WASHINGTON — One of President Donald Trump’s first official acts on Monday was signing an executive order declaring there are only two sexes.
“It is the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female,” reads the order. “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.”
Trump’s action is part of the Republican’s yearslong efforts to stoke fears about transgender people and push them out of public spaces. In effect, the order means the US government will no longer provide any money or contracts to groups or people that it considers to be “promoting gender ideology.” Federal agencies will now only issue passports and visas that offer “female” or “male” sex markers, and these will be based on the person’s assigned sex at birth. The order also bans taxpayer money from being used for gender-affirming care.
The executive order punches down a particularly vulnerable community; trans people only make up about 1.6% of adults in the US. But on a more technical level, the way it’s been written is so embarrassingly ignorant of basic human biology that it would be laughable if its effects weren’t so harmful.
In its strangely constructed definitions of “female” and “male,” the order states that a person’s gender is defined by the size of a “reproductive cell” at the moment of conception, a stage when all embryos are phenotypically female. In other words, it appears that Trump just declared all Americans are female. This prospect has drawn mockery on social media and has been noted by Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first transgender member of Congress.
This language, which is the basis for interpreting the entire executive order, is so sloppily written that it could end up being grounds for legal challenges.
“There are many reasons why this Executive Order is legally vulnerable, and the definitions themselves are just one part,” Karen Loewy, senior counsel and director of constitutional law practice at Lambda Legal, a legal group focused on LGBTQ+ rights, said in an email.
“As we see how agencies take steps to fulfill its directives, we are prepared to hold them accountable,” she said.
So how badly did Trump officials butcher their attempt to lump everyone into two sexes? Did the president really just make us all women? HuffPost reached out to seasoned biologists around the country to help make sense of Trump’s definitions of sex, gender and “reproductive cells.”
They don’t know what he’s talking about, either.
“Lots of folks are wondering the same thing!” Dr. Francisco Diaz, director of the Center for Reproductive Health and Biology at Pennsylvania State University, said of the Trump White House’s understanding of how biology works.
Embryos are “neither male nor female” by Trump’s definition, Diaz said, since there are no germ cells present at conception. Germ cells are reproductive cells that later become eggs and sperm, and that are set aside early in embryonic development.
“How about men after vasectomies? No germ cells there, are they still male?” asked Diaz, who is also an associate professor of reproductive biology at the university. ”Are postmenopausal women still female?”
“Not a super tight definition!” he concluded. “The ‘at conception’ wording seems forced to define personhood as beginning at conception and not really to define sex.”
Republicans for years have tried to legislate their personal beliefs about life beginning at conception. They’ve introduced versions of a bill called the Life at Conception Act 13 times since 2011. These efforts have almost certainly influenced the “conception” language in Trump’s latest executive action.
Dr. Richard Bribiescas, an anthropology professor at Yale University and the president of the Human Biology Association, said the order’s definitions of “sex” and “gender” ignore all kinds of variations that take place in human development.
“Woman/man, boy/girl are gender identities that do not necessarily align with biological characteristics of sex,” he said in an email. “Genders are components of human variation that are influenced by culture, identity, and many other non-biological factors. To illustrate the difference between sex and gender, we can talk about male/female chimpanzees (our closest evolutionary relative) but it would be non-sensical to discuss chimpanzee women, men, boys or girls.”
Trump’s definitions of “female” and “male” are also flawed, said Bribiescas, because he is tying them to something called “anisogamy” in biology, or the observation that females of some species, including humans, tend to produce larger gametes (the reproductive cells that come from germ cells) compared to males.
Anisogamy is not a universal rule in biology, he said. But Trump’s executive order defines females as people belonging to the sex that produces “the large reproductive cell” and males belonging to the sex that produces “the small reproductive cell.”
The size of a person’s gametes is “just one characteristic among many (ie., genetic, hormonal, developmental, physical) that is used to describe sex,” Bribiescas said. “Clearly, this order is not fully informed by current biological science.”
Some health experts said the problems with Trump’s definitions of sex and gender go beyond his ill-informed understanding of embryonic cells. Put simply, neither sex nor gender is a simple binary.
This executive order “is highly problematic from a biological standpoint because it overly simplifies what we know to be an incredibly complicated developmental process,” said Dr. Josh Snodgrass, a professor of anthropology and global health at the University of Oregon. “It’s just not that simple from a genetic standpoint, and then becomes even more complicated with time under the influence of hormones, environmental exposures, and social experiences.”
Snodgrass, the past president of the Human Biology Association, noted that Trump’s order also doesn’t account for people who are intersex, which means they are born with genitals, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don’t fit into the typical male/female sex binary.
“This reads to me as coming from people who desperately want the world to be simple — for sex to be a simple binary and for us to return to some imagined time when this was more broadly accepted,” he said. “The problem is that it’s not only science that shows us that human biological variation is more complicated, but other cultures do and have also appreciated this for thousands of years.”
Snodgrass added that there is one more thing missing from the executive order that belongs in all conversations about sex and gender: empathy.
“The authors of this executive order seem like they are trying to twist science to fit their worldview, but that this worldview is painfully out of step with reality,” he said.