Mr. Pussy-grabber Echoes Sentiments Supported by Liberals and Feminists

You can support the policy without supporting the politician

“The word gender has certain problems for the feminist critic,” wrote Janice Raymond in 1979, in her prescient book The Transsexual Empire. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had used gender as a synonym for sex, so as not to bombard the all-male panel of Supreme Court judges with it when she argued about sex-based discrimination before them. But feminists had used gender to encapsulate a set societally-based beliefs about who men and women were supposed to be, and how they were supposed to behave, based on sex. Sex was fixed, biological. Gender was cultural—and often oppressive. Those beliefs justified denying women the vote, the right to control their own bodies, to have bank accounts in their own names, to take certain jobs. Gender was the mechanism of sex-based oppression.

When transsexuals talked about “gender” issues, on the other hand, they often wanted to reclaim the very roles and dictated behaviors women were rejecting, in order to invoke their “womanhood” or “manhood.” They needed those stereotypes and culturally-located beliefs to define the boundaries of the category they opted into.

Transsexuals wanted to change their bodies and their behaviors, and thus rendered the two words intertwined, both devoid of their biological and feminist meanings. Making gender synonymous with sex, and making both terms amorphous, behooved them.

All this is to say: Asserting the biological reality of sex, and delineating it from gender, was a priority for many feminists, once upon a time. And their priorities conflicted with those of trans people. So were it not for a few incendiary terms, President Donald Trump’s brand spanking new Executive Order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” could be seen as a feminist document.

It states:

Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. 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. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.

You’ll find quite a bit of denial about these “attacks” on women among activist journalists, and perhaps skepticism about them from readers of mainstream press. That’s because only right-wing media or feminist publications like Reduxx report on the males in women’s sports and women’s prisons, and the assaults, rapes, and injuries from them. But in fact, now that Americans are more educated about what unfolds from self-defining sex, the vast majority of them are no longer in favor of policies that allow males to play in female sports or to be housed in women’s prisons. This is actually a mainstream position.

The New York Times recently released a poll revealing that 79% of 2,128 people they consulted said biological males who identify as women shouldn’t be permitted to play in women’s sports. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats thought that, too. The crazy thing is that NYT itself did not mention trans issues when they wrote up their own poll. So how would all those people know that their answers were mainstream?

But back to the EO. It continues:

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. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality, and the following definitions shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy:

(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.

(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.

(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.

The EO goes on to acknowledge the fundamental biological differences between men and women, and to ensure the right to single-sex spaces, among other directives. In other words, it states the obvious and the objectively true—things that shouldn’t have to be stated. But because our government has written subjective gender identity into law and policy, overriding objective biological sex, these truths must be stated. Trump’s EO undoes much of Biden’s 2021 “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,” which prohibited discrimination based on gender identity, which paved the way for these wildly unpopular policies and ideas, and made speaking truth and reality verboten.

Those pushing the theory of gender identity as unequivocal fact have stigmatized the truth. We’ve got to destigmatize it.

Will this document do that? Let’s check in with how the EO is being experienced by some lefty types:

Alas, it’s seen as “pure evil” to assert the biological reality of sex and the right to sex-segregated spaces based on it. That’s in part because the EO uses phrases like “gender ideology extremism” and “ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex,” which aren’t particularly welcoming to those on the fence about this issue, or who might agree in principal but suspect this EO comes from hateful bigots using this as a wedge issue, rather than those who are actually concerned about it. (Personally, I disagree with this sentiment. I think that most of the people working on this issue are not motivated by hate.)

But the assertion of evil is partly because it comes from the desk of President Donald Trump, certifiable Bad Dude (to some liberals—and some Republicans!). And that’s a hard pill to swallow for those who agree with the majority of what Trump has expressed here, but vehemently dislike the fella himself. To concur with the convicted felon pussy-grabber who supported the end of Roe and disappeared the site Reproductiverights.gov within moments of taking office—to believe that he actually cares about women—is a hard no for some liberals who’ve been making these same arguments for years.

So my advice to those people is this: If it feels weird to have your own ideas falling from Trump’s mouth, don’t shut up. Speak up. Speak louder. Speak more often. If you haven’t spoken up yet, do so now. Show America that these ideas are standard liberal feminist fare. We know that sex is real, but we also accept an older meaning of gender: societal ideas and stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. We can embrace a sex-based reality and still leave room for masculine girls and feminine boys.

In Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, she quotes psychiatrist Robert Stoller, often credited with delineating between sex and gender:

It is for some of these psychological phenomena that the term gender will be used: one can speak of the male sex or the female sex, but one can also talk about masculinity and femininity and not necessarily be implying anything about anatomy or physio­logy. Thus while sex and gender seem to common sense to be prac­tically synonymous, and in everyday life to be inextricably bound together…the two realms (sex and gender) are not at all inevitably bound in anything like a one-to-one relationship, but each may go in its quite independent way.

It would be much harder to have an executive order that reestablishes this version of gender. So let’s start by seeing the reestablishment of the reality of sex as a positive step, and teach other people that it is not harmful or hateful: it is just plain real.

It remains to be seen what and how effective the legal challenges to this EO will be. It doesn’t override state laws or school policies. It doesn’t change hearts and minds.

What will?