“Women’s sports are for women,” said Linda McMahon, President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Education. As a former professional wrestler, she would know.
Protesters lit up her confirmation hearing when Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley asked her to comment on former President Joe Biden’s efforts to use Title IX to force women to compete against males and allow them into female-only spaces including team locker rooms and showers.
Hawley also referenced Trump’s “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” executive order signed this week. That order follows closely on the heels of another order, signed by Trump on day one in office titled in part: “Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
Trump’s nominees and executive orders signal a new moment of gender sanity. We are witnessing the death throes of the gender-cult insanity that has wreaked havoc on the lives and dreams of American girls for the last four years.
With a stroke of his Sharpie, the president has restored Title IX to its original purpose: safeguarding equal opportunities for girls and women to participate in athletics. The order warns non-compliant institutions that they will lose federal funding if they require their female athletes to “compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males” in their locker rooms.
While historic, critical victories, these orders serve as a powerful reminder that congressional action is essential to permanently protect our nation’s women and girls from the dangerous excesses of gender ideology and to continue Trump’s heroic work to welcome faith-based families back into the public sphere.
This is a complete reversal of the aberrant delusion forced on the country by Biden on his own day one four years ago. In one of his first executive orders, Biden forced federally-funded schools to accommodate biological males who claimed to be female. This meant men could now compete with and against women, use female locker rooms and receive women’s scholarships.
Worse, the Biden administration exploded all federal policies designed to protect and assist women by forcing Americans to redefine “sex” as “gender identity.” The gender delirium – the full flowering of the sexual revolution – effectively erased the last 250 years of American women’s struggle for recognition and equal treatment under the law.
Americans have been quietly acquiescing to trans tyranny for the better part of this century, but the decimation of women’s sports proved to be a bridge too far. In 2021, only 62% of Americans opposed biological men competing with girls. But the latest 2025 poll shows that today that number has grown to 79%.
Such common-sense unanimity is something Americans usually only manifest in war times, which is precisely what the Biden regime’s reality-bending diktats brought about.
Gender ideologies declared war on reality, insisting that “sex” doesn’t matter even though your child could have been born in the “wrong” sexed body. They targeted parents, teachers and coaches who wanted to protect girls, calling them “bigots” and threatening them: “Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?”
Freedom of speech, scientific truth, parental rights, personal integrity, women’s privacy and safety – the war took no prisoners. Trans activism took over public spaces and corporate offices – libraries, schools and athletic fields, and drove those who objected – including parents like me–underground.
Thankfully, hope has returned in the form of the new administration, which offers a necessary course correction for federal policy and a salutary cultural moment. Trump’s orders are poised to restore a culture in which being a woman is a beautiful gift, not something to be removed, reduced or commodified. Moreover, they will help restore a common-sense society where traditional and religious values are respected, rather than stifled.
As a mother of seven children, I am very pleased with the recent orders from the new administration. I’m also glad to hear the future secretary for Education stating the obvious: My daughters should feel safe in their locker rooms. They shouldn’t have to be exposed to men undressing in their spaces.
For far too long, my family values were ridiculed, attacked and unequivocally denounced by the far-left, who would prefer if I shut up and kept my convictions to myself. Thankfully, Trump’s executive orders offer hope that families like mine will once more be able to peacefully participate in American public life without fear of attack, or danger that radical ideology will be shoved down our children’s throats.
While a wonderful balm of hope, however, these executive orders are not the end of the battle. The last four years were a painful reminder that without staunch, permanent protections, families like mine could suffer should radical gender ideologues retake the White House someday.
For this reason, it’s critical that our congressional leaders not rest on their laurels, and instead fight to ensure that Trump’s recent executive orders remain the law of the land.
On Jan. 14, the House passed the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” and it now awaits a vote in the Senate. Under the bill, echoing the executive orders, “sex” does not include “gender identity,” but is limited to a person’s genetics at birth.
It’s time to get on the right side of history and write sanity into our law so that future presidents can never again inflict gender madness on our girls. The American people are 79% behind it, and last I checked, the Senate works for us.
Erika J. Ahern is an accomplished Catholic journalist, staff writer and podcast co-host for CatholicVote’s The LOOP.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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