Donald Trump loves women. He loves them so much, in fact, that he gave Howard Stern permission to call his daughter a “piece of ass,” bragged about kissing women without asking because “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” routinely cheated on his partners and has been publicly accused of sexual assault by dozens of women since the 1970s — not to mention found guilty of sexual abuse in court.
Americans know all of this, including the conservatives who somehow deceive themselves into thinking Trump is an upstanding defender of Christianity, and apparently didn’t find it a deal-breaker in November. Still, the name of one of Trump’s first executive orders — “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government” — should make even his staunchest defenders wince. Because, let’s be honest, Trump doesn’t give a hoot about defending women.
Instead, he and the GOP conveniently use the reality of violence against women, and the subsequent “need” for men to help them, to create a misleading panic around trans people. I won’t dignify their villainizations by laying them out here — an example of the insanity that paranoia about people’s genitals produces will suffice. A Pennsylvania school district in Hanover, following counsel from an anti-LGBTQ hate group, spent $8,700 in October to install a window into their middle school bathroom — ostensibly to prevent people from preying on their students. What a totally normal and sane and not at all creepy thing to do instead of, say, buying whiteboard markers for classrooms.
On Jan. 20, the party of limited government kicked the term off by imposing its views on gender on U.S. citizens via executive order. The order claims that “Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.” Trump knows a lot about attacking women, so I won’t question his authority there. It’s unclear why his executive order apparently does not attack men, nor why it deprives them of dignity or well-being.
In fact, the repeated references to the category of “woman,” while “man” is afforded far less attention, reveal the GOP’s strategy — teaching women to fear for themselves and men to fear for women, then directing all of this toward trans people just trying to pee, survive homelessness or walk down the street.
There’s nothing new about men trying to pass off harming people and limiting freedom as protecting women. Treating women as fragile, morally corruptible and in need of protection is why women were forced into the home in Victorian England, locked in mental institutions for hysteria when men couldn’t understand their behavior and deemed unfit for the vulgar world of politics for centuries. White America justified racism by whipping up a frenzy around keeping “delicate” white women safe from “dangerous” Black men, exemplified in the horror of Emmett Till’s lynching.
You cannot erase an idea from peoples’ minds by releasing an order denying that it exists. To write and publicly announce a law claiming gender cannot be a social construct is to affirm that social movements and human minds inform how we understand gender at any given point in history.
One would be forgiven for thinking these sentences from the order are actually from The Onion — “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality.” After all, nothing says “unchangeable reality” like an administration change and new efforts to “promote” it, just as nothing says “incontrovertible reality” like scrubbing reports on harassment, COVID-19’s effect on education or how families can support their intersex kids from the web.
Trump can feign concern for women all he wants, but we don’t need his paternalism. Reality is the world we live in, found in our senses, relationships and exchanges — not a repressed world he and his desperate allies cling to with all their might. As we buckle in for another four years of watching them try, take solace in the knowledge that Trump’s incoherent frenzy to tell Americans who they are by executive order only proves that he knows individual freedom and self-realization are far more powerful than he’d prefer.
Livia Daggett doesn’t want to be writing about how much people hate other people, but here we are. Write to her at [email protected].