With depressing predictability, the leading lights of the UK anti-trans mob and their pet journalists are celebrating the inauguration of Trump and downplaying or making jokes about copying Elon Musk’s nazi salutes. In particular they’re celebrating the newly signed executive order designed to drive trans people out of society – an order that makes it very clear, once again, that they’re turkeys voting for Christmas.
The executive order is a mess, of course, bigoted, and often horrendously unscientific. But it also contains something very important: a definition of men and women. And in the order, personhood begins not at birth, but at conception.
It’s important to read that in context. The context is:
“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female… the following definitions shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy”.
All interpretation and application of law and policy. Not just the anti-trans bits.
That’s not an accident. It’s because the people writing Trump’s policy are also coming for abortion and contraception and women’s rights, like they’ve been promising they would for the best part of a decade now, like we’ve been trying to tell you for the same period of time.
Chase Strangio, writing in TIME:
It might be easy for people to dismiss the impacts of sweeping anti-transgender policies since, despite this outsized fixation we provoke in our opponents, we only represent .6% of the U.S. population. However, none of these rhetorical, political, or legal attacks on transgender people will ultimately end with us. The anti-trans rhetoric that fueled the 2024 elections was accompanied by a larger message about how men and women are supposed to act, live, and raise families.
Strangio quotes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said of banning trans girls from sports:
“What this also opens the door for is for women to try to perform a very specific kind of femininity for the very kind of men who are drafting this bill, and to open up questioning of who is a woman because of how we look, how we present ourselves, and yes, what we choose to do with our bodies.”
The people celebrating the assault on trans women in the US have paved the way for an assault on all LGBTQ+ people and on cis women as well as trans women. And they’re trying to do the same in the UK.
Update, 23/1/25
Well, that didn’t take long: Trump’s wrecking ball has come for more of women’s protections. Trump has ordered the end of Lyndon B Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which forbade federal contractors from discriminating on grounds of race, colour, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s part of the wider destruction of diversity programmes, the biggest beneficiaries of which – for decades – have been white women.