President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order that prohibits biologically male athletes from participating in women's sports, delivering on a campaign promise.
"With this executive order, the war on women's sports is over," Trump said, noting that schools that refuse to comply may lose federal funding. In addition, the order tasks the administration with working with "sports governing bodies, including the International Olympic Committee, to ensure the guidance is followed in noneducational settings," NBC News reported.
The executive order marks Trump's latest effort to reverse former president Joe Biden's transgender policies. Trump signed an order on Inauguration Day formally recognizing only two sexes, male and female. The president also issued an order barring transgender people from serving in the military and another "banning the chemical castration and medical mutilation of innocent children."
The order, issued on National Girls and Women in Sports Day, comes weeks after the House of Representatives passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would amend Title IX to recognize a person's sex as "based solely on a person's reproductive biology and genetics at birth." The Senate has yet to vote on the bill.
Trump on the campaign trail last year repeatedly railed against "transgender lunacy" and vowed to "keep men out of women's sports."
Rep. Nancy Mace (R., S.C.), a vocal critic of the Biden administration's transgender policies, wrote in an X post before the signing that Trump's Wednesday order "restores fairness, upholds Title IX's original intent, and defends the rights of female athletes who have worked their whole lives to compete at the highest levels."
"No amount of activism, corporate pressure, or lies can erase reality—men are biologically different from women," Mace wrote.
Nearly 70 percent of Americans support Trump's stance, saying that transgender athletes should "never" or only "in rare cases" be allowed in women's sports, according to a poll by NORC at the University of Chicago.