President Donald Trump signed an executive order last Wednesday that he promised, in front of laughing, cheering girls and women, would remove the “woke lunacy” from women’s sports. For him, that means attempting to remove transfeminine athletes—whom he refers to as “men”—from playing alongside their cisgender peers. The order called trans people’s participation in girls’ and women’s sports “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls” and asserted that such participation “denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”

In the order, Trump directed his administration to rescind federal funding from K–12 schools and colleges that allow transfeminine athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s categories. He also targeted the International Olympic Committee ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games, directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Department of Homeland Security to screen out transfeminine athletes with visas seeking to enter the country for competitions. These proposed restrictions seek to eradicate trans people from leisure activities and, in the cases of more elite athletes, eliminate their livelihoods.

The order arrived amid an onslaught of executive orders targeting transgender people’s very existence. It’s one part of a large-scale attack. Our rights to gender-affirming health care, military service, public bathrooms, accurate passports, support from educators, and even imprisonment in facilities corresponding with gender identity are now up in the air. In some cases, trans people, alongside advocacy groups like the ACLU and Lambda Legal, have already sued the Trump administration over the new orders.

The sports order is insidious. On the one hand, it may have little legal merit on its own; if schools and colleges want to keep including transfeminine athletes, they may still try to, though the federal government now may pull funding from and make an example of such institutions. But it’s not as straightforward as it seems—the order does not out of thin air impose a nationwide ban on trans women and girls at all levels of sport. What it does potentially do, though, is put those athletes on notice, tell them they’re not welcome, and scare their states and sports governing bodies into compliance. And it’s only in understanding how the order is already massively affecting U.S. women’s sports that one can realize how it threatens to be more broadly dangerous.

The order, like all executive orders, is not binding law for the general public; rather, it contains internal instructions for the executive branch to carry out. “Through an executive order, Trump can’t order Massachusetts to stop including trans people in sports,” said Erin Buzuvis, a Western New England University law professor who specializes in gender and discrimination in athletics. “But Trump can order the Department of Education to change its regulations, or start enforcement actions, or issue an interpretation that would be binding on federal funding recipients in the realm of Title IX.” Indeed, the 1972 statute Title IX is directly applicable to this order because it mandates equal educational opportunities, including in sports, by sex.

It wasn’t so long ago that the NCAA positioned itself in allyship with trans people, in response to North Carolina’s infamous bathroom bill, which passed in 2016. But it didn’t take long after Trump’s order for the college sports governing body to sell out its handful of out transfeminine athletes. Last Thursday, the group updated its gender-eligibility policy to exclude them from competition. To be clear, again, the order did not legally require the NCAA to do this—or to do anything. But the organization chose to do what the Trump administration prefers. Most recently, amid transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas’ senior season, in 2021–22, the NCAA ruled that it would continue allowing transfeminine athletes to compete in women’s sports so long as they adhered to certain guidelines set by their sport-specific federations. But the new policy supplants that decision.

“We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said in a statement last Thursday. “To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.” A smaller collegiate sports governing body, the NAIA, implemented a ban on transfeminine athletes last year, and at that time the NCAA had already been toying with doing the same. Now there’s no doubt where it stands.

That’s the biggest impact of the order so far in the U.S. It might be tougher for Trump to compel international organizations like the IOC to play ball with his administration’s new guidance. In 2021 the Olympic overlords announced a new sport-by-sport framework for inclusion of trans athletes that would ultimately leave policy decisions in the hands of each sport’s international governing body, while generally advocating for inclusion. Trans athletes have been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 2004, though few actually have. But the outlook for prospective Olympians heading for L.A. will likely hinge on who wins the high-stakes race to be the next IOC president. That’ll be decided in March. At least one front-runner, World Athletics head Sebastian Coe, has been vehemently anti-trans.

The order’s reach is ultimately yet to be determined because the courts will have their say. So far, two transgender teenage girls in New Hampshire public schools have amended their 2024 lawsuit challenging a state anti-trans sports ban to also include claims against Trump and his administration. And it’s possible more legal action will be on the way once a trans athlete is denied the opportunity to compete in girls’ or women’s sports and hires a lawyer. A different sort of challenge to the executive order could come from blue states’ attorneys general, Buzuvis said, much the way red states challenged Joe Biden’s efforts to create Title IX protections for trans students.

Although Trump’s order does not change the law, it gives his administration marching orders to create and enforce new rules. “Everything that the Department of Education and the Department of Justice could do under [Trump’s] executive order, they could have [legally] done whether the executive order preceded it or not,” Buzuvis said, noting that even though such orders can offer transparency and insight into governmental actions, their public nature also comes with negative effects in cases like this. “It’s just political gamesmanship and shilling. This is just trying to manipulate people’s opinions for political reasons and look good in the eyes of the public in ways that keep this issue front and center so that he can maintain favor with his base, maybe particularly as everything else is a dumpster fire right now.” In other words, Trump could have directed the DOE and DOJ to find ways to withhold funding from public institutions with trans athletes anyway, without the executive order. So the order itself is not highly meaningful as a matter of law. It’s extremely meaningful, though, as a matter of politics.

The debate over trans rights in sports may have started with conservatives purporting that they were “just asking questions.” But as my former Ringer colleague Rodger Sherman points out, those arguments—though compelling to some (including, at one point, himself) across the political spectrum—were never actually grounded in issues of fairness. That’s because it is not fair to exclude an entire marginalized group from recreation and its many benefits. There are many legitimate ways to go about protecting women’s sports that don’t pit trans and cis women against each other. One way is to ensure that schools and boosters offer equal scholarship spots and name-image-likeness opportunities to women. And it is telling that on Wednesday, the Department of Education rescinded Biden-era Title IX guidance that called for schools to provide proportionate athletic department resources and revenue-sharing payments to women’s teams. Another way is to hold abusive coaches accountable throughout the college and professional ranks, but the administration is not calling for that. This order does not protect anyone; instead, it risks endangering all women competitors by subjecting them to invasive and troublesome sex testing.

Since 2020, more than half of states have put anti-trans sports bans, some of which face legal challenges, on the books. Meanwhile, transgender athletes will continue wanting to partake in sports at every level. So while the ripple effects of Trump’s move remain to be seen, it’s already clear that trans athletes face a long, rocky road back toward inclusion in the U.S.—and beyond.