Biological truth? WTF? Part 3

The Government's Gender Ideology Extremism

The Title of the January 20, 2025 Exececutive Order (EO) begins “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM”. Reading down the order past the definitions of sex, women, men, female and male (already discussed on WTF Parts 1, 1.5 and 2), we arrive at “gender ideology”. The EO says that “Gender ideology replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity…(and) includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.”

Vast spectrum © Anne Fausto-Sterling

This definition bewilders me. So I begin instead with the Merriam-Webster Dictionary that says that ideology is “the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program” and—and I will return to this — “visionary theorizing”.

The EO seems to be saying that “Those people”, whoever they are (liberals? feminists? gender/sex activists? the Civil Rights Act?) have an ideology that is illogical and flies in the face of the known fact that there are two sexes and no gender. By implication, the authors of the EO have no ideology, just the truth about biology—there are males/men who have small sex cells and females/women who have big ones (WTF1 and WTF2). The equation reads: they have an extreme ideology while we have none. We have the truth. Follow us. Erase them. (And indeed the EO ends with a long list of documents and government websites designated for deletion).

The equation looks like a no brainer, except for one rather considerable problem: everyone has an ideology which structures how they interpret the world.

The EO’s gender ideology goes something like this: men and women are people with small or large reproductive cells. There is no normal variation. So, the rare person who doesn’t fit into this “two is normal” ideology—say an XY person with testes who looks and feels like a women (as in androgen insensitivity)— must be medically abnormal. Medical or psychiatric treatment might be appropriate but they (potentially) have those pesky small sex cells. So regardless of large breasts, or a vagina and a sense of self as female/woman they must be male/men. Such a conclusion results from the Executive Order’s gender ideology extremism that holds that there are only two sexes.

According to the EO authors’ ideology, claims to be normally non-binary sre fraudulent and possibly illegal. In recent times such claims gained legal validity, allowing gender-non-conforming people, for example, to obtain passports marked X for gender, or protecting them against discrimination in work, housing and schools. Or sports, which has freaked out a lot of people, and to which I will devote a separate substack. The current executive order pushes back on the idea that people all along the spectrum of human gender/sex/uality deserve legal protection and social recognition.

I also use a gender ideology to frame how I understand gender/sex variation. Rather than extreme, however, I see it as visionary, which is a second meaning offered by Merriam-Webster. I observe and analyze gender/sex variability as continuous, not either/or. Starting with physiology and anatomy I notice wide variation among people who the EO defines as female/women. Big breasts, small breasts, broad shoulders, narrow waist, large clitoris, small clitoris, long labia, short labia. The same idea holds for the EO-defined male/man. And then there are people with mixed reproductive anatomy or physiology—a penis and breasts, ovaries and testes, high testosterone levels and a “female” anatomy. And more.

There are heterosexual people, homosexual people, transgender people, bisexual people, etc. (the famous LGBTQI). A wide variety of desires, attractions and identities have always existed. In different historical eras they have been named differently, embraced, or rejected. Different cultures define and assimilate gender/sex variation in different ways. My ideology, as a biologist and also as a feminist activist, embraces the biological normality of human gender/sex variation.

Each gender ideology, my visionary one and their gender extremism, is compatible with a particular social vision.

An ideolgy of natural variation synergizes with a belief in social equality, a belief that generally, men and women (trans or not), people of whatever sexual orientation, deserve the same educational, job, housing, and travel opportunities. Everyone should be welcome in the public sphere. Everyone also has the right to control their own bodies— no forced sterilization, no forced pregnancies, no forced hormone treatments for rapists, and more. And speaking of controlling their own bodies, no matter how squeamish I may or may not feel about a particular voluntary medical procedure, it is not my job to interfere. I do not try to prevent straight women from getting breast implants or surgically modifying their vaginal labia. Or take hormones. Nor is it my business to intervene in affirmative care for trans people. The medical profession, in interaction with patients and group activists can judge these matters for themselves.

My social ideology and my scientific beliefs about gender/sex are intertwined. This does NOT mean that I ignore data. I believe deeply in empiricism. But my ideologies shape what I study and how I collect and interpret data. Just as my social theory focuses on human variation and equality, my biological theory leads me to look at how bodies change over the life cycle. I see that physiology responds to social context and developmental history.

The EO’s gender ideology extremism oozes out from their words and screams loudly from their enforcement actions. They start with word enforcement. From now on government websites and any government-supported research can only use the word sex. Gender has been banished, both as a noun or adjective and a concept. Gender, pregnancy, sex, male, female, care, breastfeed, diversity, and many more words have been scrubbed from government websites. The EO ideologues are even trying to prevent academic journals from publishing research on these topics.

Some of the words scrubbed from government websites

The current U.S. government’s assault on gender/sex variation has been relentless. The State Department has confiscated trans people’s passports, ordering people to list the sex assigned at birth (although this phrase is now banned), even if they have legally changed their birth certificate. State is also preventing foreign LGBTQ people from entering the country. Now only EO-men and EO-women can serve in the armed forces. And the Defense and Health and Human Services Departments have suspended $175 million in grant money already earned by the University of Pennsylvania because they have one (did I say ONE?) transgender athlete on their women’s swim team. These are the tip of the iceburg in terms of instructions to erase gender/sex variation.

If this isn’t gender ideology extremism then I don’t know what is. This Executive Order calls out ideological extremism in unnamed others, when the order’s promulgaters are the real ideological extremists.