https://www.vecteezy.com/free-photos/trans-pride-flag
Edited by Amelia Cantwell & Rishi Chandra
As philosopher Hannah Arendt once said, “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other,” and no American president has exemplified that dynamic better than Donald J. Trump. In Executive Order 14168, President Trump claims that he is “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” but what exactly does he mean by this? Well, he cites “ideologues across the country who deny the biological reality of sex” and goes on to claim that “‘gender ideology’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.” These claims misrepresent the arguments of trans rights advocates and challenge the very nature of sex and gender.
To adequately address EO 14168, it is important that we review the research surrounding sex and gender. While many people tend to use these two words interchangeably, when defining them rigorously, they are distinct. Sex refers to the attributes that determine whether a person is biologically male, female, or, in about 0.018 to 1.7% of people, intersex. On the other hand, gender is a social construct tied to societal norms, roles, and behaviors such as the clothes we wear, the pronouns we use, and how we wear our hair. Furthermore, gender identity can differ from biological sex and outward expression of gender.
That said, Donald Trump—or rather, the staffers who wrote Executive Order 14168 on his behalf—avoided the pitfall of using the words “sex” and “gender” interchangeably. Instead, they dedicate separate sections to each, singling out “gender ideology” as “an ever-shifting concept” that allows for “men to identify as and thus become women and vice versa." These arguments and intentionally ominous phrases are rhetorically useful to Trump, but they continue to conflate the two terms. Ultimately, this order’s separation of sex and gender is a structural choice intended to discredit the idea of gender itself rather than identify it as a meaningfully distinct category.
Trump’s claim that gender “replaces the biological category of sex” is not congruent with the scientific consensus on sex and gender—there is no strong evidence that sex is inherently tied to social roles, behavior, or identity, and these phenomena are better explained by the theory of gender. Furthermore, in describing gender transitions, Trump frames identifying as a woman and “becoming” a woman as equally false; a person simply is or is not a woman in his view. In both of these segments, along with the order overall, Trump is expressing a gender essentialist view that is, by design, unable to accommodate gender as a distinct category.
If one assumes, as this order does, that gender is not a legitimate social category and that sex is an immutable binary, then the idea of a transition would be illogical. Thus, for those who make this assumption and are ideologically opposed to transgender people as a group, gender identity would be quite an inconvenient truth to handle. As we can see in this executive order, the Trump administration’s solution to this inconvenient truth is to destroy it.
This isn’t lying by omission or exaggeration but an explicit assertion that there is no such thing as distinct gender identities. It’s an assertion of one reality that cannot possibly coexist with the other. The administration could argue that the data on sex and gender is inconsistent, but it does not do this. It makes its stance on gender quite clear in this order and in other actions, such as cuts in research funding related to LGBTQ health.
Furthermore, this assertion of “truth” as advertised in the order’s title stretches beyond biology. In EO 14168, Donald Trump claims the Biden administration “misapplied” the Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) Supreme Court ruling, labeling it “legally untenable” and a harm to women. The Bostock ruling is significant, as it protects gay and transgender Americans from discrimination in employment under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Furthermore, it was only made possible by conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts, underscoring its cross-ideological bona fides. Still, Donald Trump does not explain why Biden’s interpretation was “untenable,” which is concerning, as it makes little intuitive sense to say so when the majority ruling in Bostock is explicit in its application to transgender rights.
President Trump has normalized his assertion of untruths and—as he demonstrates in his denials of Bostock—is especially comfortable with denying legal precedents. However, an outright denial of scientific findings tied to an entire demographic should stand out as a particularly disturbing act. Trump presupposes his own conclusion on the matter in defiance of scientific rigor and with disregard for the serious consequences that may have for his constituents.
Still, it is crucial to address the anti-trans arguments made by figures like Trump because they resonate with millions of Americans. About half of the American public believes that teaching elementary schoolers about trans identities should be illegal, and another half believes that gender transitions are a moral wrong. Though Trump’s ruling may be at odds with the scientific establishment and the truth of sex and gender, it is not as conflicted with the will of the American people.
Thus, Americans who vote against the interests of their transgender neighbors need not be punished: they need to be persuaded. The reality presented by Executive Order 14168 may make that difficult or even infuriating for trans rights advocates, and understandably so—this is an existential issue. That said, in order to make positive change on this front, we need to leverage political tools beyond the science to bring the public to our side. As Abraham Lincoln bluntly put it, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”