Donald Trump’s executive order, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” is not about science. It is not about protecting women. It is a chilling, calculated effort to use the full machinery of the federal government to erase the rights, humanity, and existence of transgender and nonbinary people. It is not policy—it is ideological authoritarianism cloaked in pseudoscientific language, written to control not just laws and funding, but people’s bodies, identities, and lives.

This is not a defense of women. It is a cynical hijacking of feminism to justify discrimination, deploying women’s safety as a political weapon while conveniently ignoring the actual threats women face—poverty, violence, underpaid labor, lack of reproductive autonomy. Trump’s sudden concern for women’s “dignity” rings hollow from a man whose record is littered with misogyny, sexual assault allegations, and policies that have actively harmed women at every level.

This order is not about “restoring truth.” It is about imposing a rigid, binary worldview that denies the complex, medically and scientifically recognized reality of sex and gender. It deliberately conflates sex and gender identity to create confusion, fear, and hostility. It treats trans people as predators, intersex people as errors, and anyone who dares to live outside a two-box system as a threat to the republic.

What this order does is codify cruelty. It orders the erasure of inclusive language. It demands the rollback of basic civil rights protections. It removes trans people’s right to be seen, to be safe, to exist in public life without harassment or institutional rejection. It paints gender identity as a “threat,” as if simply existing as a trans person undermines the entire federal government. That is not policy—it is propaganda, and it reeks of the kind of fear-driven governance we’ve seen in history’s darkest chapters.

It strips away guidance designed to protect LGBTQ+ youth in schools, putting vulnerable children directly in harm’s way. It threatens housing, healthcare, identification, and equal access to public services for transgender people, not because of any demonstrable harm caused—but because it satisfies a reactionary thirst for control. This is not defending rights—it is denying them.

And let’s be clear: science is not on this order’s side. Major medical organizations—the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics—all recognize the legitimacy of transgender identities and support gender-affirming care. This executive order is not a defense of biology. It’s a rejection of science, medicine, lived experience, and the fundamental principle that every person deserves the right to define themselves and live free from state-sponsored discrimination.

To define gender identity as “ideology” while using the machinery of law to enforce a deeply political, religiously tinged version of gender essentialism is hypocrisy in its purest form. It’s not gender ideology that’s extreme—it’s this order. It’s not trans people who are threatening democracy—it’s a government telling people how they’re allowed to exist.

This executive order is a manifesto of erasure, and history will see it for what it is: a shameful, heartless assault on basic human rights. It is a deliberate act of oppression against people already pushed to society’s margins. And it must be rejected—not just legally, but morally, socially, and unflinchingly.

We will not go back. We will not be erased. And we will not let hate masquerade as governance.