Biological truth? WTF? (Part 2)

Shell game: a fraud or deception perpetrated by shifting conspicuous things to hide something else

The Jan 20, 2025 Executive Order (EO) is a gender shell game. In Part 1 I discussed how the EO insists on a rigid (there’s only 2!) account of the biology of sexual development, even though such an account ignores the non-binary and complex nature of sexual development. Now, in Part 2, let’s focus on how the order makes gender disappear.

In one sense it is simple. The order uses “gender” as a stand alone only once, and then it is to forbid its use.¹ It also makes up strange definitions for two gender-containing terms—”gender ideology” and “gender identity”. To ungarble what is happening here I need to key up a little history.

If you search for the word “gender”, as I just did on Duck-Duck Go, a mish-mash of possible meanings appear. I want to stick with the one that represents the concept’s historical development from the 1950s to the present, so I chose a definition provided by the World Health Organization. “"Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.” It does not designate those big and small reproductive cells, or chromosomes, or genitalia. It refers to roles, behaviors and activities.²

This meaning is fairly new. I constructed an N-gram³ showing how often the word appeared in books between the 1950s and the present. In my first book, written in the early 1980s I did not consider the word as a central idea, using it rarely and interchangeably with “sex”. By the year 2000, when I published Sexing the Body, it had become a central concept. Where did it come from and why such a meteoric rise?

The Y axis represents gender or gender identity as a percentage of words used in English Language books. The X axis is the calendar year.

Back in the 1950’s this guy—a psychologist named John Money—was struggling to understand patients whom today we refer to as intersex. They (or their parents) sought his advice because of anatomically ambiguous external genitalia, or some mix of internal structures—oviducts and sperm ducts, or an ovo-testis. Or the patient might have well-developed breasts but also a penis. How should parents raise such a child? If there were only two sexes, which one did they belong to?

Roman statue of a sleeping hermaphrodite. (CreditPalazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome)

Until the 1950s, the medico-psychiatric literature struggled to make do with the singular concept of biological sex, but Money found the idea too limiting.⁴ Money’s interactions with intersex children led him to the concept of gender. Hethought of the outside and inside as co-constitutive. Gender identity could be imagined as a coin, with one side representing an individual interior and the other side the visible, behavioral exterior.

© Anne Fausto-Sterling

The psychiatrist, Robert Stoller, who worked with adult transsexuals, also needed new language. In contrast to Money’s gender expression/role coin, Stoller posited a core gender identity, defined as an understanding of self as a biological male or female, separate from the enactment of that identity as masculine or feminine. For Stoller, acquiring a core gender identity was the first stage in “the progress towards one’s ultimate gender identity and the nexus around which masculinity and femininity gradually accrete”.⁵

Another psychiatrist, Richard Green⁶, mentored by both Money and Stoller, studied children (born as) boys with very feminine gender expressions. Finally, a maverick physician—Harry Benjamin⁷—responded helpfully to adult transsexual women who pleaded for surgical and hormonal transformation of their external, masculine bodies so that they could exist more peacefully with their internal, feminine sense of self. Each of these clinicians responded to and worked with outspoken patients who advocated both publically and privately for their own interests. Out of this ferment, during which caregivers grappled with human variation that the term sex could not accomodate, came the concepts of gender and gender identity.

©Anne Fausto-Sterling

Then feminists entered the fray. During the 1970s and 1980s many feminists hoped that Money’s ideas would offer an exit strategy from oppressions justified by biological determinism. For too long biology had been used to argue against women’s right to vote, women’s right to a higher education, women’s right to inherit property, women’s right (and capacity) to hold political office, and more and more.⁸ In Sexual Politics (1970), Kate Millett⁹ made short work of biological reasons offered to explain women’s oppression. Instead, she used Money’s and Stoller’s gender concepts to argue that women could attain equality through social and cultural change. In 1976, another feminist, Gayle Rubin¹⁰ defined gender in terms of social structures—laws and practices that constrained or discriminated against women. (I will return to Rubin in Part 3).

The invention of gender was liberating, except when it wasn’t. It offered a theory for political activism. If, for example, women were not biologically unable to manage their own money, then why did banks refuse to offer them credit without a male relative signing off in it? If girls were lagging in math performance, it was not something inherent in the math nodule in their brains. It was because they took fewer math courses and encountered aggressive bias when they did take an advanced class. When I was an assistant professor, major journals such as Science still published want ads seeking “the right man for the job”. Gender became a political battle cry and feminists used the Civil Rights Act of 1964¹¹ to gain more civil rights. The EO has this Act in its gunsite.

Money, Stoller, Benjamin, Green and most feminists, Millet included, never questioned the male/female binary. Money developed a scheme to make sure intersex kids got slotted into “the correct” sex. He could not imagine intermediacy as a liveable option. Stoller’s work with transsexual women focused on making sure the people who sought his help could live successfully as the “opposite” sex. They all recognized sexual and gender variation. But they only had two bins, one labeled masculine and the other feminine, to accomodate human variety.

“Gender” and “Gender Identity” started out with different aims. “Gender” had the potential to liberate women from the imagined limitations of biology. “Gender Identity” provided lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people with a way out of the medicalized hell which often greeted them if they tried to live a life in which they were true to themselves. And honestly, for a while this worked. All these groups gained greater public acceptance. Matters from medical attention to civil rights improved. But safer public self-expression and more civil rights produced safe (enough) space for people to question whether a strict binary framework accurately accounted for their own gendered sense of self. LGB became LGBT, became LGBTQ, became LGBTQI and young people engaged with possibilities from A-binary to X-gender.¹²

Age matters when it comes to non-binary gender identities. Graph source

The EO claims it wants to defend women and restore biological truth in order to contain an explosion of non-binary gender identity and the accompanying demands—for medical transformation, for social transformations, for a peaceful place to pee, for participating in sports in their chosen body and their felt psyches. And to be fair, change has come rapidly. In a mere 20 years the number of straight (named at birth as) females who identify as a different gender has nearly doubled (an almost 100% increase); the increase for (labeled at birth) males was about 16%. It was going so well, really, but the rapid change also produced a lot of fear. Some feminists were fearful of diluting their “category”, some parents felt overwhelmed as their own children “came out” and asked for new medical interventions, and medical practitioners are slow (for both good and bad reasons) to change treatment approaches. All that simmered at low to medium heat until rightwing politicians ramped up the flane with increasingly invasive legal pushback—in the states and now federally.

Here’s how the Executive Order Orwellianizes gender identity. It is not, the EO authors write, a real and truthful representation of an individual’s deepest self. Instead it is “disconnected from biological reality and sex” (which they claimed to be resolutely real, and completely binary). Gender identity cannot, according to the EO provide a meaningful basis for identification. Only eggs and sperm, which they (erroneously) name as the definers of true sex, can.

So, finally, we come to the sleight of hand. In the Executive Order, gender as a stand-alone, as a social component of of human development, disappears, then reappears joined to the word ideology. That is the new nut, the one the EO hopes it can use to make the entire LGBTQI alphabet of people disappear. And make no mistake, all ye straight women who want transwomen out of public bathrooms, this order is coming for you, for your credit cards and your rights to equal access and reproductive freedom.

How? In Part 3 I dig into the last switcheroo--gender ideology.

1. When administering or enforcing sex-based distinctions, every agency andall Federal employees acting in an official capacity on behalf of their agencyshall use the term “sex” and not “gender” in all applicable Federal policiesand documents.”“

2. World Health Organization Gender Definition

3. Ngram Viewer

4. see: Velocci B. The history of sex research: Is "sex" a useful category? Cell. 2024;187(6):1343-6 and Dreger A. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge: Harvard University press; 1998.

5. Stoller, R. (1985). Presentations of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press p. 11

6. Wikipedia: A list of gender identities

7. Click to learn more about Richard Green

8. Harry Benjamin The Transsexual Phenomenon

9. I documented a lot of this history in Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (1985; 1993)

10. Click to learn more about Kate Millett

11. Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women.

12. Civil Rights Act 1964