President Donald Trump’s Administration’s use of Executive Orders and the Necropolitical Erasure of Gender Minorities in the United States (Gilley 7188404)

Abstract

This thesis critically examines Executive Orders (EOs) signed by President Donald Trump in 2025 that address gender minorities in the United States. The community of gender minorities living across the United States has been directly affected by the EOs put forth by the conservative Administration. EOs are directly linked to modes of governance related to the structuring, management, and executive responsibilities throughout the Federal government. I argue that the Trump Administration’s utilization of EOs that address gender minorities facilitates the erasure of the populations at a Federl level. In 2025, potent legitimizing agents throughout the Federal government of the United States have politically redefined biological sex, gender ideology, and gender identity, facilitating a necropolitical apparatus that has led to the erasures of gender minorities through paradigms of governmentality. To explore governmental apparatuses in relation to necropolitics, EOs signed by President Donald Trump regarding political definitions of biological sex and gender are central objects of study, aiming to understand better how these erasures are taking place. I contend that these erasures are directly linked to necropolitical deaths, which are politically motivated, born out of a desire for an ontological-metanarrative in the United States. Drawing on theoretical lenses related to necropolitics, I invoke Michel Foucault’s work on massification and anatomo-politics of the human body; Orlando Patterson’s work on ‘social death,’ and Lauren Berlant’s work on ‘slow death.’ Applying these theories to Trump’s EOs elucidates the timeliness of this thesis; insofar as the Trump Administration’s erasures of gender minorities extend out of the Federal government and its modes of governance into social, legal, and political spheres. Consequently, the necropolitical erasures of gender minorities are taking place, at the time of this thesis, in public schools, the Armed Forces, occupational spaces, and doctors’ offices. I argue that EOs are means of erasure connected to a constellation of historical precedents, political lobbying, and a conservative desire for a massified, Americanized society based on a biological sex binary.