This week, the Trump administration instructed all federal agencies to remove information from their websites pertaining to “gender ideology.” On Friday, a flurry of reports indicated that exact thing was happening.
In a Wednesday memo, Office of Personnel Management Acting Director Charles Ezell instructed agencies to comply by Friday at 5 p.m. ET with an executive order that says its aim is “defending women from gender ideology extremism.”
That memo laid out “steps to end federal funding of gender ideology.” Among those was the instruction to “Take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology.”
As of late Friday, attempting to reach the Census Bureau’s 2020 Results page returned a message that that part of the site was down for maintenance. Similarly, its page on sexual orientation and gender identity was down, along with other pages including information on those topics.
The examples proliferated on social media, with academics, journalists and activists noting that basic information had disappeared from government websites. The CDC’s HIV surveillance data disappeared, as noted by Aaron Richterman, a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Similarly, the CDC’s Youth Risk Survey data is no longer accessible, which KFF’s Cynthia Cox pointed out.
“OPM sent guidance to agencies to remove gender ideology-related content from their websites by 5 pm today as part of the efforts to defend women and uphold the truth of biological sex against the radical claims of gender activists,” OPM communications director McLaurine Pinover said in a statement Friday evening. “This may have been misinterpreted to mean we would shut down government websites who weren’t able to comply but that is not the plan for continuing to implement this important effort.”
While “gender ideology” is sharply defined, Trump and other transgender rights opponents have used the phrase to argue against the idea that people can identify with a gender that does not match the sex they were assigned at birth.
Indeed, the executive order calls it a “false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”
Many who support transgender rights oppose using the phrase “gender ideology,” as it implies that being transgender is a belief system, as opposed to an identity. Nearly 2 million Americans identify as trans or transgender, according to 2023 polling from KFF and Washington Post.
This week’s “gender ideology” memo wasn’t the only order from the Trump administration to remove information from websites. In another memo implementing an executive order aimed at “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs,” Ezell instructed agencies to “Take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) of DEIA offices.” DEIA stands for “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” in this order.
When asked Friday about the removal of “DEI” information from websites, Trump said, “It doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me. DEI would have ruined our country, and now it’s dead.”
The “Defending Women” executive order, and Ezell’s resulting memo, go well beyond policing information on government websites. Ezell also instructed agencies to “review all agency programs, contracts, and grants, and terminate any that promote or inculcate gender ideology,” and also to make sure that forms ask for respondents’ “sex” and not their “gender.”
The memo additionally calls on agencies to make sure that “intimate spaces” are “designated by biological sex and not gender identity,” which could mean transgender and nonbinary employees will be restricted in which bathrooms they use. NPR reached out for clarity on which spaces would be considered “intimate spaces” and did not receive a response.
