"Restoring Truth and Sanity": Anti-Gender Framing as the Formalization of an Authoritarian Political Project in the...

This article examines how sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression (SOGIE) are discursively constructed in the executive orders issued during the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. Drawing on critical frame analysis and situating the findings within the intersecting literatures on anti-gender politics and authoritarian statecraft, we identify four dominant frames: 1) biological truth, ideology, and pseudo-science; 2) protection and safety; 3) equality, fairness, and meritocracy; and 4) anti-Americanism, cultural tradition, and division. We argue that these frames do not constitute discrete policy positions but form a coherent discursive architecture that delegitimises SOGIE minority rights epistemically, morally, legally, and nationally. A key finding is that the executive orders actively construct a vision of the state grounded in binary sex and heteronormativity as foundational organizing principles-a form of epistemic authoritarianism that exceeds the regulation of gender and sexuality as such. The findings contribute to comparative debates on the institutionalization of anti-gender politics through formal instruments of executive governance.