Prior to the election in November 2024, I had several people tell me that Trump was not running on an anti-LGBT platform. The real concerns were the economy and the border and the rest was just noise and didn’t mean anything real. I told them…well, I won’t repeat what I told them here, but let’s just say that I told them they were wrong and being deliberately blind to reality.

I wish I had been wrong. But, I wasn’t.

Within hours of the inauguration there was an executive order with the following title, “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT”. The very title of this order is a lie. It’s real title should be “Prohibiting any accommodation for transgender people in the Federal Government”. That’s what this policy does.

I asked my wife to proofread this and her insightful comment about the title of this executive order was the nobody should believe that a self-proclaimed “pussy grabber” could ever claim to be protecting women. I apologize for the language but it’s important to remember that it is Donald Trump’s own words.

There is so much to say on this one order alone. We’re going to dissect it line by line if we have to.

Trump says: “Section 1.  Purpose.  Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers.  This is wrong”.

What is wrong is that the entire premise is made up whole cloth. Nobody “permits men to identify as women”. The group he denigrates are women who were born with the wrong physiology. I have no idea what the phrase “socially coercive means” even means. But he seems upset that they use legal means to accomplish their nefarious goals. What is not legal is this executive order. It violates the rights of people who have done nothing wrong.

The next sentence says “ Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.” Tell me how one person trying to make her life right impacts the dignity, safety and well-being” of any woman. Go on. I’ll wait. Nothing? I thought so.

Then he says in the very next sentence: “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.” This is typical Trump. Make a claim with no evidence and assert it as truth. There’s no evidence of this because it isn’t true.

The next sentence is, “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.” Finally, something I can agree with! It’s a shame this executive order is the complete antithesis of that statement. Nothing in this order is based on truth. This order erodes trust in government.

We finally finished the first paragraph, now on to the second: “This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.”

There is no “purposeful attack”. There is indeed no attack at all. This is simply a person trying to make their life right. It isn’t unhealthy. In fact, they are trying to make their lives more healthy by no longer being forced to live a lie. The last part of the last sentence is writing checks that Trump’s understanding of actual biology can’t cash but we’ll get to that.

The next sentence, “Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.”  This is rich. He tries to say that this order Is needed so that sex-based policies can be reserved for “real women”. Of course, he nuked those in another executive order so what is he actually protecting here?

Finally, another paragraph! “Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”

Again, there is no defense of women’s rights here. And in what way is he protecting freedom of conscience? This is the first mention of that and so far as I can tell he’s violating the freedom of conscience of transgender people. Is this another veiled way of defining freedom to discriminate as freedom of conscience?

Now we make it to section 2, “Policy and Definitions.  It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.  These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. “

Donald, I’m sorry but it is very controvertible. Merely saying something doesn’t actually make it so.

Now we get some definitions:

(a)  “Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.  “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”

(b)  “Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.

(c)  “Men” or “man” and “boys” or “boy” shall mean adult and juvenile human males, respectively.

(d)  “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

(e)  “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

He got one thing right. Sex is not a synonym for gender identity. Sex is physiological. Gender is psychological. Much of the rest of this is wrong. And it requires digging into to exactly why it’s wrong so we’ll return to it later.

The definitions continue with this:

(f)  “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.  Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.  Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.

What Trump is his people willfully ignore is that sex and gender are two different things. The want to combine them into a single thing.

Everyone’s gender identify is “self-assessed”. Why does he think that someone born with a male physiology can’t identify as a woman? We don’t know other than he says it is a “false claim”. Here is a person who knows nothing about medicine and nothing about psychology making the statement that something about the intersection of those fields is true or false. 

We continue with definitions:

(g)  “Gender identity” reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.

Why does it need to make a “meaningful basis for identification?” These people know who they are. If you don’t then that is your problem, not theirs. There is no justification for using this single metric for as a yardstick for identification and ignoring other possible choices.

We’re going to skip down to section 3c as the stuff in between basically says nothing new.

Here’s 3c: 

When administering or enforcing sex-based distinctions, 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.

According to Trump it is only physiology and not psychology that matter.

Section 3d:

The Secretaries of State and Homeland Security, and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, shall implement changes to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder’s sex, as defined under section 2 of this order; and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management shall ensure that applicable personnel records accurately report Federal employees’ sex, as defined by section 2 of this order.

Here is some serious discrimination against transgender people. Regardless of the actual physical anatomy of a person, the only thing that matters to the Trump administration is what was between your legs at birth and not what is there now.

Section 3e:

Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages.  Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity.  Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.

This is pretty consistent with the whole “we don’t believe in gender” thing.

Section 4 goes into all the ways the government will pretend that transgender people don’t exist and how they will be mistreated.

Whenever the modern Republican Party talks about protecting rights they mean protecting the ability to discriminate against people they don’t like. In that vein, section 5 talks about protecting the “freedom to express the binary nature of sex”.

The rest of the order goes on to talk about how to implement it.

Now that you’ve heard all this nonsense. Let’s talk a look at some of its premises. This is where the Trump Administration would fail a 9th grade biology class.

Back in sections 2d and 2e they define “male” and “female”. They define these based on the condition at conception of the person who produces small or large reproductive cells. I’m not sure why they are afraid of saying sperm or egg, but that’s what they mean. Sperm are tiny. Eggs are large. When I first read this I wondered why they didn’t define it based on genetics. I think it’s because they wanted to avoid muddying their whole “binary nature of sex” claim with having to account for intersex people.

But, there are problems with their definitions. One issue is that at conception, nobody can produce either sperm or eggs. Sexual differentiation in humans doesn’t occur for about 7 weeks. At conception we each start out as one cell that has no inherent sex differentiation. All of us develop the same until that point, about seven weeks in, where certain triggers cause some to develop as males. If that trigger doesn’t happen, the fetus continues to develop as female even if it has the XY chromosomes associated with maleness. 

There are people that may never produce either type of gamete. What sex are they?

This basis of determining sex is fundamentally wrong. It is based on incorrect assumptions. It tries to make the world a simple binary when the world is, in fact, much more complex. The Trump Administration saying these things are true does not make them true. It just makes them look like idiots and hurts people who have done nothing wrong other than to exist in the same world with them.

So, the sex part of their definition is wrong. For the gender part of their story they basically just wave their hands and say gender doesn’t exist. There is only sex and that is all that matters.

Gender is a complex subject, but gender is, whether they like it or not, a person’s identity. It forms at a very young age and it is independent of physical sex. For most people it aligns. But for some people it doesn’t. 

You have a perfectly normal body and you have a perfectly normal mind. Which of those is correct? The Trump Administration would say the mind is irrelevant. All that matters is an improperly defined notion of biological sex that is both wrong and incomplete at the same time. However, if they spoke to real, live transgender people they would find out that from the perspective of the person living in the body, the mind is what defines the person. 

I’d like each of us to put ourselves in the mindset of a transgender person for just a moment. Imagine that you woke up one morning in the body of the opposite sex that you have now. How would you feel? I know there is some group of men out there that would make a joke about what they would do. But, I’m pretty sure if it ever happened they would be curled up in a fetal position on the bed and unable to face the world because the world would now see them as something they aren’t. This is what a transgender person faces every day. And the Trump Administration has made their lives that much harder. And they did so by pretending they were protecting women.

The fact that they don’t think men need protecting from transgender men tells volumes. This is purely about the “ick” factor that some feel when discussing transgender issues. The sad fact is that the “ick” they feel is the same one that transgender people feel about their own bodies. The same feeling of “wrong” that you feel is the same feeling of “wrong that they have. But Trump wants to persecute them instead of helping them.

Why should we let some men who are insecure in their own masculinity persecute transgender people just because they don’t understand and don’t want to make the effort to understand? 

They make claims about the world and don’t care that they aren’t true. Unfortunately, a society that bases itself on that kind of ideology fails because nature doesn’t care whether we believe in it. It just is. And it will continue to be long after Trump and his squeamish cronies who cross their legs in fear every time they hear the word transgender. Transgender people have existed ever since there will people and they will continue to exist despite Trump’s attempt to make them officially invisible.

The only question is how many transgender people will die because of policies like this that make their lives more difficult and also encourage hate crimes?  How many cisgender women will be accosted in a restroom because someone simply thinks they might be transgender?

Unfortunately, Trump’s rash of orders targeting transgender people continues so that is the likely topic of episode #4.

Until then, take care and stay safe.