Within hours of his inauguration as the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump began signing a record-breaking blitz of executive orders. From ending birthright citizenship to withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization, the far-reaching directives paint a disturbing picture of how Trump plans to refashion national policy over the next four years to serve the MAGA agenda.

One executive order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” takes explicit aim at transgender people’s very existence, stating that it is the official policy of the U.S. government to recognize only two sexes, male and female, and that these categories are immutable and determined at conception.

Right now, the full extent to which many of Trump’s executive orders will play out is still unknown, but there are some immediate ramifications. To learn more about what the gender directive means for the civil rights of trans people, Truthout spoke with Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Women’s Rights Project and LGBTQ & HIV Project. The ACLU has been a key player in major litigation over LGTBQ rights, including seeking to maintain trans people’s access to gender-affirming care.

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

Schuyler Mitchell: What do we know right now about the most immediate impacts of President Donald Trump’s new anti-trans executive order?

Gillian Branstetter: The first most immediate impact is on transgender people who are currently incarcerated in federal custody, so either in federal prison managed by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), immigration detention, or some other federal facility. The order implements a blanket policy forcing people to be placed in facilities based on their sex assigned at birth.

This is alarming for a few reasons. First, most incarcerated transgender people are already imprisoned based on their sex assigned at birth, simply because prisons have never been very lawful places. Still, for some time now, courts have held that transgender people do have particular rights when in prison, including under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which says prisons must place people on a case-by-case basis.

PREA was passed in 2003, and there was a decadelong review into what policies should be implemented at the facility management level in order to prevent sexual violence, particularly against folks who are especially vulnerable to sexual violence, which includes transgender people. In 2012, a commission released guidelines that recommended that prison officials assess each person in their custody on a case-by-case basis and said they must take into account the fact that transgender people face an inordinately high risk for sexual violence according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Incarcerated transgender people face nine times the risk of being sexually assaulted in prison compared to their cisgender peers. Enforcing a blanket policy, as the Trump administration is outlining, is extremely dangerous. We have heard from defense attorneys that those relocations are already taking place in federal prisons now.

The administration also calls for the BOP to put an end to any provision of gender-affirming medical care for incarcerated people, including folks who have received this care for decades. It’s already very difficult to access gender-affirming care in any prison, but courts have long held that withholding medically necessary care of any kind from somebody who is incarcerated is a violation of the Eighth Amendment — and, more specifically, they’ve held that this certainly includes access to gender-affirming care.

I think it’s important to start there, because trans rights often get pulled into the abstract. But the crisis of violence and dehumanization and debasement that trans folks are facing in our prison system is one of the greater crises that trans people are facing in this country, period. Especially given that trans people are more likely to live in poverty, we’re overrepresented in the sex trade, we’re overrepresented in counts of homeless populations and less likely to be sheltered — it also makes it far more likely that a transgender person is going to be arrested and incarcerated in the first place.

The other area where we’re seeing the executive order being implemented rather quickly is in regard to federal documents. Passports, but also........

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