It’s funny how minds with a mission to dominate and repress think alike. They repeat the same words (‘gender ideology’) and target the same vulnerable groups (transgender women) in the name of ‘protecting’ women and even women’s rights.
In one of the many executive orders issued within the first one hundred days of Trump’s second term, the white house has proclaimed, just in case you didn’t know, what a man and boy is, and what a woman and girl is. This has, like the British supreme court judgment recently, direct deleterious implications for transgender people. Like the protections ‘gender critical’ campaigners demand for ‘single-sex’ spaces evacuated of men impersonating as women with the intention of harming them, the executive order has also indicated its legal reach to impose restrictions on the movement of transgender people in public spaces. In the name of ‘defending women from gender ideology extremism’, the actual name of the executive order. And like the ‘gender critical’ feminists, the executive order casts aspersions on the very concept of ‘gender identity’ in favour of using biological sex as the basis of womanhood/femininity and manhood/masculinity. But it goes even further to microscopic levels of biological sex, using primary school level language to make distinctions:
(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.
Because this is America we’re talking about, we must have ‘freedom’. Under this executive order, Americans can now have the ‘freedom to express the binary nature of sex’ (Section 5 of Executive Order 14168, accessed on 1 May 2025). Was there ever a time when this freedom was denied? Judith Butler in her new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, makes a fascinating point about how anti-gender groups perceive the ‘self’ and ‘identity’ as properties under threat from being ‘stolen’ when marginalised groups are given rights to assert their ‘self’ and ‘identity’. But of course, your gender and identity as a cis-gender woman can never actually be stolen. Nothing really changes to you as a cis-woman if a transgender woman is legally recognised as a woman. Similar to how conservative groups who argue that legalising equal/same-sex marriage ‘destroys’ heterosexual marriage. It’s a very strange logic but surprisingly common. It seems to come from a place of entitlement to exclusive meaning and recognition, two things that are inevitably diverse and subject to contestation. And we have plenty of evidence that minds given to domination and repression cannot tolerate diversity and contestation.
It becomes less funny when this kind of legislation inspires leaders elsewhere, especially in the global south, which is not always the friendliest place to be trans. And it won’t take long to see the same things germinating following exposure to toxic spores. The same gotcha questions (‘what is a woman?’), the same assertions (‘common sense has to prevail!’) and the same fake pretexts of ‘male violence’ that don’t affect or engage actual men while heaping oppression on transgender people who are as vulnerable to male violence as cis-gender women.
Alicia Izharuddin 