Mick Hartley

MIT philosophy professor Alex Byrne on The British Invasion: TERF Island and Trump’s Executive Order on “Biological Truth”:

Who could have dreamt of reading, in an order signed by the President, that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female”? Governing institutions are not in the habit of affirming widely known scientific truths. Perhaps the last time that happened was in 1992, when the Catholic Church officially acknowledged—more than 350 years after Galileo’s trial—that the Earth orbits the Sun. And yet, those were the words of Donald Trump’s Executive Order (EO) of January 20, 2025, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

The EO defines each sex in terms of the size of “reproductive cells,” and defines a woman as an “adult human female” (with similar definitions for men, girls and boys). But why was it felt necessary to define “male” and “female” at all, let alone in terms of “reproductive cells”? “Male” and “female” are common words in everyday speech. The same goes for “woman” and “man,” which are ubiquitous. And where did the EO’s defining phrase “adult human female” come from?

The answers lie across the Atlantic, in that drizzly sceptered isle, known affectionally to its gender-critical inhabitants as TERF Island. “British feminists,” Susanna Rustin writes in her fine history of British feminism, Sexed, “are at the heart of the movement to resist the philosophy or ideology that says every human being has an inner gender.” Some of these feminists may not wish to admit it, but Trump’s Executive Order owes much to them.

But read it all.