AdvertisementGo ad freeDonald TrumpTrumps Administration Is Taking Down Sites About Gender Identity All Over the Internet Jan 23, 2025 at 11:39 AM After Trump signed an unscientific, transphobic executive order deeming there to be "two sexes," several informational websites about gender identity went offline.The Trump White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On day one of his presidency, one of Donald Trumps 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 ones sex from its website.Are you a federal employee or contractor with knowledge of the changes described in this piece, or how employees are reacting to these changes? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.Ari Drennen spotted the change to the change sex identification site and posted a screenshot on X: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 ones sex have also been scrubbed from the administrations main LGBTQIA+ site. Heres 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 ArchiveThe Gender Identity link thats now missing from that site and inaccessible to the publicshowing a 404 error and not a CMS login message, unlike the change sex identification siteused 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 peopleand anyone who actually cares about reproductive rights or freedom of speechalready face going into Trumps presidency. And its not the first time Trumps 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.Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She's the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.More from Samantha ColeMore like thisWhy the Work Still Matters When Donald Trump won in 2016, we weren't sure if good journalism mattered anymore. Now, we're more sure than ever it does. Nov 8, 2024 GitHub Is Showing the Trump Administration Scrubbing Government Web Pages in Real Time Watch the Trump administration play DEI whac-a-mole on this government agency's GitHub page. Jan 23, 2025 Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots "Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. 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