"'Women' is a banned word": Trump uses trans panic to strip rights from all women

In a country where 1 out of 6 women have experienced rape or attempted rape, Republicans believe they've found the real threat to female safety: The slim possibility that a cis college athlete might tie for 5th place in a swim meet with a trans woman. It happened once, and according to Donald Trump and his followers, it's the worst thing that has possibly happened to a woman in all of human history. "We will not allow men to beat up, injure, and cheat girls," Trump declared last week as he rolled out an executive order banning trans women from sports.

In terms of Trump's lies, this one was especially obnoxious, as Trump himself was found by a civil jury liable for sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll. His Cabinet nominations have been a murder's row of men accused of rape, sex trafficking, and other abuses of women. The lies are layered upon each other because his speech was about trans women in sports. That has nothing to do with injuring women, as trans women are women and there's no evidence that any of them are hurting cis women. 

His lies also depend on people not reading his various anti-trans executive orders. It's not just that these orders have nothing to do with "protecting" women. Then text of the orders is an all-out attack on all women, both cis and trans. Trump is exploiting an anti-trans panic, which far too many centrists and liberals have enabled over the years, as cover for the long-standing conservative goal of trying to reverse decades of women's progress in education, the military, and science. 

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In response to an executive order titled "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Radicalism," the U.S. military has halted sexual assault prevention programs. Part of the problem is the order uses vague language such as, "Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology." "Gender ideology" is a nonsense term, meant to obscure meaning and frighten people. It's invoked by the right any time the concepts of gender and equality come together. Some conservatives use it primarily to mean "respecting trans people." But others take a more expansive view, using the term to demonize anyone who acknowledges that oppression and violence are sometimes about gender. Simply put, it's impossible to talk about the causes and impacts of sexual assault and harassment without acknowledging gender, which could get someone accused of "gender ideology." No wonder military leaders are "pausing" these programs. 

This is being reported as a side effect, but it's likely the goal. Despite a handful of feminists falling down the anti-trans rabbit hole because they once saw the phrase "pregnant people," the vast majority of transphobia is coming from people who hold cis women in contempt, as well. The reason conservatives are obsessed with, to quote Trump's order, defining sex as an "immutable biological classification as either male or female" is so they know which group of people to deem inferior. Trans people are uncomfortable reminder that men and women's bodies are not so different, and that the assumption that men are biologically superior is not grounded in fact. 

That much was made evident by Trump's anti-trans speech, in which he falsely declared "a male boxer stole the female gold" in the Paris Olympics. He's referring to Imane Khelif, a cis woman from Algeria who has become the subject of a vicious international smear campaign by the right. Khelif is not a man, nor is she trans. But she's relatively tall at 5'10", muscular, and dark-skinned. Because she doesn't fit what the right believes women "should" look like — small, light-skinned, frail — she's being called a "man." Despite claiming to believe gender is "immutable," conservatives are eager to strip gender identity away from even cis women who don't fit their narrow view of what "women" should be. This attitude also reveals that, far from "protecting" women's sports, most conservatives hold female athletes in contempt.  If what makes you a "woman" is to cultivate physical fragility so men feel stronger in comparison, no female athlete is safe from being called a "man." 

Unsurprisingly, then, the Trump administration is using the trans panic to take a hammer to the very program that allowed women's athletics to flourish in the first place: Title IX, a 1972 law that bans sex discrimination in education. President Joe Biden's administration updated the program to make it stronger and more inclusive, strengthening rules to prevent sexual assault and harassment on campus, and expanding protections for pregnant students. The updated rules also expanded protections for LGBTQ students, with some allowance for trans athletes, though it fell far short of what many advocates asked for. Using this trans clause as a pretext, Trump and an allied federal judge have rescinded all of these new regulations. As Kylie Cheung of Jezebel explained, the main impact of this order will be to "make it even easier for students to get away with sexual misconduct." To "protect" cis women from imaginary threats from trans women, Trump has raised the already-high threat of sexual violence, most at the hands of cis men, on campus. Schools are already being forced to respond by taking away resources from victims of sexual violence and ending programs meant to help keep pregnant students in school 

That the anti-trans panic is a stalking horse to strip rights and protections away from all women is most bluntly seen in the world of medical research. Trump's executive orders banning "gender ideology" may be sold to the public as an anti-trans initiative, but, as the Washington Post reported, the White House enforcement appears to be taking a broader view that any reference to gender is a threat. The National Science Foundation was told to comb through thousands of active research projects and defund any deemed too "woke." That's a big project, so they've been given a list of keywords deemed red flags for "wokeness." Among those words: "female," "women," and even "trauma." One poster on Bluesky noted that we'll soon have "a Ministry of Double Speak" and "Also - 'women' is a banned word."

It's easy to dismiss this as stupidity, but I'd argue it was deliberate. This was never meant to be limited to trans women but to expand the right-wing's assault on all women. If conservatives were solely motivated by the view that there are two genders who are vastly different from each other biologically, they couldn't possibly object to research that focuses on women's bodies. If the goal is reinstating a social order where men are the only people who matter, this order makes more sense. This is the same party that keeps passing draconian abortion bans that kill women. Of course, they don't care if they end medical research that could save women's lives. 

All this certainly exposes the lie that Trump or the MAGA movement cares about "protecting women." What they actually care about is protecting gender hierarchy. But it's politically unpopular for Republicans to simply state that they long for a world where rape is unprosecutable and women are pushed out of school, sports and occupations like science and military service. Unlike cis women, who are about half the population, trans people are a small and vulnerable minority, making it far easier to demonize them, especially to credulous centrists. But MAGA was never going to stop at harassing trans people. Creating the scare term "gender ideology" was inevitably going to create space to attack anyone who doesn't conform to a rigid, misogynist worldview, including cis women who want to go to college or join the military.