When Biology Needs Some Help
The gracious clarity of Trump's anti-gender regime
Perhaps the most pivotal aspect of the campaign to erase transgender people from public life for the activists and pundits pushing it is the need to disguise both its means and its ends. In the stories told in right-wing media, conservative journals, and state party platforms, the very notion of “gender ideology” is a threat to principles loosely held and as often undermined by those same institutions, be it women’s sports, parent’s rights, free speech, liberal feminism, medical ethics, or the safety of children.
As recently relayed to Maggie Astor, this virtue signaling is a kind of political drag, a costume used to distract from the overall goal of eliminating the very notion of cross-gender identification, or even gender nonconformity, from the state and culture:
Matt Sharp, senior counsel and state government relations national director for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said his group believed “gender ideology attacks the truth that every person is either male or female.”
And [Terry] Schilling, of the American Principles Project, confirmed that his organization’s long-term goal was to eliminate transition care. The initial focus on children, he said, was a matter of “going where the consensus is.”
At the core of much of this obfuscation is the reliance upon “biology” as somehow a virtue itself, based on the farcical idea the full spectrum of human biology supports anything like a gender binary and the ahistorical idea biology could never be deployed for misogynistic and racist purposes.
In the most often told version of the anti-trans story, “biology” is being resisted by a postmodern kind of decadence, a celebration of the self as the only reality that matters. And if we simply cease this project, then the biological reality of traditional, complimentary sexes will be allowed to resume as God, nature, or both intended.
As Ryan Anderson writes:
Whereas for most of human history our sexual embodiment was a sheer given, allowing us to unite conjugally and form families, the modern therapeutic turn inward counsels people to be true to their inner sexual desires. What was once simply self-evident, that a boy should grow up to be a man, become a husband, and assume the responsibilities of a father, now entails a search to discover an inner truth about “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” based on emotions and will, rather than nature and reason. Historically one’s “gender identity” was determined by bodily sex, as was “sexual orientation”—a male’s “identity” was a man and he was “oriented” by nature and reason to unite with a woman, regardless of where his (fallen) desires might incline him.
In this telling, the notion that gender could ever exist separate from biology—or even that biology itself isn’t so clear-cut—is like a pollutant in the air our children breathe, emitted by a factory Ryan and others are keen to shut down. Once they do, we’re told, the untouchable wind of human nature will blow away this Marxist smog and replace it with cool, clean, Christian air.
Enter into this china shop of rhetoric, like a riot into the Capitol rotunda, Donald Trump. Trump’s core asset for many on the right has long been a complete lack of shame, an apparent freedom from consequence or censure that enables him to say aloud what they’ve often had to couch in euphemisms and rhetorical exercises. Trump does not now nor seemingly ever has felt the need Schilling invokes to go “where the consensus is” and is a one-term President and failed kingmaker for it.
In a platform announced last week, Trump laid out a whole-of-government effort to purge transgender people and our rights from public life: ending insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, prosecuting the people who provide it, and repeating measures his administration took during his first term to, as was memorably put, “define transgender out of existence.” This would include censoring any public official or institution that receives public funds—schools, hospitals, contractors, and other massive wings of our entire society—who dare mention sexual orientation or gender identities other than the ones Trump prescribes.
More than just trans exclusion, however, Trump asserts a need to enforce gender rules with the threat of prosecution, weaponizing public institutions to mold children based in Trump’s own gender ideology. This includes a new government agency that will force teachers to provide a “positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique.” School districts or faculty which resist this new Lavendar Scare would become its victims, be denied all federal funding, and be threatened with federal charges.
Most tellingly of all, however, is Trump’s appeal to Congress to pass a bill establishing that “The only genders recognized by the U.S. government are male and female—and they are assigned at birth” (emphasis not mine). It mirrors language in proposed restrictions on drag performances which, in defining drag performers (those who “exhibit a gender identity other than the one they were assigned at birth” read one voted through the Arkansas state House), tacitly admit that all gender is performance, a role you’ve been cast to play.
This is rather a shocking admittance from a movement that, by and large, echoes the vision of humanity offered by Anderson, resting its entire messaging and legal strategy upon the naturalistic fallacy of the gender binary and the notion that “gender identity” or “gender assignment” are relatively recent inventions of leftists and academics to replace immutable and complimentary “sexes.” If these sexes are simply the truth that lives in each of us and gender is a poisonous delusion, then wouldn’t the end of transsexual medicine or a permissive attitude towards transgender identities be enough to cease it? How do we align the idea that sex and gender as described by Anderson are a “sheer given” without leftist indoctrination but are also at risk of collapse without rigid enforcement of gender assignment, pedagogy in complementarian gender roles, and censorship of all behaviors, histories, narratives, and ideas that challenge them?
Writing recently in the National Review, Nate Hochman made these contradictions even more blatant by uttering them within the same breath:
Having dismantled the various social, economic, and political mores and habits that we had developed, over the course of centuries, to cultivate and steward those distinctions — what the Left derisively referred to as “gender roles” — progressivism has now arrived at the final barrier on the road to universal homogeneity: biological distinction itself. There is simply no “moderate” version of a project that seeks not only to destroy the idea of distinctions between men and women but to artificially dismantle the structural evidence that those distinctions ever existed — evidence that is written into the basic composition of the human body itself.
Hochman leaves unanswered who “we” are, what “social, economic, and political mores” have been dismantled or by what (no-fault divorce? women having bank accounts? suffrage?), or why “we” must “cultivate and steward” gendered distinctions if they are “written into the basic composition of the human body itself.” Why must a fait accompli of biology and human nature need the rigid enforcement of the state? What are we cultivating? Who are we stewarding? And what consequences await the people who turn down this kindly offer and resist this taming?
Given the current direction of conservative policymaking, the only thing their gender regime appears to be cultivating is the trauma of underage incest victims forced to give birth to their rapist’s children and the only thing it appears to be stewarding is trans youth into the grave, so it can be hard to guess what is on or off the table.
In fact, Hochman’s language reminded of nothing as much as the official guidance on intersex people issued by Focus on the Family. The very existence of people who’s physical anatomy doesn’t align with Christian doctrine, they write, can be blamed on “a fallen state—and in a fallen world, which impacts us spiritually, emotionally, mentally and even physically.” Focus On The Family, citing Matthew:19, urges compassion for intersex folks, but:
Practically speaking, this means that we – as the Hands and Feet of Christ – are called to help intersexuals carry this “heavy yoke” and steward their assigned gender in a manner that glorifies God and, to the degree possible, reflects His created intent for human sexuality and gender.
Here, as in Hochman, Trump, and Ryan, we see the admission that gender is “assigned” and one must be “stewarded” to its fulfillment which, in the context of intersex people, often means forcibly reshaping their genitalia as infants. The political arm of Focus on the Family in fact exempts those surgeries from bans on gender-affirming care that it writes and promotes, as does the national ban proposed by Marjorie Taylor Greene. So the conservative mindset is fine with gender-affirming care, really—as long as they get to decide that gender for you.
It’s long been apparent the right has an interest in constructing identities they presume to be best, consent of the governed be damned. What’s changing is how explicit they are about it. As Rod Dreher recently wondered aloud about sexual identities, “heterosexuality is partly something innate, but also something that must be achieved.”
The best way for society to do that is to regulate sexual desire, and to channel it into socially constructive outcomes. Historically, most societies have done this through some form of polygamy (which has its own serious problems, but that is the historical norm). In Jewish and Christian societies (excluding, obviously, the Judaism of the Old Testament), the model has been one man and one woman, exclusively.
So not only does compulsory heterosexuality exist in Dreher’s telling, but its compulsory nature is simply the best path to ill-defined “socially constructive outcomes.”
What’s slowly inching out from the curtain of anti-gender rhetoric about biology—or parent’s rights, or concern for children, or women’s athletics, or liberal feminism—is an ideology of cisheterosexual elitism. It’s a belief that these identities—man and woman—are constructed, sure, but must be made to appear inevitable and all other paths impossible.
Think of it as a kind of “gender realism”: a political, economic, social, and cultural regime designed to support cisgender, heterosexual identification as the premiere, utopian path and any form of self-identification as both doomed and too dangerous to allow. Not because the latter ignores “biology” and the former follows it (neither assertion being true), but because the latter is simply “bad” and the former is “good” (insert your favorite slippery slope here). This pattern of illogic is shared with the narratives of nationalist or racial supremacy with which it is usually intertwined—an assumed inevitability often hidden under the guise of conventional wisdom.
As terrifying as that is, I can’t help but feel a bit grateful. As the ideological standard-bearer for the very politicians moving anti-transgender legislation, Trump’s refusal to dress up his transphobic policies in a decorative concern for others or some allegiance to nature is a bit of a relief. Instead of chasing down individual arguments raised to eliminate transgender rights and enforce our exclusion—often forced to put logic and evidence in the face of politicians and pundits I know don’t care about either—Trump is giving me a gift, sweeping away the respectability posturing sold by Schilling and his ilk for a discussion about identity construction at the hand of the government and the elimination of dissent against that construction.
What Trump is proposing, of course, is merely making explicit the gendered divides that are already implicit throughout much of our society. In a 2021 interview with The Guardian, Judith Butler said:
Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us. The powers that do that are part of an apparatus of gender that assigns and reassigns norms to bodies, organises them socially, but also animates them in directions contrary to those norms.
Perhaps we should think of gender as something that is imposed at birth, through sex assignment and all the cultural assumptions that usually go along with that. Yet gender is also what is made along the way – we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level.
This assignment is not limited to the gender marker on your birth certificate or the sign above your bathroom stall. As Hochman hints at above, gender is not merely a social or legal construct but an economic one, threaded through everything from the wage gap between men and women (or, indeed, the wage gap between transgender people and cisgender people) to the undervaluing of feminized forms of labor to continued discrimination in housing and credit. Opposition to policies which seek to redress these inequalities have long been dismissed with the language used by Hochman and Anderson to dismiss transgender rights today, portraying the factors which foster these distinctions as either an illusionary result of individual choices or doing God’s work for them.
These systems target not only gender outlaws more readily defined as queer or trans but also what Cathy Cohen called “those heterosexuals on the outside of heteronormative privilege.” Writing in 1997, Cohen warned a queer politics which ignores all straights—as much as feminism that ignores all men—is in danger of reinforcing the same institutions and power structures which enforce these identities in the first place:
As we stand on the verge of watching those in power dismantle the welfare system through a process of demonizing poor and young, primarily poor and young women of color-many of whom have existed for their entire lives outside the white, middle-class, heterosexual norm-we have to ask if these women do not fit into society's categories of marginal, deviant, and "queer". As we watch the explosion of prison construction and the disproportionate incarceration rates of young men and women of color, often as part of the economic development of poor white rural communities, we have to ask if these individuals do not fit society's definition of "queer" and expendable.
The intentional construction of cisgender, heterosexual identities proposed by Trump is not a unique platform but the expansion of an existing one threaded within a broader framework of constructing whiteness and conformity. That overall project, dependent upon its own air of inevitability, is threatened by the very notion one could flout, mock, reject, or rewrite gender assignment altogether.
Cohen was one of many of Black authors recently purged from an AP African-American History course by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as part of his ongoing war against all things “woke,” a term his administration’s lawyers helpfully defined as “The belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” As the crusade against critical race theory suggests, conservatives are usually eager to deny these systemic injustices—like the one’s described by Cohen—even exists, replacing it with the idea unequal outcomes between individuals based on their race are strictly the result of individual racist malice (“bad apples”) or individual choices by the people of that race (here, too, we’ve seen “biology” touted as justification and precedent for the further entrenchment of these inequalities).
It’s a maneuver that exploits the weaknesses of liberal conceptions of identity politics by rejecting the notion institutions could ever enforce and police difference while empowering public institutions to do exactly that. The abandonment of biology as the cop patrolling the streets of gender is simply the first step to calling for more such cops—be they bureaucrats deemed loyal to this project or actual cops themselves—to police not just gender but any deviation from the norm.