On Day One of his second term, President Donald Trump took bold action to protect women’s rights by signing a powerful executive order defining male and female as the only two and separate sexes. Trump’s sex-definition executive order is a nationwide victory for women and girls.
Trump’s order protects women from those “who deny the biological reality of sex” and “increasingly 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, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers.”
As Trump noted, efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally degrade women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy debases not just women but the validity of the entire justice system.
Polling shows people, including most Democrats, overwhelmingly reject the unfairness of men in women’s sports and want female athletics protected. Female athletes lose scholarships and prize money, suffer indecent exposure to male genitalia, and suffer concussions and other grave injuries or risk of injuries from much larger, stronger males.
But as Trump noted, damage from this dangerous ideology creeps far beyond athletics. Female inmates in prison and women and girls in domestic violence shelters also deserve privacy and safety.
Otherwise, male prisoners cloaked in false gender ideology can transfer to women’s prisons and easily overpower and sexually assault female inmates. Men and boys claiming to identify as females can sexually assault schoolgirls and women in bathrooms and locker rooms.
In Loudoun County, in my home state of Virginia, a boy wearing a skirt exploited transgender policies and sexually assaulted a girl in the bathroom. After lax school safety failed to protect other girls, he assaulted a second one.
Case law under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause recognizes inherent differences between men and women. Thus, precedents recognize that to ensure equal protection under the law, men and women sometimes must be treated distinctly. Trump preserved the Constitution through this order.
Over the past four years, gender ideology has infiltrated our schools, culture, policies, and laws, distorting our language with Orwellian terms such as “pregnant person,” “chest feeders,” and “bleeders” and forced use of opposite-sex pronouns.
Former President Joe Biden attempted an illegal rewrite of Title IX that threatened women and girls’ safety nationwide, but Trump’s order resoundingly rejects that and creates needed legal clarity to sex-based words such as “woman,” “man,” “female,” and “male,” while preserving the legal existence of women as distinct from men.
Trump’s order decreed that “the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality.”
Groups such as Independent Women, which leads the fight to protect women, rejoiced. Trump’s executive order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” was written by my former Independent Women colleague, May Mailman, who just joined Trump’s domestic policy council.
Independent Women created model legislation defining sex-based terms in law and code to stop bureaucrats and elitists on federal and state levels from redefining language to fit a false narrative and erase women.
We shepherded this model legislation into law in eight states, protecting more than 14 million women and girls. An additional 14 states introduced Independent Women’s definitions legislation. We are at the forefront of legal battles against gender ideology — including suing the Biden administration, the state of New York, sororities that admitted men, and more.
Gender ideologues sacrificed women’s rights to single-sex spaces, opportunities, and privacy on the altar of a radical view of “inclusion.” The pernicious creation of “gender ideology” underpinning this effort to erase women came through “critical gender theory.” It falls under broader critical theory created by toxic German Marxists at the Frankfurt School in 1923.
It’s a sad 21st-century reality that America must explicitly define words such as “women” and “men” into law. The lie that sex is fluid erases and endangers women. Trump’s action last Monday is a resounding victory for truth: that sex is binary, and women are biologically distinct from men. His repudiation of gender identity indoctrination brings back sanity and common sense.
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Eight years after Trump entered the White House his first time, the thunderous 2017 Women’s March shrank to a whimper this year. Leftists surrendered women’s rights. They can’t even define what a woman is, let alone protect one.
Our brand-new president stopped the Left’s attempts to erase the concept of women as a separate sex. Women and girls everywhere are cheering Trump for it.
Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst for Independent Women.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
