President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to halt federal recognition of transgender individuals late Monday as part of broader executive actions rolling back efforts to promote diversity and combat discrimination enacted during the Biden administration.

The order specifies that the federal government would recognize only two, immutable genders. Trump also issued orders that rolled back Biden-era orders allowing transgender military servicemembers, changing gender on passports and other efforts.

Trump’s call in the order for a bill to recognize only two genders federally will likely intensify fights in Congress over gender-affirming care and discrimination protections more broadly. Last year, Congress passed a law ending Tricare coverage for gender-affirming care for minors and the House has routinely debated amendments on spending bills that would affect the availability of transgender care.

Trump’s moves on Monday could also play out in the courts over the rights of LGBTQ individuals. The Trump administration has inherited court fights over state laws that restrict or ban gender-affirming care for minors, including one case currently pending at the Supreme Court.

The order Monday argued that “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.”

Trump’s order requires the federal government stop supporting gender identity, refer to a person’s sex instead of gender, stop issuing new passports or other government documents that allow a person to change their sex, and end the “misapplication” of a 2020 Supreme Court case holding that the Civil Rights Act prohibited LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace.

The order also directed the DOJ to issue “guidance to ensure the freedom to express the binary nature of sex,” and engage in litigation to defend that right in workplaces and federally funded entities.

Trump himself trumpeted the effort in his inaugural address, after campaigning on promises to roll back protections for transgender individuals.

“This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” Trump said during his inaugural address.

In a call with reporters, Trump officials earlier Monday cast some of the moves as protecting free speech and religious objection rights of Americans. Trump officials and the order itself said the Justice Department would be directed to issue guidance on the reach of a 2020 Supreme Court decision which found that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination against LGBTQ people in the workplace.

The Biden administration relied on that decision in rulemaking extending similar protections in education under Title IX, another effort Trump rolled back Monday.

Monday’s order did not make any mention of intersex individuals or others who did not fit the new federal definition. According to the Census Bureau, about 1 percent of Americans identify themselves as transgender.

The order also included text seeking legislation that would codify the order.

The president of the advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, Kelley Robinson, criticized Trump for “taking aim at the LGBTQ+ community instead of uniting our country and prioritizing the pressing issues the American people are facing,” in a statement Monday.

“We are not going anywhere, and we will fight back against these harmful provisions with everything we’ve got,” Robinson’s statement said.

Trump campaigned heavily on rolling back protections for transgender individuals, including an executive order extending transgender protections to schools that receive federal funds under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.

The move drew praise from Trump’s Republican backers in Congress, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who cast it as fulfilling a campaign promise.

“No biological man should ever come in any of our spaces or try to take our place. And so it was incredibly important. That was a campaign promise of his, it’s an issue I’ve talked about with him personally, many, many times, and I was thrilled to hear him say it,” Greene said after Trump’s inaugural address.

Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., chair of the Equality Caucus, said Trump had taken steps to “erase the existence” of transgender people with the order.

“Make no mistake: these attacks on our community are part of a larger strategy by Republicans to use anti-LGBTQI+ attacks to distract Americans from the massive tax cuts they want to give to their billionaire buddies — cuts they are going to pay for by cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” Takano said.

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(Mary Ellen McEntire contributed to this report.)

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