An essay (that is in no way comprehensive enough) on the recent governmental attacks on gender identity
2025 has been nothing short of a roller coaster so far. Our beloved Los Angeles mountains and many of our precious homes were destroyed in the January fires. Donald Trump was sworn in as president for his second term. Cars now drive themselves. TikTok was banned for 12 hours. Katy Perry went to space for 11 minutes. The richest people on Earth are now involved in running our country. Elon Musk, with a flick of the wrist (or raise of the arm), has had his Tesla stock plummet drastically, in just a few months.
The White House website is much revised, and jarringly so. Our new president lost not one day in office before signing multiple executive orders, immediately attacking many groups of people including immigrants, people with disabilities, and notably—transgender people. On the new White House website, under the promise to “Bring Back American Values” there lie two bullet points. One is regarding the renaming of certain landmarks, including the Gulf of Mexico, now called the Gulf of America. This sounds more official than it actually is, considering that most of the Gulf is international waters, and therefore cannot even really be named. Trump can only try to enforce that U.S. federal documents and maps legally refer to the Gulf by its new name, but not that the rest of the world does. I suppose since “American values” have always included claiming things that aren’t ours, this action makes sense in this particular category. Ironically, the next bullet point implies potentially less tolerance for name changes, with regard to human beings. It reads: “The President will establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology.”
Firstly, when something needs to be “established” as a biological reality, this admits it is not already a biological reality, especially when those doing the establishing are not scientists, nor any god, but politicians. Second, as a woman, I can speak to the fact that we would love for our reproductive rights to be protected, and we would love to be protected from gender-based violence and discrimination. However, it is demeaning to use “protecting women” as a false justification for attacking the rights of a community of people who pose no threat. Our current administration seems to be taking advantage of the fact that women have never been made to feel safe, or protected; our culture belittles, victim-blames, and patronizes women who speak up about abuse, and lets abusers off easy. The choice now to use the phrase “protecting women,” has about as much to do with actually protecting women as you’d expect, coming from a man who has over two dozen sexual assault and harassment allegations himself.
Gender is determined by culture, not chromosomes, but let’s first discuss the science behind sex to deepen our understanding of “biological reality.” Chromosomes contain our DNA, and therefore decide many things about who we will become, including which genetic traits we will inherit, and what sex characteristics and reproductive systems we may develop. Most people are born with 46 chromosomes, coupled up into 23 pairs. Of these 23 pairs, only the last pair decides our sex. Most often, that 23rd pair will be labeled as either XX or XY; the former indicates development of a female reproductive system and typical female sex characteristics, while the latter indicates a male reproductive system and typical male sex characteristics. Occasionally, a person may be born with XXY, or XO (implying just a single X), or another uncommon mix of sex-deciding chromosomes for their 23rd pair. Having a unique mix like this can manifest in a genital/reproduction/secondary sex characteristic combo that we are less familiar with. This phenomenon is called being intersex, and about 1-2% of the world’s population falls under this category.
What our chromosomes don’t dictate is how we dress, what haircut we get, or whether we’re expected to cross our legs when sitting in a chair; these are gender roles that come from culture, they are not predispositions. We live in a society where we have taught ourselves that it is “biology” to let an infant’s genitalia decide whether they will play with trucks or dolls. If at birth, that infant’s genitalia doesn’t make it clear enough which toy their parents should buy, the parents can sometimes opt to have their newborn undergo immediate surgery to correct nature’s “error.” We live in a gendered culture which demands people to fit themselves into boxes, in lieu of just existing. Only two boxes have been available ever since most of us can remember: one blue, and one pink. It can be hard and uncomfortable to fit yourself into any box, even if you mostly agree with your given color, but so much more painful to be assigned the wrong one. It’s not all blue and pink. Even in our gendered culture, people are now learning to express themselves in a myriad of ways. We are learning to utilize all colors of the rainbow, and to give less weight to confining gender roles. The trans and non-binary community is teaching us that gender can be a celebration, not a rule. Unfortunately, the government is now retaliating against this celebratory rejection of gender-confinement.
In addition to dismantling DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs which help fight systemic discrimination of people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other historically marginalized groups, the Trump administration has also begun to erase various terms from governmental websites. The National Park Service’s website page dedicated to the Stonewall riots seems to have been algorithmically edited soon after Trump’s inauguration. The letters T and Q were simply removed from the acronym LGBTQ, and the website now refers to “LGB civil rights,” rewriting history to erase the important trans activists involved in the 1969 movement. Additionally, our new administration is no longer allowing trans people to have passports with the gender marker they identify with, forcing them to out themselves while traveling, putting their safety at risk.
Both women’s rights and trans rights are being threatened with the government limiting access to abortion and gender-affirming care, but the injustice doesn’t stop at healthcare. Trump’s administration has introduced something called the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act. This bill, if passed, would create barriers for people registering to vote (or updating their voting registrations), requiring Americans to prove their citizenship with documentation like a birth certificate. Voting as a non-citizen is already a crime punishable by law, and there are eligibility requirements one must meet in order to vote in the United States. The SAVE Act, however, would create challenges for millions of American citizens who have ever undergone a name change. It is clear how this proposed bill would specifically inhibit transgender Americans from voting, since a large portion of trans people have changed their names to better suit their identities, but this barrier would also extend to married women who have taken their partners’ surnames.
There is no “protecting women” from trans people, we are all in this fight for our rights together. I have only mentioned a couple of the many ways that gender identity is being targeted right now, but the fact that human rights are even up for debate at this magnitude should be concerning no matter who you are. Regarding trans women in sports, I would advise anyone who wants to learn the statistics behind this inflammatory claim of “unfairness” to watch John Oliver’s recent episode on the subject: Trans Athletes – Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Hot topics like this are being used as distractions from the active ways in which rights are being targeted. It is easy to see through this performative concern for women when it only ever appears in concurrence with placing undue blame on another marginalized group.
Our country is rapidly regressing. The people are suffering, the planet is suffering, and the economy is suffering. It is not the government’s place to decide how people dress, how they refer to themselves, or how they present their own bodies. If we don’t have bodily autonomy, we have nothing. Picking and choosing which citizens have voting access based on gender or name changes is unlawful discrimination; it’s unconstitutional, if that word still holds any weight. Transness has always existed, and it is offensive to see the very real issue of women’s safety being weaponized and used to rationalize hate. There is no basis for attempting to erase an already vulnerable and marginalized community from existence.
