The following is a response to an article complaining that Trump’s executive order on transgender defines male and female as adult human beings and claiming that his was a “new” definition.
The original article appeared on Mother Jones under the title “Trump’s Definitions of ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Are Nonsense Science With Staggering Ramifications”. It included this excerpt from Trump’s executive order, which it objected to:
(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.
The “at conception” part is not exactly accurate, because the structures that will give rise to the reproductive cells haven’t developed at that early stage, but the rest of his claim is settled biological science. Feminists have been saying for years that the only determinant of sex that doesn’t have an exception is what kind of gamete (egg or sperm) a person makes. We realize there is not agreement even among “TERFS” on how and how much Trump’s definition is a win for us and how and how much it is a win for the Right.
The response below was to a re-publication of the article on Portside, an online distributor of “material of interest to people on the Left”. Portside shortened the Mother Jones title to “Trump’s Definitions of ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Are Nonsense”.
To their credit, Portside printed the critical comment below in its entirety along with the very apt meme included above.
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Re: Trump’s Definitions of Male and Female Are Nonsense
by Carol Hanisch
The supposedly “new definition” of the sex of adult humans as “male” and “female” put forth by President Trump in his declarations on transgender is probably one of the few statements he has made that is NOT nonsense. Rather it’s the Portside headline (shortened from the longer original version on the Mother Jones article) and the transgender ideology it puts forth that are nonsense.
The fallout from the confusingly false-but-often-accepted claim that “sex is assigned at birth” mantra has ended up giving legs to the nonsense that biological sex is changeable. The contention that an individual can simply “identify” out of the reality of their biological sex (even with the “help” of castration and dangerously applied hormones) has brought mystification and bedlam into our politics. It has garnered support for Republicans, which seem to be the only political party that didn’t go off the rails acquiescing to the demand that one’s sex can be declared via a personal demand and/or some medical intervention.
This confusion of sex with gender has been deliberate, at least on the part of those who funded its rapid emergence into a power with enough impact to question long-settled biological fact. Anyone looking into who has been pushing transgender theory will find it did not come out of a mass movement of the oppressed. Rather it leads back to some very wealthy people and their donations and foundation grants to medical facilities, big Pharma, and postmodernist theorists, especially in elite universities. See: https://gript.ie/how-a-handful-of-billionaires-created-the-transgender-movement/
It may well be that the reference to “a person at conception” formulation in Trump’s declaration is going to be used to further the anti-abortion argument around “personhood”, but that doesn’t make Trump’s definition of sex false nor transgender claims true. This rather desperate attempt to capture the popularity of abortion rights for the transgender cause is made clear in the article, which states, “It [Trump’s declaration] seeks to define women according to the functions of their bodies and regulate how all people, not just transgender people, move through the world and their interactions with federal government entities or federally supported entities.”
Nothing new for women here. We females have always been overly “defined” by the function of our bodies. Some of that definition is factual (sex/reproduction) and some is actually “assigned” by society imposing sexist gender roles, which most feminists seek to get rid of. Whether a woman individually ever have a child or not, it is female human “bodies” through which our species reproduces, a life-and-death fact crucial to our economic, social, political and personal existence. It has nothing to do with “identity”—a subjective wishful-thinking notion similar to religious belief.
As for “personhood at conception,” we need to base our liberation fight, including for the right to abortion, on material reality. Everyone knows that a life in a pre-birth early stage is destroyed when a woman has an abortion, but we women’s liberationists fight to put the living, already-born woman in control of her body and labor—as we try to unite to improve our working conditions.
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