Donald Trump officially declared that there are ‘only two genders’ as he returned to the Oval Office, but the wording of his executive order could come back to bite him.
The executive order, signed on the first day of Trump’s second term in office, is presented as an order which will ‘defend women from gender ideology extremism and restore biological truth to the federal government’.
The order claims ‘ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex’ have ‘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’.
Branding this as ‘wrong’, Trump’s order states: “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.”
The order goes on to give definitions for the terms ‘female’ and ‘male’, but in doing so, the order actually suggests that every human is a female.
It states: “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.”
If your biology classes have been long forgotten, then allow me to explain.
For the first few weeks after being conceived, all embryos look the same in a state called ‘unisex’. This state forms the blueprint for female bodies, and it’s not until about six weeks after conception that most people with an XY genotype will follow a male developmental process.
A report published by the National Library of Medicine explains: “All human individuals—whether they have an XX, an XY, or an atypical sex chromosome combination—begin development from the same starting point. During early development the gonads of the fetus remain undifferentiated; that is, all fetal genitalia are the same and are phenotypically female.”
Though the team behind Trump’s executive order may not have caught this, people on Twitter certainly have.
“In case you missed it, Trump issued an executive order yesterday declaring all Americans’ gender is determined at the moment of conception. All human zygotes are female at the moment of conception. Donald Trump just created approximately 160 million F2M transgender people,” one person wrote after seeing the order.
Another commented: “Fun fact, the zygote is coded as female at conception so saying sex is defined at conception like Trumps executive order stats means we’re all assigned female at conception. It takes 6-7 weeks of gestation for sex to determine your assigned gender at birth. Let’s go girls!”
When push comes to shove, it’s likely any officials interpreting the order would form an opinion based on its intended meaning rather than the scientific meaning.
But there’s no escaping the irony that in his attempt to stop men from ‘self-identifying as women’, Trump accidentally assigned them all a new gender.
