In an executive order whose name sounds like it came right out of the Handmaid's Tale, Trump is forcing all state agencies to formally erase the existence of trans people.

The executive order, titled "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government," frames itself as being aimed at "protecting women" from some made-up "trans attack," but in fact, it's an incredibly dangerous attempt at using the state to enforce a strict patriarchal gender divide.

** The executive order says, "It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality." 

The implications of this are huge. 

This order is attempting to erase trans people from public life. 

A report issued from UCLA in 2022 said there are 1.3 million adults and 300,000 youth ages 13 to 17 who identify as transgender. The percentage may be higher among younger adults. In a country with over 340 million people, the percentage of people who identify as transgender is tiny. But there has been an outsized vicious and demeaning fascist attack aimed at trans people, and a lot of patriarchal confusion and enforced ignorance among masses more broadly. 

Gender dysphoria is a real medical condition that cannot be erased through presidential decree. Gender dysphoria is a profound unhappiness with one's biological sex, and a desire to live as or become a different gender. While there are real medical questions over the right course of treatment for people experiencing gender dysphoria—these fascist attacks have nothing to do with those real questions. They are about viciously scapegoating and dehumanizing trans people and violently enforcing strict patriarchal gender roles.

This executive order would force trans people to put their biological sex on government-issued IDs like passports and visas. Think about the hell this will cause a trans person in an airport when their gender expression contradicts the sex on their passport! 

The order rescinds a whole bunch of "guidance documents" from government agencies, including the "U.S. Department of Education Toolkit: Creating Inclusive and Nondiscriminatory School Environments for LGBTQI+ Students," the "Back-to-School Message for Transgender Students from the U.S. Depts of Justice, Education, and HHS [Health and Human Services]," and more. 

And it instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to have this strict definition of sex and gender applied to all of its public policies and directives.

Not only will this open up kids to even more bullying and harassment, it will make it hard for them to seek any kind of public assistance from schools and health agencies or find any legal recourse and protection. Already, there are higher rates of suicidal desires among trans and gender non-conforming young people. And there are higher rates of victims of homicide among trans Black and Latina women. This order will very likely make that much worse.

This order will even end state-based tracking of these trends, which are often done with federal funding or in coordination with the National Institutes of Health.

** This executive order attempts to conflate sex and gender—as if the sex with which you are born defines your gender. But biology is not destiny! Gender is a social construct that can—and needs to be—unmoored from "biological categories." The oppression of women is historically evolved and deeply rooted in this system and it will take an actual revolution and a huge struggle both before and after that revolution to really dismantle the millennia-old oppression of women, and all gender oppression—to truly emancipate all humanity. The strictly defined patriarchal gender roles completely distort what it means to be human and robs boys and girls, men and women, from the full spectrum of human experience and emotions. And the challenging of all this is an essential, and driving, force of the revolutionary struggle needed now.

People—all people—are capable of playing many different roles: leader, nurturer, teacher, mechanic, scientist, etc. At the same time, there are differences between the sexes—all people can play the many roles in nurturing and rearing children, but at this point in human society it takes two sexes (male and female) together to create the embryo which has the potential to become a person. And it takes a female—or, in a small number of cases, a trans man who still has his uterus—to give birth to a baby. 

To take another example, all people can play—and some people, of both sexes, can excel—at sports, though the male body type affords certain advantages in many sports (the tallest, strongest men are almost always taller and stronger than the tallest, strongest women). Patriarchal societies enshrine and reinforce the overall domination over women by men. These societies strictly assign social roles to one or another gender, with the general rule that powerful roles are reserved for men and men take for themselves the right to dominate others. In patriarchal societies, it is insisted that these social roles are “natural” and “inborn, depending on what sex you are at birth.” Over the past 70 years in particular there has been huge struggle against this—with women and LGBT people breaking into all kinds of spheres formerly reserved for men. LGBT people have begun to live openly in many more parts of society. As a result, millions and millions of people have changed their attitudes about what is “natural” and what is desirable, and what is not.

The Christian fascists who make up a large part of Trump’s social base bitterly oppose this and want to reinforce those patriarchal roles… with a vengeance. They see the attacks on trans people as one very important part of this. These attacks are horrendous in their own right; but the Christian fascists take advantage of people’s unfamiliarity with, ignorance of, and in some cases prejudice against, trans people to use these attacks as a battering ram in this larger effort. And right now, these same forces are attempting to erase the very existence of LGBT people in schools and the larger culture, and to erase the rights—such as gay marriage—that they have fought for and won, and subject them all to a whole other level of oppression.

The Time to Resist This Is NOW!

We don't yet know the full implications of this executive order, but even the issuing of this—from the highest office of the land, backed up by a fully fascist force in the legislature and the courts—should be a call to mass protest. This cannot be allowed to stand unopposed.

There are court cases being filed, and that's good. But that needs to be accompanied by mass resistance in the streets.

This vicious patriarchal assault on trans people, on gender non-conforming people, on women and lesbian, gay, bisexual people MUST BE OPPOSED—NOW. We need to come together to defend the rights and lives of all those under fascist attack. And do so while taking the OFFENSIVE AGAINST this whole Trump MAGA fascist agenda—uniting all who can be united, in every corner of society—to defeat this fascism.

And we need to raise our sights to a world where, as the Points of Attention for THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity say, "…women, men and differently gendered people are equals and comrades." This is possible, and urgently posed. Any system that reaches back to the 1950s of patriarchal oppression—driving LGBT people back into the closet and the violent enforcement of macho men and baby-making girls is an outmoded system that needs to be overthrown at the soonest possible time. 

In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!

This Whole System Is Rotten and Illegitimate—We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System.