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One of Donald Trump\u2019s first acts as President was to\u00a0sign an Executive Order<\/a> insisting that there are only two biological sexes: male and female. While it\u2019s not within the power of the President of the United States or any other country to mandate such a thing, Trump\u2019s move had immediate effects. It went hand in hand with an order eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in federal agencies. Across the United States,\u00a0corporations<\/a> and universities<\/a>\u00a0dropped their DEI programs, either out of fear of losing federal funds or contracts, or simply to impress the administration with their ability to change with the times.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s actions most immediately affect transgender and nonbinary people, denying access to gender-affirming care, gender-marker changes on IDs, and a variety of other services that allow trans and nonbinary people to safely and comfortably exist in their bodies and in the world. If this were all the administration did, it would be enough. But orders enforcing so-called biological sex are about much more than banning trans people from public life. Reinforcing a supposedly \u201ctraditional\u201d binary is about gender roles broadly: It is about men getting manly-man jobs and women returning to the kitchen and the nursery.<\/p>\n As historian Jules Gill-Peterson writes in her book\u00a0A Short History of Trans Misogyny<\/em><\/a>, rightwing authoritarianism comes first for trans women \u201cbecause it aims to preserve, or entrench, existing social hierarchies through the production of an imagined threat from those with the least demonstrated power, demanding violence to put them down.\u201d (Trump\u2019s Executive Orders are clothed in the language of \u201cdefend[ing] women\u2019s rights,\u201d marking out trans women in particular as a threat.) Misogyny broadly is not simple hatred of women, nor is trans misogyny or transphobia a somehow natural fear of trans people\u2019s bodies. Rather, Gill-Peterson writes, it is social and often state policing and punishment inflicted upon \u201ccertain women for their perceived failures to stay subordinate to men.\u201d Transphobic violence and policy are tools to keep us all in line\u2014and the line they want us toeing is one of a very particular set of gender roles.<\/p>\n This is visible in Trump\u2019s policies, Sharita Gruberg, vice president for economic justice at the\u00a0National Partnership for Women and Families<\/a>\u00a0(NPWF), explains to me. The Executive Order, she says, allows members of the Trump Administration \u201cto review anything that has gender in it.\u201d The public face was the attack on trans people, but the implementation goes beyond, \u201ctrying to claw back gender equity projects and work and data.\u201d<\/p>\n NPWF\u2019s research shows that states that have\u00a0attacked or banned<\/a>\u00a0gender-affirming care have also banned or attempted to\u00a0ban abortion<\/a>; the laws are written by the same set of politicians broadly aligned with Trump\u2019s agenda. (Commentators have\u00a0noted<\/a>\u00a0that the Executive Order\u2019s fixation on sex \u201cat conception\u201d aligns with attempts at legislating a fetus as a person.) Those same states often\u00a0lack<\/a>\u00a0the kinds of equal pay protections and paid leave that have made it possible for women to enter and succeed in the workplace. These states have low minimum wages and often have not expanded Medicaid.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biological essentialism reinforces gender essentialism, which is just not how most families work regardless of their gender and biological sex makeup,\u201d says Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at the Institute for Women\u2019s Policy Research. \u201cThe reality of modern American family life requires much more flexibility. The reality is that it\u2019s mostly two working parents these days who are piecing it together the best way they can, because we have an economy that requires both parents to work. Reinforcing this binary harms families that are actually trying to figure out ways to care for each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Such retrograde gender roles are central to the ideal that \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d aspires to, yet that ideal was never a reality for most people, Bahn notes. Women\u2014particularly Black women\u2014have always participated in the workforce more than the idealized\u00a0Leave It to Beaver<\/em>, mid-century memory shows. And today, that reality is even less likely to apply, despite the best efforts of \u201ctradwife<\/a>\u201d influencers. Women are in the workforce\u00a0out of necessity<\/a>\u00a0as much as desire, and most children, even if they do grow up in a family with one man and one woman as parents, will see both of them going to work because the rent is too damn high. That means that birthing parents probably need access to lactation rooms or at least a private space; meanwhile, a man might have to bring his young child into the restroom regardless of the gender on the restroom door. Today\u2019s realities, though, are the last things on the minds of Trump Administration policymakers.<\/p>\n The Trump playbook, Gruberg notes, looks very similar to the one that has existed around the globe since at least the 1980s. The Vatican, for example, opposed not only abortion, but also women working outside of the home, the entire existence of queer people, and then trans people as a more recent addition.<\/p>\n \u201cThe attacks that we\u2019re seeing in the administration on trans people are aligned with that worldview, [which is] trying to re-establish in multiple ways this belief that they have of not only two genders or two sexes, whatever word they\u2019re using that day, but that those two also have some prescribed role by God that they\u2019re supposed to uphold.\u201d<\/p>\n While it\u2019s easy to see that social conservatives, like former Vice President Mike Pence, think this way, researchers such as Melinda Cooper have noted that neoliberalism, too, is invested in propping up a certain kind of \u201cfamily values.\u201d In her book of the same name\u2014Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism<\/a><\/em>\u2014Cooper writes, \u201cIt would not be an exaggeration to say that the enormous political activism of American neoliberals in the 1970s was inspired by the fact of changing family structures.\u201d Cooper points out that Chicago school economists like Gary Becker \u201cunderstood the breakdown of the Fordist family wage to be the critical event of his time, and one whose reverberations could be discerned in everything from shifting race relations to the recomposition of the labor market and the changing imperatives of social welfare.\u201d Neoliberals, she argued, were concerned with the \u201csocial costs\u201d that come from the breakdown of the Fordist family\u2014the wife at home supported by a husband making enough money to pay all the bills. Those costs are financial: Neoliberals were, of course, obsessed with welfare reform and refusing to pay for children who were not born in the right kind of family.<\/p>\n Becker, Bahn notes, argued that \u201cunder modern capitalism, specialization is the most productive way to allocate resources . . . . But he thought households worked that way as well. He thought households should specialize.\u201d He described people as different \u201ctypes\u201d rather than explicitly referring to gender, she notes, but still, \u201cbasically in his ideal world, girls would just go to home economics and boys would take the other suite of classes, because if, generally speaking, girls have more of an affinity for caregiving, why would you train them in anything else?\u201d Such families, organized into hierarchies, were the building blocks of the broader hierarchical society that thinkers like Becker wanted to uphold.<\/p>\n Of course, since the decline of the Fordist factory job, few families can afford such specialization\u2014or rather, the specialization continues, and women continue to do most of the care work, but they do it as a \u201csecond shift<\/a>\u201d after a paid job that contributes to the family and the broader economy. \u201cThe rise of inequality would be much worse, but the fact that women have increased their labor force participation and have more access to a greater variety of jobs is the thing that has stabilized families in the past forty years,\u201d Bahn says.<\/p>\n But the MAGA longing for the Fordist family is about more than the loss of family-wage jobs. Cooper chides those who would treat gender, race, and sexuality as merely \u201csocial\u201d issues; today many people are calling Trump\u2019s gender orders \u201cdistractions\u201d or purely \u201cculture war\u201d red meat for a social conservative base. But, Bahn reminds us, \u201cthe Fordist politics of class was itself a form of identity politics inasmuch as it established white, married masculinity as a point of access to full social protection.\u201d<\/p>\n The economic and the social are deeply intertwined, and while Trump and his cronies aren\u2019t even offering the carrot of bringing back good factory jobs anymore, they\u2019re hoping instead to force us back into the old social hierarchy\u2014with white, married, working men on top\u2014purely through the use of sticks. Gruberg points to a\u00a0directive<\/a>\u00a0from Sean Duffy, Trump\u2019s Transportation Secretary, which states that \u201cthe department\u2019s grant and loan programs should prioritize projects in \u2018communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,\u2019 to the extent allowed by law.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very specific view of what kinds of families, what kind of marriage they want,\u201d Gruberg notes. The Family Research Council, one of the contributors to Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for Trump\u2019s second term, has a long history of \u201chand-wringing about Black children born to unmarried moms and the fatherlessness contributing to crime [and] mental illness,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re just doubling down on it by centralizing power and pushing this worldview through at all costs.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a politics of anxious masculinity filtered through the family: Note Trump\u2019s Executive Order\u00a0taking aim at ensuring that the Department of Defense\u00a0focuses on<\/a>\u00a0\u201cdeveloping the requisite warrior ethos.\u201d Rather than providing the kinds of things that actually incentivize childbearing\u2014family and medical leave, paid child care, and most importantly, higher wages and stable costs of living\u2014they\u2019re relying on rhetoric and punishment. There is an aspect of these policies, again, that is about reinforcing dominance. And white supremacy and patriarchy are both about dominance.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no surprise that the administration is joining rightwing politicians around the world in its attack on what it calls \u201cgender ideology<\/a>,\u201d just as it does in its attacks on migrants. Hungary\u2019s Viktor Orb\u00e1n, for example, has framed his attacks on LGBTQ+ media as \u201cchild protection,\u201d a common pose among the global far right. Declining birth rates\u2014but only the right kind of \u201cnative\u201d births\u2014are an obsession, as is the fear of\u00a0being replaced<\/a>\u00a0by immigrants, who are often portrayed as having too many children. The desire to turn back the clock on human rights is global, and while it is unlikely that any of these politicians can return us to 1945 with an Executive Order, \u201cthey can cause a tremendous amount of damage in the process, even if they don\u2019t succeed in their goal,\u201d Gruberg notes.<\/p>\n But what would it look like to really support families in 2025? Far from a warrior ethos and an end to women at work, what parents (and, importantly, children) need, Gruberg says, is equal pay and jobs free of discrimination, paid family leave and sick time, paid child care and elder care, and a raise and paid overtime. Yet conservatives have moaned over child care requirements in the CHIPS and Science Act, and made sure that the child tax credit\u2014the Biden Administration\u2019s flagship success for working families\u2014was dead. Trump benefited\u2014and Biden suffered\u2014electorally from precisely the demographic that such policies would\u2014and briefly did\u2014help.<\/p>\n As economist J.W. Mason\u00a0points out<\/a>, \u201cDuring 2020-2021, the federal government did more than ever before in history to support the incomes and living standards of ordinary Americans. Then it\u00a0took that support away<\/a>.\u201d He adds, \u201cWhen Democrats boasted, in 2021, of the largest-ever reduction in child poverty rates, was there an understanding that it would be followed, a year later, by the largest-ever increase<\/a>?\u201d<\/p>\n It is hard in this moment to point to a lesson beyond the obvious: that Trump is unconstrained by any belief in precedent or compromise, while Democrats often let their wins slip through their fingers, giving policies expiration dates or, Gruberg notes, calling something a \u201cdown payment\u201d on the end goal that never comes. The Family and Medical Leave Act, for instance, just passed its thirty-second anniversary, but still provides only unpaid leave.<\/p>\n There is one bit of advice to take away from all of this: We do not, as the saying goes, live single-issue lives. \u201cCommunities are being connected through the shared experience of being under attack,\u201d Gruberg says. \u201cAnd the only way to effectively fight back is to recognize our shared future here and the reality that our ability to thrive and survive this relies on us working together across issues and across identities to fight for\u2014not restoring, but advancing\u2014more equitable policies.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of Donald Trump\u2019s first acts as President was to\u00a0sign an Executive Order insisting that there are only two biological sexes: male and female. While it\u2019s not within the power of the President of the United States or any other country to mandate such a thing, Trump\u2019s move had immediate effects. It went hand in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":192482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[67583,2394,2752,2083,17303,46922],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-192481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-april-may-2025","tag-attack","tag-experience","tag-magazine","tag-shared","tag-work-won"],"yoast_head":"\n