It might help to know that this EO, though signed by Trump, was written by feminists. May Mailman of Independent Women’s Forum wrote the EO based on a legislation model co-written, in 2021, with WoLF (Women’s Liberation Front), to define the terms male and female, men and women in law. These feminists understood that legally defining these terms was the first step to counteracting the unhinging from biology that trans ideology was social engineering into the culture.
Those of us who have followed this story, from the beginning, know that sex realists had to work with the Right because it was the only political entity that would listen to our cause and would enact policy. The Democrats, having been completely captured by trans/LGBT activists, were carried away with promoting wholesale all that the trans affirming activists demanded, because women were not speaking up, were being silenced or threatened with violence for speaking up.
Most would likely have lost their jobs and all their leftie friends if they had done so and yet many worked in secret with pseudonyms, and went to meetings with Democratic politicians about their concerns, and testified at public hearings only to be told over and over again that they were Right wing haters.
To now disparage or refuse to accept this EO because it was signed by a President so many find distasteful, is to spit on all of what these pioneering sex-realists worked so hard to achieve.
Good to know. I suspected feminists had drafted it and it's great to have that confirmed.
Proud to have donated to WoLF in the past and will make a gratitude donation this month.
This clarity will help protect young people, including gay and lesbian teens, from the tidal wave of pressure to medicalize and claim a different identity based on their "gender non-conformity." We need to know kids are accepted as they are and not made to feel they were somehow "born in the wrong body."
Of all the snake oil lies told in history, that one rates as a major whopper.
I agree. But what now, if we all believe that this is the win we hoped for? Is it enough to counteract all the negatives of a new Trump administration? As long as each of us speaks with her or his own honest voice about what we care about in terms of the real life effects of all Trump's EOs and other policies. As glad as I am for this EO, I keep thinking of that line from the song: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. In this case, I think Trump and company are already far worse than we bargained for. He just let violent Jan. 6 criminals out of jail, for G's sake. Well, I guess it's all a trade-off... hope it's worth it.
Yes this is the win we hoped for. The wording was more than we hoped for because it turned out we wrote it. But this is just the beginning of a fight even more contentious because, now, we sex-realists are not just a fringe group in the blue bubble that could be ignored. Now we are perceived to be in the red camp being patronized by a projected dictator and legally described felon.
We street activists will now face an even bigger crowd of what have been largely white male misogynists who now have double and triple the backing of the blue bubble because of the company we are perceived to be keeping. Luckily we are battle scared enough to have grown very thick skins and we have built a sizable twitter following at Women Are Real with which to shame them with our video recordings.
All of you trying to figure out how to resist Trump and his projected authoritarian rule sound like idealists. You cannot support us because you can't afford to support the idea of him rather than the reality of what we have achieved. We had nothing to do with Trump's other policies, but this EO is now our vehicle for fighting trans ideology.
Wow, your comment comes across as way out in left field if it's directed at my comment. You have no idea what motivates me and are out of line calling anything I said idealistic or whatever you implied, as if that's even a valid criticism. You're having tunnel vision, imo, and it shows, as if nothing else matters but fighting gender ideology. You and your "street activists" aren't the only ones who have stood up for women and girls (not to mention children in general, including boys and vulnerable adults, male and female) against gender ideology. As much as I agree with and support the EO, as I already said in one comment, I refuse to live in the bubble you seem to be living in. If you think Twitter/X isn't a bubble, you're mistaken, just as Substack can be a kind of bubble. I've supported you and others here in the past, but no more. Good luck to women and girls, and all children and vulnerable adults, if you think this EO and anything springing from it are all that stand between them and perdition.
I think what you are saying is that the polarization is very strong - D are for trans, R are for no-trans. That will make it hard to get a long-term solution, and has the possibility of snap-back in the next admin.
That's a non-response and it makes no sense. But thanks for your thoughtfulness. Context matters in everything. We can pretend it doesn't at our peril.
Thank you for this, Lisa. Your piece speaks to the EXACT feelings I’ve been experiencing since this EO came out. I also recently watched the school board meeting you and others spoke at. Thank you for speaking up and representing moms like me. I can’t thank you enough.
I also watched the school board meeting. I found the tone and delivery of all participants to be very helpful as I think about framing my words and thoughts and delivering them better, while respecting the thoughts and words of those with whom I may disagree. I do believe sound dialogue and exchange between opposing ideas is key, and we must all work on the emotional and intellectual defenses to persuade and carry the debate.
Thanks for trying to thread this needle. Too many who agree with such a document are still resisting this because it comes from Trump.
I would add one more point. Rather than react to ideas because of *who* is speaking (the basis of standpoint epistemology—as in, only women can speak about women’s issues), we can encourage people to focus on the *content* of the ideas instead.
*What* is being said ought to matter more than *who* happens to be saying it (or what their motives are).
Facts are facts, untruths are untruths, good evidence is good evidence, poor evidence is poor evidence, well considered policy & poorly-considered policy the same - regardless of who is putting them forward.
I vehemently oppose the Trump/Musk agenda, and also suspect some amount of bad faith actors behind the EO, but on its own it stands as a testament to facts, reason, and fairness for all Americans.
We would do well to emulate it here in 🇨🇦 (and further abroad), ideally without the other threats that I perceive from the oligarch-focused and -driven Trump II administration.
And while I hope I’m wrong about those perceived threats, and our own parallel threats to 🇨🇦pluralistic secular democratic values, hope alone won’t mitigate against the worst of those potential futures. So I’m fighting, vocally, stubbornly, and passionately, for what I believe in, and what I believe most of my fellow 🇨🇦, 🇺🇸 & 🌍 citizens and residents also believe in.
The point of this piece is to tell the people who hate Trump, but like this policy, that his signature on it shouldn't dissuade them from supporting it. If you're not one of those people, and you're not interested in helping others feel comfortable getting on board, then I'm sure there are other pieces that would please you more.
The absolute genius move by the radical trans ideologues and their post Enlightenment allies was to make the issue a matter of "social justice". Sadly, the Right Wingers fell for the bait, and what were once vigorous advocates of gay equality were corrupted by the six figure money from a couple of transexual/AGP fetishists into supporting the worst possible form of "conversion therapy". This development has enabled many poorly informed people to apply the "Fox News Fallacy", the rule of inference that if Fox says "X", "Not X" or "~X" must be the case.
Lisa, this is such a well written explanation of the conundrum so many of us find ourselves in. That the reality check we've all been waiting for came from the politician that comes with so much other baggage. Thank you for writing this and for your good advice.
Thank you, Lisa. As usual, I agree with everything you said. I'm from Europe and have always considered myself a liberal, but since the pandemic I have found myself fundamentally disagreeing with a number of officially "left-wing" (but really non-evidence based and illiberal) policies.
As I former tomboy and a long-time supporter of gender non-conformity and gay rights, I have now gone down the gender rabbit hole, and am just marveling at the insanity of it. I do remember learning about Judith Butler in the early 1990, and already back then thinking the idea that sex is a social construct was crazy, but I never thought it would actually infiltrate science and the minds of people who purport to believe in it.
Since Covid, I've found myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Trump on a number of issues (I do see a lot of parallels between Dems' approaches to Covid and gender), and as much as I applaud the gist of this EO, my primary concern is whether having him, who I think is obviously a disingenuous and sociopathic individual unfit for public office, as the standard bearer of this position is going to help or hurt our cause. I fear it might go the way of the school closures and mask mandates for children, where the left doubles down and digs in their heels just so they aren't on the same side as Trump - even while European countries took a different path. Remember how the AAP reversed their position on school closure in the summer of 2020, shortly after Trump tweeted that schools must reopen? I hope this doesn't go a similar way.
Someone also recently mentioned that the some of those supporting men's placement in women's prisons do not realize that the vast majority of those men still have penises.
Yep. According to their own National Survey, 90% of trans-identified males remain fully intact, and half of them don't even take hormones; they are just fetishistic cross-dressers: (Relevant data begins on p. 100)
In the sworn affidavit in my divorce proceedings from Dr. Christine Wheeler, PhD psychologist and diagnosing practitioner of "sex reassignment" letter writing, she used terms "transgender" and "transsexual" interchangeably, in 1997. She also claimed that it was my rejection of him as a newly "female" marriage partner for why he decided to have the surgeries in 1996, after a very relaxed and foreshortened period of crossdressing for the "Blanchard Protocol." (it's supposed to be a steady 2 years) She was not some fly-by-night practitioner, but rather had a large practice in Manhattan with many underlings doing the in person therapyy and an adjunct position at Columbia University. Because of the "Eli Ehrlich" tone of the trans movement, and their defamation of trans widows, I just am not obsessing about Trump's past adventures.
If you're not taking the victories you can get to effect meaningful change for fear of appearances, then you care more about appearances than meaningful change.
great piece. I think the thing liberals still will want is to allow for some to live as the "other" gender. And what becomes of the thousands of kids who have been medically ushered through the "other" puberty? and adults who've had surgery? There's cruelty it seems in outing them on their IDs. Is there a way to acknowledge sex, protect women, and allow for the reality that some people are trans not only in identity/belief but because medicine altered them?
I do also have concerns not only about this but also about those who do have legitimate intersex conditions. While rare, there absolutely still are people, including here in the US, who are thought to be one sex based on external appearance only to discover during puberty (usually) that they actually have the internal organs of the other sex and often have a chromosomal pattern other than the standard xx or xy. I'm not happy with how far we've changed our whole society based on such rare conditions, but the fact is such people do exist and will continue to be born and it seems unnecessarily cruel to simply act as though they don't exist in order to make trans "go away".
How about that people with DSDs exist, they are the opposite sex to that they believed themselves to be, they will be supported emotionally to deal with the difficulties of discovering tht reality. In the meantime, women in general will not be expeced to just take the hit for a medical condition that they have, and the people with a DSD will need to learn that certain spaces and sports are not for them, but others will be open to them.
Life can be hard, but it's usually best if you hang on to reality.
The biological reality is that even people with so-called intersex conditions still can be classified as either male or female, based on the gonads their body's developmental plan (even if disrupted) was meant to produce. Sometimes that turns out to be the opposite of what they thought themselves to be based on their external appearance. The human species does not produce true hermaphrodites, only rare cases of disorders of sexual development, for which "intersex" is really a misnomer.
One thing that came from Biden's EO, aside from a tremendous amount of harm, is that we got to see the result of gender ideology in action. Seeing the outcome of that ideology made a whole lot more of us start pushing back against it.
After the election it became clear that a whole bunch of Americans weren't paying attention last time Trump was in office. Now they'll get to see the real outcome of all his policies. The guardrails that held him in check will be gone. My hope is that when they see these outcomes, they'll start pushing back, too. This is a hope, not a certainty. But when it hits your family, shit becomes real.
The other thing that gives me hope is that even though it looks like we're at a point of extreme polarity, it also seems like the polarity is shattering. I totally agree with this executive order. I also drink raw milk, and think junk food is toxic. Doesn't mean I want mass deportations or tariffs or tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy or to abandon Ukraine. If enough of us abandon the tribalism and schismogenesis of Left vs Right, maybe we can build a world that works for all of us.
Nice clickbait title haha! Just like with the lawsuits, I am hoping that this EO forces a push for, and opens a pathway, for actual science and evidence-based practices (ie not "gender affirming care") in mental health and medicine. It dismays me that smart people have a hard time putting aside their biases against Trump, conservatives, etc., to focus on science and facts. A couple of years ago I shared some articles showing the harm of "gender affirming care" with my classmates in a counseling graduate program, and they immediately shut down all of it saying, "I'm a liberal so I don't support any of this stuff." We really need to get past these biases, and political baiting ("pussy-grabber," "convicted felon," etc.), otherwise we are part of the problem.
It might help to know that this EO, though signed by Trump, was written by feminists. May Mailman of Independent Women’s Forum wrote the EO based on a legislation model co-written, in 2021, with WoLF (Women’s Liberation Front), to define the terms male and female, men and women in law. These feminists understood that legally defining these terms was the first step to counteracting the unhinging from biology that trans ideology was social engineering into the culture.
Those of us who have followed this story, from the beginning, know that sex realists had to work with the Right because it was the only political entity that would listen to our cause and would enact policy. The Democrats, having been completely captured by trans/LGBT activists, were carried away with promoting wholesale all that the trans affirming activists demanded, because women were not speaking up, were being silenced or threatened with violence for speaking up.
Most would likely have lost their jobs and all their leftie friends if they had done so and yet many worked in secret with pseudonyms, and went to meetings with Democratic politicians about their concerns, and testified at public hearings only to be told over and over again that they were Right wing haters.
To now disparage or refuse to accept this EO because it was signed by a President so many find distasteful, is to spit on all of what these pioneering sex-realists worked so hard to achieve.
Good to know. I suspected feminists had drafted it and it's great to have that confirmed.
Proud to have donated to WoLF in the past and will make a gratitude donation this month.
This clarity will help protect young people, including gay and lesbian teens, from the tidal wave of pressure to medicalize and claim a different identity based on their "gender non-conformity." We need to know kids are accepted as they are and not made to feel they were somehow "born in the wrong body."
Of all the snake oil lies told in history, that one rates as a major whopper.
I agree. But what now, if we all believe that this is the win we hoped for? Is it enough to counteract all the negatives of a new Trump administration? As long as each of us speaks with her or his own honest voice about what we care about in terms of the real life effects of all Trump's EOs and other policies. As glad as I am for this EO, I keep thinking of that line from the song: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. In this case, I think Trump and company are already far worse than we bargained for. He just let violent Jan. 6 criminals out of jail, for G's sake. Well, I guess it's all a trade-off... hope it's worth it.
Yes this is the win we hoped for. The wording was more than we hoped for because it turned out we wrote it. But this is just the beginning of a fight even more contentious because, now, we sex-realists are not just a fringe group in the blue bubble that could be ignored. Now we are perceived to be in the red camp being patronized by a projected dictator and legally described felon.
We street activists will now face an even bigger crowd of what have been largely white male misogynists who now have double and triple the backing of the blue bubble because of the company we are perceived to be keeping. Luckily we are battle scared enough to have grown very thick skins and we have built a sizable twitter following at Women Are Real with which to shame them with our video recordings.
All of you trying to figure out how to resist Trump and his projected authoritarian rule sound like idealists. You cannot support us because you can't afford to support the idea of him rather than the reality of what we have achieved. We had nothing to do with Trump's other policies, but this EO is now our vehicle for fighting trans ideology.
Wow, your comment comes across as way out in left field if it's directed at my comment. You have no idea what motivates me and are out of line calling anything I said idealistic or whatever you implied, as if that's even a valid criticism. You're having tunnel vision, imo, and it shows, as if nothing else matters but fighting gender ideology. You and your "street activists" aren't the only ones who have stood up for women and girls (not to mention children in general, including boys and vulnerable adults, male and female) against gender ideology. As much as I agree with and support the EO, as I already said in one comment, I refuse to live in the bubble you seem to be living in. If you think Twitter/X isn't a bubble, you're mistaken, just as Substack can be a kind of bubble. I've supported you and others here in the past, but no more. Good luck to women and girls, and all children and vulnerable adults, if you think this EO and anything springing from it are all that stand between them and perdition.
I think what you are saying is that the polarization is very strong - D are for trans, R are for no-trans. That will make it hard to get a long-term solution, and has the possibility of snap-back in the next admin.
Like dollarsandsense said above, this issue isn't about who said it, but what was said, in the EO.
That's a non-response and it makes no sense. But thanks for your thoughtfulness. Context matters in everything. We can pretend it doesn't at our peril.
Thank you for this, Lisa. Your piece speaks to the EXACT feelings I’ve been experiencing since this EO came out. I also recently watched the school board meeting you and others spoke at. Thank you for speaking up and representing moms like me. I can’t thank you enough.
I also watched the school board meeting. I found the tone and delivery of all participants to be very helpful as I think about framing my words and thoughts and delivering them better, while respecting the thoughts and words of those with whom I may disagree. I do believe sound dialogue and exchange between opposing ideas is key, and we must all work on the emotional and intellectual defenses to persuade and carry the debate.
Thanks for trying to thread this needle. Too many who agree with such a document are still resisting this because it comes from Trump.
I would add one more point. Rather than react to ideas because of *who* is speaking (the basis of standpoint epistemology—as in, only women can speak about women’s issues), we can encourage people to focus on the *content* of the ideas instead.
*What* is being said ought to matter more than *who* happens to be saying it (or what their motives are).
Well said $&¢!
Facts are facts, untruths are untruths, good evidence is good evidence, poor evidence is poor evidence, well considered policy & poorly-considered policy the same - regardless of who is putting them forward.
I vehemently oppose the Trump/Musk agenda, and also suspect some amount of bad faith actors behind the EO, but on its own it stands as a testament to facts, reason, and fairness for all Americans.
We would do well to emulate it here in 🇨🇦 (and further abroad), ideally without the other threats that I perceive from the oligarch-focused and -driven Trump II administration.
And while I hope I’m wrong about those perceived threats, and our own parallel threats to 🇨🇦pluralistic secular democratic values, hope alone won’t mitigate against the worst of those potential futures. So I’m fighting, vocally, stubbornly, and passionately, for what I believe in, and what I believe most of my fellow 🇨🇦, 🇺🇸 & 🌍 citizens and residents also believe in.
This is a great point.
Why does it matter that it came from Trump? He listened to the people. The opposing party refuses to.
The point of this piece is to tell the people who hate Trump, but like this policy, that his signature on it shouldn't dissuade them from supporting it. If you're not one of those people, and you're not interested in helping others feel comfortable getting on board, then I'm sure there are other pieces that would please you more.
Sorry you took it that way.
I did not read the response of Alison Bull in any sense hostile or antagonistic. Rather, I read her response as being in agreement.
That response, Lisa, was helpful for me. Thank you.
The absolute genius move by the radical trans ideologues and their post Enlightenment allies was to make the issue a matter of "social justice". Sadly, the Right Wingers fell for the bait, and what were once vigorous advocates of gay equality were corrupted by the six figure money from a couple of transexual/AGP fetishists into supporting the worst possible form of "conversion therapy". This development has enabled many poorly informed people to apply the "Fox News Fallacy", the rule of inference that if Fox says "X", "Not X" or "~X" must be the case.
Lisa, this is such a well written explanation of the conundrum so many of us find ourselves in. That the reality check we've all been waiting for came from the politician that comes with so much other baggage. Thank you for writing this and for your good advice.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Nailed it.
Thank you, Lisa. As usual, I agree with everything you said. I'm from Europe and have always considered myself a liberal, but since the pandemic I have found myself fundamentally disagreeing with a number of officially "left-wing" (but really non-evidence based and illiberal) policies.
As I former tomboy and a long-time supporter of gender non-conformity and gay rights, I have now gone down the gender rabbit hole, and am just marveling at the insanity of it. I do remember learning about Judith Butler in the early 1990, and already back then thinking the idea that sex is a social construct was crazy, but I never thought it would actually infiltrate science and the minds of people who purport to believe in it.
Since Covid, I've found myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Trump on a number of issues (I do see a lot of parallels between Dems' approaches to Covid and gender), and as much as I applaud the gist of this EO, my primary concern is whether having him, who I think is obviously a disingenuous and sociopathic individual unfit for public office, as the standard bearer of this position is going to help or hurt our cause. I fear it might go the way of the school closures and mask mandates for children, where the left doubles down and digs in their heels just so they aren't on the same side as Trump - even while European countries took a different path. Remember how the AAP reversed their position on school closure in the summer of 2020, shortly after Trump tweeted that schools must reopen? I hope this doesn't go a similar way.
Someone also recently mentioned that the some of those supporting men's placement in women's prisons do not realize that the vast majority of those men still have penises.
Yep. According to their own National Survey, 90% of trans-identified males remain fully intact, and half of them don't even take hormones; they are just fetishistic cross-dressers: (Relevant data begins on p. 100)
https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf
https://nypost.com/2024/03/16/opinion/why-are-womens-prisons-passing-out-condoms/. You can't make this stuff up. Thanks to so many on the front lines.
Convicted felon?
Oh, please.
It was a bogus conviction based on a bogus charge by a thoroughly corrupt judge and will be thrown out shortly on appeal.
The term "lawfare" is correct. It's an attempt to use the judiciary system to damage a political opponent.
In the sworn affidavit in my divorce proceedings from Dr. Christine Wheeler, PhD psychologist and diagnosing practitioner of "sex reassignment" letter writing, she used terms "transgender" and "transsexual" interchangeably, in 1997. She also claimed that it was my rejection of him as a newly "female" marriage partner for why he decided to have the surgeries in 1996, after a very relaxed and foreshortened period of crossdressing for the "Blanchard Protocol." (it's supposed to be a steady 2 years) She was not some fly-by-night practitioner, but rather had a large practice in Manhattan with many underlings doing the in person therapyy and an adjunct position at Columbia University. Because of the "Eli Ehrlich" tone of the trans movement, and their defamation of trans widows, I just am not obsessing about Trump's past adventures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXPFwSBwdgc&t=8s
"She also claimed that it was my rejection of him as a newly "female" marriage partner for why he decided to have the surgeries in 1996,"
rejection of him-whom as a newly "female" marriage partner to whom?
In a sworn affidavit submitted to Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn NY.
I'm looking forward to Australia catching up.
Indeed. And now we have LNP politicians stating gender-ideology is a non-issue and that nobody is contacting them about it!
Broken clock is right twice a day.
If you're not taking the victories you can get to effect meaningful change for fear of appearances, then you care more about appearances than meaningful change.
Luxury beliefs.
great piece. I think the thing liberals still will want is to allow for some to live as the "other" gender. And what becomes of the thousands of kids who have been medically ushered through the "other" puberty? and adults who've had surgery? There's cruelty it seems in outing them on their IDs. Is there a way to acknowledge sex, protect women, and allow for the reality that some people are trans not only in identity/belief but because medicine altered them?
I do also have concerns not only about this but also about those who do have legitimate intersex conditions. While rare, there absolutely still are people, including here in the US, who are thought to be one sex based on external appearance only to discover during puberty (usually) that they actually have the internal organs of the other sex and often have a chromosomal pattern other than the standard xx or xy. I'm not happy with how far we've changed our whole society based on such rare conditions, but the fact is such people do exist and will continue to be born and it seems unnecessarily cruel to simply act as though they don't exist in order to make trans "go away".
How about that people with DSDs exist, they are the opposite sex to that they believed themselves to be, they will be supported emotionally to deal with the difficulties of discovering tht reality. In the meantime, women in general will not be expeced to just take the hit for a medical condition that they have, and the people with a DSD will need to learn that certain spaces and sports are not for them, but others will be open to them.
Life can be hard, but it's usually best if you hang on to reality.
The biological reality is that even people with so-called intersex conditions still can be classified as either male or female, based on the gonads their body's developmental plan (even if disrupted) was meant to produce. Sometimes that turns out to be the opposite of what they thought themselves to be based on their external appearance. The human species does not produce true hermaphrodites, only rare cases of disorders of sexual development, for which "intersex" is really a misnomer.
One thing that came from Biden's EO, aside from a tremendous amount of harm, is that we got to see the result of gender ideology in action. Seeing the outcome of that ideology made a whole lot more of us start pushing back against it.
After the election it became clear that a whole bunch of Americans weren't paying attention last time Trump was in office. Now they'll get to see the real outcome of all his policies. The guardrails that held him in check will be gone. My hope is that when they see these outcomes, they'll start pushing back, too. This is a hope, not a certainty. But when it hits your family, shit becomes real.
The other thing that gives me hope is that even though it looks like we're at a point of extreme polarity, it also seems like the polarity is shattering. I totally agree with this executive order. I also drink raw milk, and think junk food is toxic. Doesn't mean I want mass deportations or tariffs or tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy or to abandon Ukraine. If enough of us abandon the tribalism and schismogenesis of Left vs Right, maybe we can build a world that works for all of us.
Nice clickbait title haha! Just like with the lawsuits, I am hoping that this EO forces a push for, and opens a pathway, for actual science and evidence-based practices (ie not "gender affirming care") in mental health and medicine. It dismays me that smart people have a hard time putting aside their biases against Trump, conservatives, etc., to focus on science and facts. A couple of years ago I shared some articles showing the harm of "gender affirming care" with my classmates in a counseling graduate program, and they immediately shut down all of it saying, "I'm a liberal so I don't support any of this stuff." We really need to get past these biases, and political baiting ("pussy-grabber," "convicted felon," etc.), otherwise we are part of the problem.
Well put, Lisa.
Excellent analysis. Thank you