WASHINGTON (BP) — President Donald Trump’s executive order to prevent transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports is a long overdue correction and return to normalcy, said a representative of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC).

“Under the Biden administration, Title IX was co-opted by the sexual revolution and women’s sports were compromised by the advancement of sexual orientation and gender identity politics,” said ERLC President Brent Leatherwood. “Today, President Trump signed an executive order preventing transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, which is both an encouraging and helpful step toward protecting women. Southern Baptists believe our biological realities cannot be ignored, and any attempt to do so will inevitably bring harm to women and our society.”

The week before Trump’s inauguration, the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. The vote fell primarily along party lines, with only two Democrats in support. The Senate has yet to bring it to a vote.

Today’s step, taken on National Girls & Women in Sports Day, is one of several by the new president regarding gender.

On the day he took office, a Trump executive order promoted restoring biological truth to the federal government, namely by returning to the recognition of only two sexes — male and female.

“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong,” it read.

The order, reflecting Leatherwood’s comments, stated the necessity to push back against a movement that attacks the “longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, [attempting to replace] the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.”

“Sex” it further stipulated in federal documentation, would refer to “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” and not as a synonym for or including the concept of “gender identity.”

This effectively ended transgender activists’ attempts to tie the issue to Title IX, which prevents discrimination based on sex.

On Jan. 28 Trump signed an executive order on protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation. In addition to other directives, it called for the end of all chemical and surgical treatments designed to “reassign” a person’s gender.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that today’s order reflects “a wildly popular position with the American people.”

A June 2023 Gallup study reported that 69% of Americans say transgender athletes should only compete in sports that conform to their birth gender.

Holden and Abigail Cross, members of Simpson Creek Baptist Church in Bridgeport, W.Va., discussed last month their daughter Adaleia’s motivation in protecting women’s sports. Baptist Press reported in June on Adelia’s experience competing against and ultimately losing her spot on her school’s girls track team to a transgender athlete.

Her church issued a letter in support of Adaleia, calling the school board’s actions supporting the transgender athlete “a galling lack of concern for our daughters.”

The controversy extends beyond sports. At Denver East High, a girls restroom was converted to gender-neutral over the winter break, drawing protests from parents and students.

“Due to the fact that anyone can go in the gender-neutral restroom, most girls, myself included, do not feel comfortable going into the bathroom by themselves or at all, in fear of an act of sexual harassment or misconduct happening,” a senior at the school wrote in a guest column for the Denver Post.

Yesterday, three members of the University of Pennsylvania 2021-22 women’s swim team brought a lawsuit against the Ivy League Council of Presidents, Harvard, Penn and the NCAA over Title IX violations regarding former Penn swimmer Lia Thomas.

Thomas, a biological man, competed in the 2022 Ivy League Championships and NCAA national women’s championships, setting records in every individual event and replacing the names of previous women champions that had stood at Harvard’s Blodgett Pool and at Penn.

“Women swimmers throughout the Ivy League were left shattered by the disregard of their rights and opportunities in order to create new rights and opportunities in women’s sports for a man with biological advantages they could not hope to match,” the lawsuit said.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Scott Barkley is chief national correspondent for Baptist Press.)