Trans Rights Are Women's Rights

*This blog was updated in March, 2026.

March is Women’s History Month, which means I’m often asked to name the most pressing issue facing women in America. Answers spring to mind, sometimes faster than I can form the words. I think about the White House’s attacks on childcare at the expense of kids and families who need it most. The fall of Roe and the rise of abortion bans and restrictions coupled with the dangers of being pregnant in America, particularly for Black women. The Trump administration’s open contempt for women who serve our country — and for the word “women” also comes to mind. The list goes on.

None of these ills, however, is the subject of a presidential action “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Instead, this executive order creates a legal definition of womanhood based on the capacity to produce ova, or human eggs. This definition of “woman,” which is gerrymandered to exclude trans women and girls, then applies throughout federal law — and threatens trans people’s freedom to live openly at work, at school, or anywhere in the places they call home.

That should set off alarm bells for all of us, not just those engaged directly in the struggle for LGBTQ rights. The executive order is only a sliver of the cruel campaign to deny basic rights to trans people currently underway. And despite its misleading “Defending Women” label, it shares a through-line with a long and ugly history of gender-based subjugation in the name of “biology.” For centuries, laws and policies premised on women’s biological capacities and “delicate” nature were used to shut women out of educational, economic, and civic opportunities. On these grounds, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld laws barring women from becoming attorneys — or bartenders. Similar “biological” arguments were used to exclude Black women from “the fairer sex” in order to justify extraction of Black women’s labor under the institution of slavery and beyond.

As feminists, we reject efforts to appropriate the rhetoric of “women’s rights” to inflict life-threatening harm on trans people, men or women. Attacking trans people does nothing to address the real problems women face. To the contrary, limiting freedom for trans people worsens conditions for all women by re-entrenching the very gender stereotypes that have underpinned centuries of women’s oppression and that the ACLU Women’s Rights Project has worked for more than half a century to dismantle. After all, the very notion that a person should identify with the sex they were assigned at birth for their entire life is a stereotype, as the more than 1.5 million trans people living in the United States attest to every day.

Formed in 1972, the Women’s Rights Project’s earliest cases focused on establishing rigorous judicial review of laws that classified people on gender lines, often based on long-held stereotypes about men’s and women’s capacities and without regard to individual abilities, needs, and wants. That work, led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the ACLU, included challenging a probate rule that preferred men to women based on the stereotype that any man is more capable of settling an estate than every woman; a housing allowance offered to servicemen, but not servicewomen, based on the stereotype that men should be primary breadwinners; and an income tax deduction available to women, but not men, based on the stereotype that only women should be caregivers.

The plaintiffs in these cases included men as well as women. What they had in common was that each defied gender stereotypes, out of desire or necessity. And all fought to live fully and authentically, without laws and policies that constrained them based on gender or their ability to bear children. To live openly as transgender is to seek that same freedom.

Not only is there no conflict between demanding rights for women and for all transgender people, advances in trans rights hold a specific promise for women’s liberation. By tearing down laws and policies based on gender stereotypes, we can create the opportunity for each of us to determine our own life story. That’s why the Women’s Rights Project strives to represent people of all genders who face barriers based on their sex.

Today’s avalanche of attacks on trans people, with over 492 anti-LGBTQ bills we’re tracking in 2026 so far, makes plain that the gender discrimination of the past is all too present today. Defending trans people is not only a moral duty for the feminist movement; it is central to it.