By Joshua Arnold

President Trump’s Tuesday executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” marks a milestone that seemed far out of reach a mere five years ago. Yet, as transgender activists continued to transgress biological, ethical, and logical lines, they sparked a counter-movement that has now firmly entrenched itself in the defensible rampart known as common sense. A brief review of the past, present, and future serves to illustrate how far the issue has evolved.

Past

“When FRC started working on this back in 2017,” there was very little understanding of the issue, explained Family Research Council Senior Fellow Meg Kilgannon on “Washington Watch.” Transgender activism had only begun in earnest after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in its 2015 Obergefell decision, and the victories and consequences of the transgender policy agenda had not become widely felt.

Adding to this was the fact that “this is such a huge issue that there’s plenty of work for everyone to do,” said Kilgannon. “There’s been a big push around women’s sports. There’s been a big push around what’s going on in schools and sex education. And this medical piece was the most difficult piece to work on, and [FRC] took that on.”

Opposing the transgender movement on the medical front was rendered more difficult by the lack of much high-quality, longitudinal research, especially on the effects of gender transition procedures on children and youth. “The Left has squashed actual research. They’ve intimidated. They’ve used grants to silence those institutions that would do true scientific research,” pointed out Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.

Despite the lack of medical research regarding gender transition procedures on minors, transgender activists convinced mainstream medical organizations to endorse the practices, based on guidelines developed by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), a pro-transgender activist group.

Regulating medical practices is largely a state issue, so Family Research Council, as well as other groups, pursued a state-by-state approach to constrain these harmful procedures on minors. “We developed some bills, and we’ve … slogged it out in the states, and we’ve made a lot of progress there,” said Kilgannon.

It truly was a slog at first. In 2021, Arkansas became the first state to enact legislation protecting minors from gender transition procedures when it passed the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act. To enact the bill, the state legislature not only had to overcome the standard pro-transgender propaganda, but also hostile coverage from national media heavyweights like “60 Minutes” and a veto by their own Republican governor.

But the slog quickly snowballed. Three more states joined Arkansas in 2022, and by 2024 more than half of U.S. states (26) had enacted some sort of legislation (not all laws are equally strong) protecting minors from gender transition procedures. Left-wing activists immediately challenged many of those laws in court with only partial success. To date, three federal appeals courts have upheld such laws on their merits (only one has struck them down on the merits), and the issue already received a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, which will likely deliver their ruling in June 2025.

Numerous developments, which The Washington Stand has covered extensively since its inception in 2022, catalyzed this rapid change in policy. Some practitioners who performed gender transition procedures were exposed for choosing profits over health, coercing parental consent, and prescribing life-altering hormones after a single consultation. Detransitioners provided powerful testimonies of the lies they were told and the lifelong suffering that resulted. European countries reversed their practices of providing gender transition procedures to minors, when more data showed evidence of harm. WPATH was exposed for manipulating their supposedly scientific standards of care for political purposes, with input from the Biden administration.

Not that popularity provides a solid basis for law, but it helps that these laws protecting minors from gender transition procedures were widely popular (because politicians need not muster up quite as much courage to vote for it). Shortly before the 2022 midterm election, a poll found that 80% of Americans opposed gender transition procedures on minors. Likewise, a poll shortly before the 2024 election found majority opposition to the procedures among nearly every demographic group of Americans.

Present

This brings us roughly to the present, where President Trump has issued an executive order to take these various state laws up to the national level.

“This executive order is beautiful. The language in it is wonderful,” Kilgannon gushed. “It’s very well written. It’s very clear. And it protects parents. It protects children. It ends the reliance on junk science and will stop the promotion of using the WPATH guidelines. That’s huge. And it directs the federal government to review: what is the state of the science on this? What is the research into the effects of these treatments, so-called treatments on children?”

“This is quite extensive,” Perkins agreed. “Not only does it address this issue of transgender sexual mutilation that is taking place, but it shows how much the federal government is involved in everything.” The executive order affects “institutions that get [federal] grants,” he continued, “and that’s almost every institution of higher learning that may have a hospital associated with it.” It also affects the military health care system, and it instructs the Department of Justice to treat some gender transition surgeries as female genital mutilation.

Future

Trump’s executive order also places his administration on the side of those fighting to protect children. “Now we will have the wind at our backs, instead of fighting the headwinds of the Biden administration, which was enforcing all of the opposite of this,” Kilgannon said.

“I love these executive orders — most of them,” said Perkins. “But they’re executive orders. They can be undone four years from now.” He called on Congress and state legislatures “to start seeing policy adopted into law that is anchored to truth, common sense. … Now, with the wind at our backs, this needs to be translated into public policy at the state and even the federal level.”

In fact, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) “has already introduced a bill to protect children against child abuse of these procedures,” noted Kilgannon. “It’s really a wonderful time to think about the possibilities.”

For all the labor expended in fighting to protect children from gender transition procedures, it’s encouraging to see that translate into federal policy under the Trump administration. However, the possibility that some future administration will reverse this policy is a reminder that the fight is not over until there is legislation to back up this order.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.