And We're Off!

Image:  Katie Rainbow at Pexels

One of the zillion executive orders Donald Trump signed after being sworn in as president yesterday had this unwieldy title:  "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."

A more accurate title would've been "Erasing Transgender People for Fun and Profit."

The premise of the order is that women need protecting from all those men who claim to be women so they can gain access to women's shower facilities. It's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

Nevertheless, to thwart the "ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex," this country's new firm leader has given us a new firm policy:  "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."

Bull pucky.

I know too many transgender people too well to buy the lie that they're somehow making up their gender dysphoria. This executive order and all the anti-trans campaigning that led to it are about fear, ignorance, power and religious extremism, not gender extremism.

The conservative flunkies who wrote this order were thorough. It seeks to wipe out acknowledgement of trans people at the federal level in a variety of ways, from insisting passports "accurately reflect the holder's sex" to forcing all government agencies to remove any statements or policies that "promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology."

The list goes on. But no matter how much Trump panders to his fans, transgender people have always been here, and they aren't going away. They're simply, cruelly, being marched back into the closet.

All under the pretense of protecting women. As a woman, I know that transgender women don't threaten my personal safety. It's Trump, the assaulter in chief, and a number of his wannabe cabinet members who do.