In a grim executive order geared towards denying transgender rights, Donald Trump's White House seems to have made a serious blunder about biology.
Titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government," the sweeping new order — signed just hours after Trump returned to the Oval Office — attempts to establish a new legal definition of sex as part of its rollback of trans rights.
This legislation is horrific and will inevitably be challenged by civil rights groups. But it also appears to get the science majorly wrong — to the point that it seems, according to some scientists, to have accidentally declared that all Americans are now female.
According to the order, the US only recognizes two sexes, male and female, which are defined respectively as a "person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell" and a "person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell" — a clunky and potentially AI-generated way of saying "produces eggs" and "produces sperm," basically.
The "at conception" part seems, as critics have suggested, to be a ham-fisted attempt at sneaking a "fetal personhood" argument into the transphobic order. It also ignores that the XX fetuses Trump is attempting to define as universally being girls don't typically start to develop the eggs they might one day use to reproduce until months after conception, and the XY children the order is attempting to define as universally being boys don't start to develop sperm until late childhood.
"Conception results in a single cell that does not have gonads or make gametes, obviously," journalist and former biology professor Emily Willingham wrote in a Bluesky thread about the biological fallacies in the order. "It's weeks into development before the organs for pelvic anatomy start to be established, [and] even then, how they'll develop isn't a given."
"Inundated by emails from biologist pals chortling that Trump's anti-trans executive order legally defines every American as female," wrote acclaimed historian Charles Mann, pointing to a 2001 scientific paper about how during the weeks following conception, "all fetal genitalia are the same and are phenotypically female."
The reality, of course, is while sex markers like chromosomes are immutable, people express their gender in all kinds of ways; for one example among many, look no further than this video of Trump flirting with former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani while the latter is dressed in elaborate drag.
Attorney Jay Reding took it a step further, joking on Bluesky that because "at conception all embryos are female," the order "outlaws men" — which "to be honest, might not be such a bad thing."
Though it's easy enough to laugh at this order's nonsense biology, Willingham surmised that ultimately, its ignorance doesn't matter.
"I know these people don't care," she wrote. "But I care [about] developmental biology [and] despise this willful, useless ignorance designed to hurt people."
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