State Senate President Warren Petersen speaking with the media outside the Arizona House of Representatives at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona. January 13, 2025.
Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen was at the White House on Wednesday when President Donald Trump signed his latest executive order.
The executive order signed by President Trump is supposed to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls' and women's sports.
The order, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” gives federal agencies, including the Justice and Education departments, wide latitude to ensure entities that receive federal funding abide by Title IX in alignment with the Trump administration’s view, which interprets “sex” as the gender someone was assigned at birth.
Hours before the signing ceremony, Senate President Petersen posted a video on social media praising Trump's actions.
"The war against women and girls is taking a dramatic turn for the better and today sanity is being reinstated," he said in the video.
In 2022, Arizona passed a law banning transgender athletes from women's sports. That law was put on hold by the courts but is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Petersen is a vocal supporter of the law and has intervened in the case on behalf of the state legislature.
The timing of the order coincided with National Girls and Women in Sports Day, and is the latest in a string of executive actions from Trump aimed at transgender people.
Trump found during the campaign that his pledge to “keep men out of women’s sports” resonated beyond the usual party lines. More than half the voters surveyed by AP VoteCast said support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far.
He leaned into the rhetoric before the election, pledging to get rid of the “transgender insanity,” though his campaign offered little in the way of details.
The order offers some clarity. For example, it authorizes the Education Department to penalize schools that allow transgender athletes to compete, citing noncompliance with Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination in schools. Any school found in violation could potentially be ineligible for federal funding.
The order also calls for private sporting bodies to meet at the White House so the president can hear in person “the stories of female athletes who have suffered lifelong injuries, who have been silenced and forced to shower with men and compete with men on athletic fields across the country.”
The move is the latest by the Trump administration to limit the rights of the transgender population.
Previous ones have sought to have the federal government reject the idea that people can transition to a gender other than the one assigned at birth. That has implications for areas including passports and prisons. He’s also opened the door to barring transgender service members from the military; called to end federal health insurance and other funding for gender-affirming care for transgender people under age 19 and restricts the way lessons on gender can be taught in schools.
Already, transgender people have sued over several of the policies and are likely to challenge more of them in court.
Civil rights lawyers who are handling the cases have asserted that in some instances, Trump’s orders violate laws adopted by Congress and protections in the Constitution – and that they overstep the authority of the president.
There could be similar questions for this order, for instance: Can the president demand that the NCAA change its policies?
NCAA President Charlie Baker told Republican senators in December that the organization would follow federal law. The NCAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
The order came a day after three former teammates of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas filed a lawsuit accusing the NCAA, Ivy League, Harvard, and their own school, Penn, of conspiring to allow Thomas to compete at conference and national championships.
The lawsuit, which makes similar allegations of that filed last year by Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines and others, alleges the defendants violated Title IX by allowing Thomas to swim “and acted in bad faith.” Gaines joined Trump for the signing ceremony.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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