A tornado of executive orders has arrived from the White House, with transgender people in the eye of the storm. A directive implementing these orders froze trillions of federal dollars, shocking our nation and federally-funded campus. Its central threat was this: eliminate “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” or federal funding will cease. As Prof. Kate Manne, philosophy, helpfully sums up the research, preferential U.S. hiring practices still favor white men. So Trump could have just cut to the chase, as his State Department appointee Darren Beattie did and declared “competent [sic] white men must be in charge.” Cornell’s leadership reassured us with a measured Jan. 28 statement. It was reassuring that Cornell was not making immediate changes in response to this threat, even if the statement was released after a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s directive. No mention of trans people made it into that statement, but I recommend keeping an eye on us.

Cornell’s founding principle of “… any person … any study” and our core value of free and open inquiry and expression are under threat. Studying the White House’s attack on transgender people shows exactly how this threat is operating, what the stakes are, and how we can resist.

The executive order on K–12 education also explicitly targets the content of instruction, including trans issues alongside sex education/reproductive rights, racial justice and climate change. As Erin Reed has reported, many districts are publicly refusing to comply with this order, emphasizing that it is illegal and against core institutional values. Staffers at U.S.-funded medical facilities in Chad “had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die. They chose the children.”

We are already learning what compliance looks like at the United States Department of Agriculture, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Census Bureau.

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