does expect the Olympic Committee and the NCAA to no longer allow men to compete in women’s sports,” saying, “the President with the signing of his pen starts a very public pressure campaign on these organizations to do the right thing for women and for girls across the country.”
While the U.S. bishops have yet to comment on this latest move by the Trump administration, Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minn., the chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, recently praised President Trump’s Jan. 28 order that seeks to prohibit certain types of medical or surgical gender reassignment procedures for minors who identify as transgender.
“Helping young people accept their bodies and their vocation as women and men is the true path of freedom and happiness,” Bishop Barron said at the time. “As Pope Francis affirms (‘Dignitas Infinita,’ 60), we are all called to accept the gift of our bodies created in God’s image and likeness as male and female. Sexual difference is profoundly beautiful and the basis for the union of spouses whose love can bear fruit in the inestimable gift of a human life.”
In 2023, the U.S. bishops backed a bill in Congress that would require federally funded female sports programs “to be reserved for biological females.”
Then, Bishop Barron and Bishop Thomas A. Daly of Spokane, Wash., wrote that, “in education and in sports, we must seek to avoid anything that undermines human dignity, including denial of a person’s body which is genetically and biologically female or male, or unequal treatment between women and men.”
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