Executive Order 14168
effectiveDefending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government
President of the United States (Donald J. Trump) · United States
Summary
Executive order signed by President Donald Trump on January 20, 2025 (inauguration day of his second term). Directs federal departments and agencies to recognize sex as an immutable male-female binary determined at conception; to replace 'gender' with 'sex' across federal materials, forms, and communications; to cease federal funding for gender-affirming care and programs supporting transgender identities; to require sex-segregated facilities (bathrooms, prisons, shelters) to be designated by biological sex; and to rescind specified Department of Education guidance documents including 'Supporting Transgender Youth in School' (June 2021), 'Supporting Intersex Students' (October 2021), and the 'U.S. Department of Education Toolkit: Creating Inclusive and Nondiscriminatory School Environments for LGBTQI+ Students.' Cited by Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett's Oct 31 2025 letter as authority for requiring the 181 libraries in the Tennessee Regional Library System to review juvenile children's-section materials for compliance. Opening of Section 1 (Purpose): 'Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women's domestic abuse shelters to women's workplace showers. This is wrong.'
Notes
Federal authority cited by Tennessee SoS Tre Hargett's 2025-10-31 letter (administrative_rule #4) directing 181 Tennessee libraries to review juvenile children's-section materials. EO 14168 itself is broader than library content — it covers federal employment, facilities, funding, and communications — but its rescission of Department of Education guidance documents is the education-specific through-line that Hargett invoked. Also published in Federal Register as document 2025-02090. Wikipedia maintains a detailed summary at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14168.