JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transgender women from participating in women’s sports.

The president signed the order on National Girls and Women Sports Day.

The order mandates immediate enforcement against schools and athletic associations that deny women single sex sports and single-sex locker rooms.

Nancy Hogshead and Donna de Varona are both US Olympic champions who have pushed for banning transwomen from sports. 

While in Washington D.C. speaking with lawmakers about passing legislation for women and girls in sports, Trump signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which bans transgender athletes from girls and women’s sports.

The order “upholds the promise of Title IX” and will require immediate action be taken against any school or athletic associations that deny women single sex sports or locker rooms.

“If you’re in sports, you know the big gaps between males and females, so in order to give women an equal opportunity to play sports they have to have their own team. There’s no other way that you can come up with criteria that would give women equal opportunity,” Nancy Hogshead, Olympic Gold Medalist from Jacksonville and CEO of Champion Women, said. 

“This is for women to change the dialogue. This isn’t anti-trans, this is for protecting the spaces that we worked so hard for, for so many years,” Donna de Varona, Olympic gold medalist and Founding President of Women’s Sports Foundation, said.  

Since this is the fourth executive order signed by President Trump that targets transgender people, Florida state representative Angie Nixon sees this newly signed executive order as a distraction from the Trump administration. 

“We’re just going to see a constant degradation across the board of our democracy. This is just a distraction,” Nixon said. “He is basically just trying to shock people, and again, distract people from his failure to do what he said he was going to do on day one which was lower the price of food and lower inflation.”

With today also being national girls and women in sports day… de Varona and Hogshead see this executive order as a win in the sports world. 

“We come from such different biological plans that we are different enough. again women need their own sports if they’re going to have equal opportunity,” said Hogshead.

“I was here in ‘72 when title IX had been passed and we had to make sure it stayed intact. We fought every battle and we’ve seen the great results of what our women can do,” said de Varona. 

This executive order also authorizes the education department to penalize schools that allow transgender athletes to compete.

Any school that violates this order could be potentially ineligible for federal funding.

The order also denies visas for transgender women trying to enter the U.S. for the 2028 summer Olympics in Los Angeles.