United States President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender and gender diverse (trans) women athletes from competing in women’s sports, at the beginning of his presidential term on Feb. 5, showed the president accelerating a long-standing moral panic about queer and trans people.

Bearing the offensive title “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” the executive order misinterprets a U.S. law called Title IX to suggest falsely that trans-inclusive policies in collegiate and elite-level sports are somehow harmful to cisgender women. The force of this claim is backed by a threat: ban trans women, or face having your funding rescinded. The order came following a flurry of political moves entrenching transphobia in U.S. law and society.