Trump the Feminist Hero?
Let's not be idiots.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transgender girls and women from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams in any school that receives federal funding — which is most of them. He also said that his administration will deny visas to any transgender competitors in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics who plan to compete in events matching their gender identity (that is, trans women competing in women’s events). The Justice Department also recently announced that, under Trump, it is changing its Biden-era position on a Supreme Court case challenging a Tennessee law that banned the use of puberty blockers and other treatments for gender dysphoria in minors.
Over at the UK paper The Times, one columnist cheered Trump as a “feminist hero.” In Congress, Republican Rep. Mary Miller took up Trump’s position of unnecessary cruelty by referring to Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress, as “the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride.”
This is not feminism. Or at least, it’s not the feminism I want to see in the world.
My personal view is that feminists should be more open to difficult conversations around gender, biology, and trans rights. This is complicated space, and when it comes to the hottest-button issues — women’s sports, gender-affirming care for minors — there are real competing interests, open questions, and some difficult terrain. I don’t think we’ve done ourselves any favors by arguing that anyone who raises questions or hesitations is simply a bigot.
But we also do ourselves no favors when we abandon basic feminist values — rights to bodily autonomy, rights to privacy, equal protection under the law, medical privacy, rejection of abject cruelty and humiliation — because we’re uncomfortable with changing norms around gender and identity. And we’re just flat-out stupid if we think that the Trump administration is doing anything at all in the service of women’s rights.
As is the case with abortion care and most medical care, I want doctors, scientists, and researchers, in consort with patients, determining best practices. I do not want the nine justices of the Supreme Court, or the hundreds of members of Congress, or a single president deciding what’s best when it comes to medical procedures and healthcare decision-making.
There are big problems with trans health care in the US, especially for minors. Waitlists for care are long. The list of providers offering that care isn’t long enough. Many young people — and many adults — don’t get the kind of in-depth counseling and holistic care they need. If you’re American, though, you can hopefully understand that this is a system-wide problem, not relegated to transgender care. Abortion care in the US, for example, is often not nearly as good as it could be — not dangerous by any stretch, but often impersonal and not exactly a model of feminist idealism. Some women who have had abortions regret it; some say they didn’t get the kind of careful counseling that might have helped them feel more secure in their decision-making. But I’m also pretty sure that any feminist would tell you that’s not a reason to ban abortion, for adults or for minors. I think any feminist would tell you that’s a reason to invest more in abortion care.
Gender-affirming care isn’t so different. At this point the information we have on that care for adults is pretty good. The research on children is thinner, but it doesn’t actually make sense to say that we just won’t allow desperate young people to transition until we have more information — how, exactly, will that information be gathered? And like with abortion, hitting pause on care for minors is not simply keeping things as status quo. If you can’t get an abortion as a child or a teenager the outcome isn’t “no abortion;” the outcome (usually) is “now you have a baby as a child or a teenager” (abortion, frankly, is far closer to the status-quo option). If you can’t get gender-affirming care as a young person, the outcome isn’t just “you didn’t get puberty blockers;” the outcome is that you go through puberty, with your body undergoing dramatic changes, many of which are either irreversible or extremely difficult to reverse. Puberty for a child struggling with their gender identity, or a child secure in a gender identity that doesn’t match their body, means their body changes in a way that is particularly distressing to their sense of self. Puberty blockers and other forms of gender-affirming care come with their own side effects and downsides, some of which may also be permanent or difficult to change. Point being, this is complicated and highly personal. I am confident, however, that the best entity to make decisions this complex and personal is not the Tennessee state legislature.
It’s easy to toss around ideas and opinions about gender and sex, biology and culture. But it’s worth remembering that we’re actually talking about people: Human beings whose bodies and lives are on the line here. Which is part of why I actually find Rep. Miller’s treatment of Rep. McBride one of the most troubling pieces of this larger story, even though it really only affects one person, and really doesn’t change anyone’s life. It is, though, an act of intentional and abject cruelty to a woman’s face, purposed only to publicly humiliate her. It signals, to me, a breakdown of basic human decency that poses a far greater danger even than mean-spirited sports bans.
Authoritarians tend to go for the weak first; they need scapegoats. Right now, Trump is going after trans people, among many others. I don’t think feminists need to have a singular view of sex vs gender or nurture vs nature or even an unassailable answer to the question “what makes a woman?” (a somewhat silly and facile question, in my opinion) to point our general compass in the right direction. What we do need is a measure of decency. We need to understand that pushing the boundaries of sex and gender is feminist work. We need, at the most basic level, to understand this: Donald Trump is not a friend to feminists, and the gleeful humiliations him and his supporters rain down on trans people? That’s aimed at all of us.
xx Jill
p.s. I don’t do sponsored content on this Substack or anywhere, and the above post is my own work, but below you will see a paid advertisement from the ACLU. I’m partnering with them — the first time I’ve done something like this — because I believe in their mission and know they do absolutely critical work for the causes I support, including free speech, trans rights, reproductive rights, and many others. Just wanted to let you know that you won’t be seeing random advertisements here, and I’m not selling this newsletter to the highest bidder. I am, however, spreading the word of organizations I care about — and the ACLU is at the top of that list.
This message is sponsored by ACLU Foundation
The Trump Administration is pushing a dangerous and sweeping attempt to control our bodies, our families, and our lives and a Supreme Court case this term will shape the future of transgender people’s freedom – and bodily autonomy for all. The state of Tennessee wants the Supreme Court to expand its ruling overturning Roe v. Wade to allow the state to target transgender people’s autonomy over their own bodies. Continuing down this road will hurt everyone's freedom to control their bodies and lives.
The ACLU told the court that everyone deserves the freedom to control their bodies and seek the health care they need. The government has no right to deny a transgender person the health care they need, just as they have no right telling someone if, when, or how they start a family.
Join the ACLU in calling on the Supreme Court to uphold constitutional guarantees for everyone – including trans people. Add your name here.
Jill, the Times of London column you reference has a completely misleading headline (as many have pointed out on Twitter. Janice Turner, the author, does not argue that Trump is a feminist hero, she thinks he is a disaster for women's rights. She said he is posing as one on the basis of his ban on women in women's sports. She then references all the anti-feminist things he has done -- pussy-grabbing, anti-abortion, etc etc. and wonders why Dems allowed Trump to own the "commonsense" issue of keeping women's sports single sex. (She opposes transwomen in women's sports, like the large majority of Americans, including Democrats, and plenty of feminists too). She thinks Dems were basically bullied by trans extremists, like the ACLU.
You're usually so careful, but this time I wonder if you actually read the article.
Nuance is the enemy of fascism. Forcing us to ignore genuine complications in, say, the incorporation of transwomen into women’s sports helps the fascists.* The complications can be resolved given time and greater information, which the fascists are determined to deny us. We need to remember that they want to force everyone into extremely narrow boxes and we want people to control their own lives. I wish I had a good catchphrase for our position.
*One way of protecting the right to compete for transwomen and ensuring that everyone is safe during competition could be weight classes for some sports. Another is more precise calculations of hormone levels. None of these are things legislators can do and all of them require good data from doctors and biologists, which the fascists are determined to prevent us from ever obtaining.