Trump's anti-transgender executive orders force CDC to remove HIV resources

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is removing content related to HIV after Donald Trump issued executive orders targeting the transgender community.

The order prohibiting federal agenciesfrom making any mention of "gender ideology" has given staffers little time to implement changes with its deadline of Friday afternoon, resulting in the agency taking down HIV-related pages regardless of if they mentioned gender or not.

Charles Ezell, the acting director of the U.S. office of personnel management titled “Defending Women,” sent an email to CDC employees Tuesday, obtained by NBC News, that directly ordered them not to make any references to “gender ideology” and to only recognize two sexes, male and female, against medical fact.

“The process is underway,” an anonymous agency staffer told the outlet. “There’s just so much gender content in HIV that we have to take everything down in order to meet the deadline.”

Trump's so-called "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" order defines sex as strictly male or female based on a person's assigned sex at birth. This is in opposition to all major medical associations in the United States, which maintain that sex is not binary and that transgender and nonbinary identities are real.

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The Trump Administration last week removed references to LGBTQ+ identities and HIV-related resources from government sites such as WhiteHouse.gov, the Department of State, and Department of Labor. The removed content included the White House’s equity report, information on HIV prevention and treatment, and Pride Month acknowledgments. The Department of Labor’s LGBTQ+ workers’ rights page and the State Department’s LGBTQ+ rights page were also taken down.

“President Trump claims to be a strong proponent of freedom of speech, yet he is clearly committed to censorship of any information containing or related to LGBTQ Americans and issues that we face,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement. “Sadly for him, our community is more visible than ever; and this pathetic attempt to diminish and remove us will again prove unsuccessful."