Trump's minions have quietly disappeared most federal data on gender identityhttps://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/03/trumps-minions-have-quietly-disappeared-most-federal-data-on-gender-identity/ 🔗LGBTQ Nation (26 March 2026)
President Donald Trump already has signed more executive orders since January 2025 than during his entire first term — and more than many presidents signed during their tenures in office. But one order has gone far beyond the others in reshaping the ecosystem of information the government and so many others, rely on.
"EO14168 has been overwhelmingly responsible for driving changes to federal forms and survey data," says Melanie Klein, an analyst with the federal monitoring organization DataIndex who has been tracking these alterations. Although Trump signed EO14168—better known by its title "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government"—on his first day in office, data experts are still getting a sense of its far-reaching scope.
Of more than 500 federal databases affected by Trump's myriad executive orders, nearly three-quarters were revised because of the Defending Women order alone. Most of the cases involved removing trans-inclusive gender identity options from survey forms, leaving people to choose between male or female.
These changes have affected "really critical programs like the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline or data collections about runaway and homeless youth," Klein says. These have been among the removals that, over the past year, have garnered widespread concern because trans people are known to experience higher rates of suicide and homelessness than others—crises that have grown worse as a result of the administration's anti-trans policies and rhetoric. "Without the data, disparities don't just magically disappear, but they do become more difficult to document and address," says Caroline Medina, a senior advisor for data policy at the Movement Advancement Project (MAP).
