INTERSEX PEOPLE DON'T NEGATE TRUMP'S TWO-SEXES EXECUTIVE ORDER

National Review

 

Intersex People Don’t Negate Trump’s Two-Sexes Executive Order

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

February 5, 2025 6:30 AM

 

People with intersex conditions have long been used as the bait in the Left’s motte-and-bailey argument to declare biological sex mutable at will. Don’t buy it.

 

Among President Donald Trump’s many executive orders upon assuming office was one titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth.” In it, the president formally designated that, from the perspective of the U.S. government and federal law, there are only two sexes: male and female, defined by the gametes each body produces, eggs and sperm respectively. The EO also explicitly disallows redefining the word “sex” — as activists have done to shoehorn the concept of “gender identity” into the law.

 

That second part was necessary because the Biden-Harris administration undertook what amounted to a full-government project to make men and women legally interchangeable, rewriting important civil rights legislation with interpretations — including of “gender identity” — that are at odds with both the plain reading and the purpose of those statutes.

 

Under President Biden’s illegal rewrite of Title IX, schools were forced to admit males to female locker rooms and sports teams when the males identified themselves as the opposite sex, regardless of the real physical advantages they possessed when compared with female athletes. Title IX was thus transformed from a statute intended to guarantee women access to fair competition and opportunities in educational institutions into one that guaranteed they would have neither.

 

Biden’s EEOC, an agency tasked with enforcing the Civil Rights Act in the workplace, attempted the same thing with regard to private employers under Title VII, classifying any single-sex facilities as illegal discrimination. As a result, women were forced to shower alongside male colleagues with intact penises — a funny way to interpret a law that was meant to provide women protections against extreme sexual harassment in the workplace.

 

The previous administration even went so far as to encourage the transfer of trans-identifying male prisoners, some of them convicted of horrible and violent sex crimes, from male to female prisons, endangering the safety and well-being of the women incarcerated there.

 

President Trump’s executive override of these policies will probably be welcomed by the vast majority of Americans who have had enough of these and other pernicious consequences of adhering to the falsehoods of gender ideology. But not everyone was pleased with President Trump’s actions.

 

Writing for Time, Alicia Roth Weigel had a different view: that the EO “attempts to negate [the] very existence” of people like himself, with intersex medical conditions. Weigel, who was born with internal testes and XY chromosomes but female-appearing external genitalia, argues that his and similar deviations from the normal characteristics of the sex binary invalidate the whole concept of sex distinctions.

 

First, this simply isn’t true. Weigel was born with the gametes of a male, even if removed through surgery. If he were competing on the track with females, he would have an advantage over them. He is faster and stronger than comparably sized women. The existence of his and others’ intersex conditions only confirm the sex binary: that despite medical deviations, no human being is born with anything but the gametes of either a male or a female. People with disorders of sex development (DSD) are not a third sex but suffer from, for example, an insensitivity to sex hormones that causes their bodies to grow differently from the typical characteristics of their sex.

 

Let us be frank here: Weigel, like a very small percentage of Americans, was born with a medical pathology, a term I use advisedly and without moral judgment. The existence of sex-related genetic mishaps no more disproves the sex binary than children born with missing or extra limbs disprove the truth that human beings have two arms and two legs. These conditions are pathological because they are unfortunate medical deviations from the norm, and they neither need to constitute “identities,” nor do they make the case for dropping the legal sex binary to better reflect biological truth.

 

People with intersex conditions have long been used as the bait in the Left’s motte-and-bailey argument to declare biological sex mutable at will. Ironically, before the rise of the concept of a transgender identity, dealing kindly with people with these sorts of disorders was the standard both socially and under the law, where they were previously accommodated on a case-by-case basis.

 

The necessary focus on sex — because of wild claims that mere identification should be the standard for bathrooms, sports teams, and prisons — has forced an uncomfortable spotlight on those with intersex conditions, many of whom probably would prefer to be left alone and who resent the need to disclose private medical details in context of this debate. As usual, the Left advances a radical social agenda, and when people fight back against that agenda and its real-world consequences, the response is misleadingly labeled as aggression. Make no mistake, Trump’s executive order became essential because the Left insisted on forcing women to accept males in their locker rooms, sports teams, prison cells, and other single-sex spaces; now people with intersex conditions find themselves caught in the cross fire.

 

Even beyond the medical specifics of people with disorders of sex development, the last decade has been one long example of the dangers of living under the tyranny of the minority. Everyone knows how these arguments work by now: A rare exception to a general rule is cited as a justification for declaring that what works for 99.9 percent of people is oppressive, and for scrapping the system. But while few have any desire to treat outliers with anything less than the dignity that should be afforded to all human beings, the consequences of bowing to every exception to the rule have outweighed the benefits.

 

It does no one any good to pretend that biological sex is a spectrum of self-identification in order to salve the feelings of a small minority with chromosomal abnormalities. It does enormous damage to the privacy, opportunities, safety, and dignity of women to do so.

 

We must get comfortable once again with simply saying no.