Shock and awe
The huge potential, and serious risks, of Trump's executive orders on sex
It’s been an absolutely crazy couple of weeks, both publicly, with the shock-and-awe measures from Donald Trump on gender issues, and on the personal work front, with a series of events to plan and hold. In this issue, I’ll say a little about the first, and in the next issue, about the second.
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I’m not going to comment, here or elsewhere, on anything Trump has done that doesn’t relate directly to sex and gender. My work is entirely focused on the meaning and importance of sex in law and in life. I have made a choice regarding where to place my thought and effort, and although I recognise there are many other important issues, I’ve made my call about what I personally am going to do with the one life I am given.
The headline, of course, is that the measures are remarkable. As well as an executive order that defines sex as biological and fixed at conception and seeks to protect women from the consequences of denying that, there’s another that seeks to protect children from “chemical and surgical mutilation”, in other words gender medicine, and a third billed as ending “radical indoctrination” in school, in large part by withholding federal funding that directly or indirectly supports the teaching of what Trump called “transgender insanity” on the campaign trail (as well as the type of race-related teaching known as critical race theory). Male prisoners are to be moved out of female federal prisons; passports will no longer have any options except male and female, which will refer to sex at birth; and the American armed forces will treat all personnel as members of their own sex, regardless of how they identify.
I’m actually jealous. I’d never have thought a year ago that the US might take major steps towards resolving the “transgender insanity” before anywhere else: I genuinely thought it was lost for at least a generation. I’m sure I’m not the only person who would have bet on TERF Island finishing first; now that looks less likely (though I still think we’ll do plenty of things that other places will learn from).
I’m glad that I’m not relying on mainstream media for reporting on this – it’s almost all been execrable (honourable exception, The Economist – see below). Trans people are apparently being “banned” from this, that and the other – sport, the armed forces, bathrooms – when actually all that’s happening is a reset to the situation in roughly 2010, insofar as that is within the power of the federal government: no male people in female-only spaces and services and vice versa; no pretending that people can change sex. And then there’s the extraordinary spectacle of once-great papers beclowning themselves by leaping on the latest absurd meme, namely that by defining sex as fixed at “conception” (factually correct), Trump accidentally reclassified all Americans as female because, dontchaknow, all embryos are female until six weeks after conception.
Here’s the Guardian’s (almost) unbelievably idiotic take: “After his executive order on sex, is Trump legally the first female president?” Of course this is a #QTWAIN (Question To Which The Answer Is No) – headline-writers love them. But the foolishness of the piece far surpasses the foolishness of the headline. My own rage about it inspired a new coinage: “stupidity singularity”. I think I’m going to be using it a lot.
Surreally, supremely, incomprehensibly stupid. Even more stupid than the stupid, stupid, STUPID tweets on this subject in the past few days. Through brain dead, out the other side and accelerating towards a stupidity singularity. So much vicarious shame https://t.co/RezqG0GsTc
— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) January 25, 2025
Incredibly, that piece was written despite Carole Hooven, author of the excellent book “T: The Story of Testosterone” spending a couple of hours kindly handholding the author through the facts about early embryonic development!
🧵1/2 The Guardian columnist who wrote yesterday's op-ed about Trump's executive order reached out to me Friday morning for some "expert commentary."
TLDR: I provided her with plenty of scientific evidence/argument/detailed commentary in answer to her questions about Trump's…— Carole Hooven (@hoovlet) January 26, 2025
Here’s my colleague Emma Hilton’s debunking:
On “we all start as females” (by request).
At the level of anatomy, “female” describes a particular reproductive system - eggs in ovaries, oviducts, uterus, cervix, vagina and vulva.— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) January 26, 2025
If you want to dig further into the legal implications of the various executive orders, I’d highly recommend you follow Glenna Goldis (@GlennaGoldis), and read her Substack, “Bad Facts”. Another of my favourite Substacks is Lisa Selin Davis’s “Broadview”, and I’m really enjoying a new podcast, “Informed Dissent”, which features five of the best American commentators on sex and gender.
I’m dying to know more about the backstory: who was working behind the scenes, how many people and how long it took, and how those people and the new administration are going to maintain the pressure to rewind as far as they possibly can before the next presidential election. The team seems to have done an amazing job of working out every possible power the federal government can deploy to root out genderism, and to wargame genderist countermeasures.
I’d really like to be in touch with them – partly to see what we can learn from them, but also in the hope of asking them to do what they can to stop American-influenced businesses, foundations and NGOs pumping out this ideology globally. A lot of the nonsense imposed by HR departments on workers around the world originated in the US. The reason my colleague Maya Forstater lost her job at CGD was that colleagues in the Washington office complained about her “transphobia” – no one in the London office had any problem with what she had said until then, and it took her four years in court to re-establish UK employment protections against the encroachment of American norms.
I’m sure there’s going to be a great deal of pushback, as well as lots of attempts to circumvent the new rules and general chaos. No doubt there will be legal actions against nearly everything in the executive orders, as well as fights with blue states and professional bodies like the American Academy of Pediatrics and Endocrine Society. Lots of bits of Big Gender aren’t easily influenced by the federal government – Planned Parenthood, for example, which is now a major supplier of hormones to young people. Indeed, I could imagine such organisations using the executive orders as the basis for a fundraising appeal.
A big risk, raised in a rather good piece by Jesse Singal in The Economist, is that this will just be another in a series of flip-flops that has been going on now for more than a decade. (It’s behind a paywall, but you should be able to sign up for a few free articles.) Since Obama’s second term, each incoming president has reversed the previous one’s position on sex/gender identity. We’ve now had four handbrake 180-degree turns: Obama’s initial imposition of gender identity over sex; Trump’s first reversal of that; Biden’s return to the Obama position and now Trump’s return to his initial position. Each time the measures and counter-measures are more extreme and polarisation worsens.
This is the most ambitious and far-reaching reversal yet. But it comes against a mixed and ominous backdrop. Yes, public opinion generally is moving strongly towards sex-realism, and as awareness of the harms done by transgender ideology rises ordinary people like it less and less. But since at least 2010 elite opinion and institutions – universities, the media, courts, medical associations, the Democratic Party and many others – have been moving towards the genderist position, seemingly inexorably and with no sign yet of slowing, let alone reversing. As Jesse says in that Economist article, there could easily be another reversal under the next president; it would take decisive action by either Congress or the Supreme Court to settle the matter definitively, and neither is likely to be forthcoming.
All the same, I think it’s important not to underestimate the sheer force behind an American president willing to use every possible power of the federal government to do what he wants to do. (I am not saying I think this is an ideal characteristic of a government, in fact it’s terrifying! Just saying it’s true.) Until now the large, extremist moves have been by the genderists; this is the first time a presidency has acted in such a coordinated and decisive manner to restore the status quo ante. Four years is a long time for many people and organisations to hold on in the hope of another reversal, if their jobs and income are at risk. And neither people nor organisations can flip-flop between two such different positions forever.
If I were involved in any way with genderist medicine, advocacy or education, I would currently be thinking about fading away quietly – walking backwards through a hedge, as in the Homer Simpson meme at the top of this article. Yes, some people’s hands are too bloody for this, and some people and organisations have bet their financial futures on Big Gender. But lots of those who have done a great deal of harm are doing it incidentally, so to speak – they’re merely teaching children lies about gender alongside truths about everything else, for example, and they could just quietly refocus their lessons.
We’ve already seen that some people and organisations that were happy to play along with gender ideology and DEI more generally when that was what the power in the land wanted were equally happy to abandon it when the power changed – among them Meta and McDonald’s. I suppose “easy come easy go” works in both directions – but there is one big difference. The genderist position is wrong and harmful; the sex-realist one is right and humane. I hold out hope that many of those who pushed genderism because they thought it was kind and knew that was what the high-ups wanted will be less keen on ramping it back up in four years’ time, if that is indeed the order that comes down.
I worry a lot about the impact of the executive orders on young people who have been brainwashed into thinking that harm is health, and that people who want to protect them actually hate them. It’s not just the ones who’ve medicalised; it’s also the ones who’ve been told, quite explicitly, that recognising the reality of the two sexes is fascism, that misgendering is hate and that a girl asserting her boundaries will cause boys who wish they were girls to kill themselves. This has been going on for so long now, and it’s so deranged, that I feel sick when I think about what some of these people might do.
I completely agree with my friend Eliza Mondegreen, who studies the way young people talk in online spaces about trans identities and transition, that our messaging has to take into account that there is a significant population that has been radicalised by propaganda and misinformation. Communicating with them is going to be a major challenge, and neither triumphalism nor politicisation will help.
The stakes are just very, very different when the government is taking away access to interventions that many of us know to be dangerous but which many young people sincerely believe to be life-saving. That has to be handled with clarity and care, not politicizing. https://t.co/T9Pk73U0S9
— Eliza Mondegreen (@elizamondegreen) January 30, 2025
Avoiding politicising the matter is hard when the genderists insist on doing so! But we have to try, all the while remembering that every day the indoctrination continues the harder it is to unwind. We can’t delay because we’re so scared of the collateral damage, because that damage is mounting.
I do think the Trump administration could usefully suggest some measures to help on this front. It’s cutting a lot of spending that goes to organisations that currently harm children’s and young people’s health by teaching them lies and offering harmful endocrine disruptors and surgeries; redirecting some of that to counselling and healthcare for detransitioners mightn’t be a bad idea. I know there’s a difficulty with finding ethical therapists, but at least the physical health-care side should be possible. These kids are victims of medical malpractice and should be given every possible medical support to recover.
If you’re finding it discombobulating that you like these policies but hate Trump, or you’re Democrat-leaning and find it hard to cope with them coming from the Republicans, I really like this thought from Lisa:
Thoughts on the executive order on gender identity: If it feels weird to have your 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.
— Lisa Selin Davis (@LisaSelinDavis) January 22, 2025
If you’re sure that one of your political opponents’ policies is good, refusing to support it because you’re afraid of aligning yourself with them only makes the situation worse. The problem isn’t that they’re saying it, it’s that your side isn’t, and silencing yourself means that won’t change.
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And finally, a request from sexologist Michael Bailey, whom I mentioned in the previous issue. He is researching public opinions about and understanding of autogynephilia, and has asked me to share his form with readers. You don’t have to be GC to respond, but Mike is specifically keen to get responses from people who are GC. The survey has been reviewed and approved by the Northwestern University Institutional Review Board.
Here’s Mike’s announcement:
Research Study of Beliefs, Attitudes, and Questions Concerning Autogynephilia
I am studying common beliefs that people have about autogynephilia (AGP), their attitudes about AGP, and what they would like to know about AGP.
You are invited to participate in my research study: Beliefs, Attitudes, and Questions Concerning Autogynephilia (STU00223398), Principal Investigator: Michael Bailey, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University (jm-bailey@northwestern.edu).
You must be at least 18 years old to participate. You will not be compensated for participation. Participation involves completing an online survey that will take approximately 15 minutes to complete.
To participate, or to find more information, click the link to the survey: SURVEY LINK