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In his Monday inaugural address President Donald Trump promised that by issuing a series of executive orders, “we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense.” Time will tell how successful he is in this effort, but right away Mr. Trump may be able to provide some needed assistance to official Washington’s understanding of biology. A number of elected Democrats and even a U.S. Supreme Court justice have struggled—at least in public—to define what a woman is. Now Mr. Trump takes a
crack in one of his new executive orders. As is the custom, the order first sets out the President’s purpose: Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The
erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself. This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts. Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them,
replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept. Accordingly, my Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male. This brings us to the order’s second section, which includes the following definitions that the Beltway’s population of publicly confused politicos may find helpful. The order continues:
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