The Trump administration claims to be rooting out “gender ideology extremism” and “restoring biological truth” in america.
In a January 2025 government order, President Donald Trump decreed that there are solely two genders – female and male – and that anybody who believes otherwise denies “the biological reality of sex.”
But as a gender research scholar, I do know what the science actually says about gender and intercourse.
Most researchers in my discipline, in addition to these in different disciplines corresponding to sociology and biology, agree that organic intercourse is vastly extra sophisticated than solely the 2 variants of female and male. Sexual range has been documented amongst all animals, together with people.
Trump’s declare in any other case is itself a gender “ideology” – that’s, a set of beliefs and values about gender.
Intercourse and gender should not the identical factor
Consultants in lots of disciplines have proven how gender is completely different from intercourse. Intercourse refers to bodily attributes corresponding to genitals, hormones and chromosomes; gender is made up of the norms, roles, behaviors and expectations individuals are presupposed to adjust to primarily based on the tradition and society they stay in.
As such, gender is socially constructed – that’s, outlined by a group’s beliefs and rituals. In different phrases, gender doesn’t observe biology. As a substitute, folks have what’s referred to as a “gender identity” – an inner sense of themselves as masculine, female or someplace in-between.
There are a lot of methods through which gender and intercourse don’t essentially line up.
Amongst people, a conservative estimate by the United Nations means that as much as 1.7% of the world’s inhabitants are intersex, which means their our bodies fluctuate from what has been labeled typical mixtures of chromosomes, hormones and genitals.
Intersex rights advocates have lengthy pushed for medical remedy that displays this truth, quite than frequent expectations of the human physique. Recognition of gender and intercourse range can considerably scale back the stigma and trauma of being an intersex individual.
Within the animal kingdom, feminine noticed hyenas have a penis. Male seahorses get pregnant.
It took biologists a very long time to determine that some male animals do issues that defy socially decided understandings of masculinity. However as soon as they did, groundbreaking insights into the complexity of evolutionary processes have emerged.
By labeling the idea of gender id as an “ideology,” the Trump administration has decreased all folks – however particularly transgender and nonbinary folks – to a perception system, ignoring their advanced human identities.
Don’t inform this dad he can’t give start. A seahorse couple on the New England Acquarium’s 2009 Pregnant Male Seahorse exhibit.
Matt Stone/MediaNewsGroup/Boston Herald through Getty Pictures
What’s gender ideology, actually?
Trump’s government order on gender is itself primarily based on a gender ideology referred to as “biological determinism” – the assumption that there are solely two genders and that the intercourse assigned at start completely determines one’s position in society.
This ideology dismisses analysis and knowledge that doc the complexity of human life. This will have severe social penalties.
As a result of adherents of organic determinism see intercourse and gender as one and the identical, they often need to ban puberty blockers, hormone remedy and different gender-affirming well being look after trans youth. These are essential and typically lifesaving remedies; the Trump administration and different adherents of their ideology dismiss them as medical malpractice.
The chief order additionally claims that implementing a inflexible male-female divide will hold ladies and women protected as a result of loos and home violence shelters change into harmful for girls when transgender individuals are allowed to make use of them.
Biology just isn’t future
A lot of my tutorial work has centered on how societies rooted in organic determinism are typically patriarchal. They’re designed by males for the advantage of males, and males maintain most positions of authority.
Patriarchal international locations, together with the U.S., are inclined to worth masculinity over femininity. Political and spiritual leaders, the media and social norms recommend ladies are weaker than males, extra emotional and higher suited to care work. Because of this, they painting ladies as much less efficient leaders than males.
Traditionally, these societies have restricted ladies’s sphere of affect to the family. That, in flip, prevented them from widespread entry to, and success in, financial, non secular and political management positions, simply to call a number of.
U.S. feminists within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies protested the concept an individual’s physique ought to dictate what they’ll and can’t do with their life. Again then, patriarchal beliefs restricted ladies’s participation in sports activities – they weren’t allowed to run marathons – and jobs, with fields corresponding to working towards legislation and surgical procedure basically off-limits.
Girls within the U.S. additionally lacked full bodily autonomy for a lot of the Twentieth century. Entry to contraception was restricted, and terminating a being pregnant was unlawful.
By the Nineteen Eighties, ladies had succeeded in convincing a lot of U.S. society that they’d the identical talents and may get pleasure from the identical rights as males. By the early 2000s, they’d made nice strides towards attaining equality in schooling, profession selection and reproductive freedom, amongst others.
Trans folks started making related progress within the 2010s.
Transferring backward
Because the Trump administration reverts to a simplistic interpretation of intercourse and gender, public debate on these fundamental social and political rights is reemerging.
There may be laws on the state and federal stage banning transgender ladies athletes from taking part in sports activities, payments that might make it against the law to establish as transgender and challenges to ladies serving in fight roles within the U.S. army.
Abortion, established as a constitutional proper in 1973, had that constitutional safety reversed in 2022. Abortion is now outlawed in 12 states; others severely restrict the flexibility to get the process.
Trump indicators the ‘No Men in Women’s Sports activities’ government order barring transgender ladies from ladies’s sports activities on Feb. 5, 2025. It was his third order concentrating on transgender folks.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Pictures
To implement Trump’s “gender ideology” government order, the Division of Veterans Affairs is phasing out gender-affirming well being care. The Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention quickly scrubbed knowledge about ladies’s well being that has been very important in elevating public consciousness and fueling ongoing analysis into facets of girls’s well being, corresponding to protected types of contraception.
The administration’s insurance policies and concepts are ingrained in a gender ideology that predates the feminist motion of the mid-Twentieth century.
When requested in courtroom throughout proceedings in lawsuits difficult the constitutionality of Trump’s government order, legal professionals representing the Trump administration have repeatedly did not outline what precisely the administration is referring to with the time period “radical gender ideology.”
One lawyer, when prompted by a decide, replied that he was “loathe to speculate” what the president means by the phrase.
In my evaluation, the administation’s incapacity to outline “gender ideology” is a significant sign. The Trump administration is pursuing, in essence, its personal gender ideology masked as anti-gender ideology.
