On day one of his presidency, one of Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to sign an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes: male and female.
The order is a transphobic, scientifically incorrect screed titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government” that mischaracterizes sex and gender and demands that “every agency and all Federal employees acting in an official capacity on behalf of their agency shall use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender’ in all applicable Federal policies and documents.”
The Social Security Administration and other government departments are complying with the order by scrubbing information about changing one’s sex from its website.
Ari Drennen spotted the change to the “change sex identification” site and posted a screenshot on X:
And just like that, the “how to change sex identification” page has vanished from the Social Security Administration website. pic.twitter.com/cNj7XeeuVH
— Ari Drennen (@AriDrennen) January 23, 2025
The site now says “you are not authorized to access this page,” blocking it from public view. It used to show basic information about how to change your sex on record with the Social Security Administration by requesting a new Social Security card, and a link to a questionnaire that helped determine how to go about it. “You don't need to provide medical or legal evidence of your sex designation,” the site said when it was online. “Currently, you can change your sex identification to either male or female, but we are examining ways to provide an unspecified sex identification option in the future.”
The "change sex identification" page, on January 21 compared to today.
Information about gender identity and access to guides on changing one’s sex have also been scrubbed from the administration’s main LGBTQIA+ site. Here’s what looks like today, compared to how it looked last week.
How the page looks today / How the SSA LGBTQI+ page looked on December 22, via the Internet Archive
The Gender Identity link that’s now missing from that site and inaccessible to the public—showing a 404 error and not a CMS login message, unlike the “change sex identification” site—used to provide links to forms one would need to fill out to start the process.
Form SS-5: Application for A Social Security Card is still available for download on the Internet Archive. A page about how to get a social security card is still online, as is a page for locating a Social Security office.
Several other government websites about gender identity and discrimination are also offline, including a Department of Labor site about discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and a State Department site about how to select your gender marker on your passport, are also gone or scrubbed of mentions of gender identity.
Aside from being unscientific nonsense and anti-abortion rhetoric, the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology” executive order has triggered all of this essential information to go offline across the internet, adding to the confusion and panic that many queer and trans people—and anyone who actually cares about reproductive rights or freedom of speech—already face going into Trump’s presidency. And it’s not the first time Trump’s administration took down a bunch of government websites to try to suppress scientific information: thousands of pages with climate change information were removed or buried during his first term.
