A federal judge today, February 11, gave the Trump administration until 11:59 pm tonight to restore public documents and datasets that were abruptly removed or altered from federal health websites to comply with an executive order on gender ideology.

Information was taken down from websites for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration following a January 29 memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The memo ordered all agencies to remove any public-facing media that "inculcate or promote gender ideology" that would violate an executive order President Trump signed on January 20. OPM gave agencies until just January 31 to comply.

The webpages that were subsequently removed include key guidance and data on health risks in youth, school health policies, social vulnerability, environmental justice, HIV testing and prevention, assisted reproductive technologies, contraceptives, and recommendations for improving clinical studies, among other essential information.

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• Uncertainty looms over Trump's order that could ban transgender people from military service.
• "This is the end of a career that I love," a Navy officer told BI.
• The Pentagon has 60 days to implement policies related to Trump's order.

A reckoning that transgender troops long feared arrived last week in an executive order from their new commander in chief.

For them, President Donald Trump's executive order accusing them of "expressing a false 'gender identity'" marks what's likely to be a bitter closing chapter to their military careers if the Defense Department reimposes a ban.

"This is the end of a career that I love, the end of a life of service that I have chosen and committed to," said Lt. Cmdr. Geirid Morgan, a program officer with the Office of Naval Research who is transgender. "I have 14 years of active-duty service, including enlisted duty and officer time. I have a pretty wide scope of operational and just general military-relevant experience, and it will be very, very hard on me and very sad to let go of that."

The Pentagon has 60 days to implement policies related to Trump's order that could have dire implications for nearly 15,000 transgender troops.

"One of the scariest things about this is that we're not sure exactly how it's going to get implemented," a staff member with Modern Military Association of America, the largest nonprofit organization in the US supporting LGBTQ+ military, told Business Insider. "That's what's scary about EOs, particularly these EOs, is that you put the burden on the agencies to figure out what compliance looks like."

The Defense Department declined to answer questions about how their forthcoming policy would impact active-duty transgender personnel.

It's still unclear what policy enforcement could look like. The executive order directs the Pentagon to update medical standards for service members, prohibit the use of pronouns other than an individual's birth sex, and ban individuals from using facilities for sleeping, changing, and bathing that do not correspond to their sex assigned at birth.

Trump also revoked the Biden-era policy allowing all qualified Americans to serve in the military, which reversed the previous ban on transgender members from service implemented during Trump's first term.

The order does not explicitly call for the immediate discharge of active-duty transgender troops, but it "sets the stage for potential future removals based on medical standards we're not sure of yet," the official said, who asked to remain anonymous due to LGBTQ-targeted harassment and doxxing campaigns.

The Trump administration has already started removing transgender troops and rejecting transgender military applicants, according to an emergency legal filing obtained by Reuters.

"There are thousands of us currently serving," Morgan told Business Insider. "Those are trained and experienced personnel who will be removed from their jobs, and that can take years to a decade or more to replace, depending on the experience level and the specialty of the person."

Alaina Kupec, a former US naval intelligence officer, told Business Insider that the "medical conditions or physical defects" mentioned in the executive order of being transgender is "such a tiny part of who we are. Kupec, who transitioned in 2012, said the recovery time and post-operation treatments related to a physical transition is "such an afterthought."

Kupec said the Trump order seeks to "spread falsehoods and to dehumanize the community because it's not based in reality, it's not based in medical evidence, it's not based in the lived experience of people who are serving our country."

Morgan said the order sends a message to US troops that "no matter who you are, no matter what demographic group you belong to, your service may not be valued as much as somebody else's service simply because of who you are."

"We are no different than any other service member," she said. "We meet the same physical standards, we meet the same medical readiness standards. If you are actively serving, if you are deployed and doing your job, that means you have met those standards."

As Morgan weighs her options for the future, she said she has met with her chain of command to discuss possible courses of action pending the Defense Department's policies.

Critics say the order threatens military readiness

Transgender personnel make up a fraction of the over 1 million active-duty troops. But 73% of trans service members are senior personnel, some of whom have up to two decades of military experience.

Morgan falls into that demographic as a Ph.D. level research physiologist for the Navy — one of 15 on active duty, she said. Exiting service would leave her department with a leadership gap, she said.

"I'm at a point in my career as a field grade officer where the expectation is that I take on greater responsibility and leadership roles, so that's going to be a gap at that command," she said. "They're not going to have the field grade officer in a leadership role that they were expecting."

Kupec said the potential removal of transgender troops would hurt national security.

"They're serving in the Red Sea, they're serving the Asia Pacific region, and if we're going to have to force them out of their commands, that's going to leave a gap in readiness," Kupec said. "Many of them are leaders, it's going to leave a gap in command structures."

The Modern Military official said the order could spark fears for other marginalized groups in the military.

"I'm speculating, but let's say you're a cis-gendered lesbian or gay person in the military, and you see your trans friend get kicked out," the official said. "You got to be thinking, 'Are we going back in the closet? Is 'Don't ask, don't tell' coming back? Am I next?' There are a lot more scary places this could go, and it would be naive to assume it stops here."

On day one of his presidency, one of Donald Trump’s 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 one’s sex from its website.

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.” 

Information about gender identity and access to guides on changing one’s sex have also been scrubbed from the administration’s main LGBTQIA+ site. Here’s what looks like today, compared to how it looked last week.

The Gender Identity link that’s now missing from that site and inaccessible to the public—showing a 404 error and not a CMS login message, unlike the “change sex identification” site—used 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 people—and anyone who actually cares about reproductive rights or freedom of speech—already face going into Trump’s presidency. And it’s not the first time Trump’s 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.