"The Executive Order establishes Government-wide the biological reality of two sexes and clearly defines male and female."

"All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed. Agencies will cease pretending that men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination. 'Woman' means an 'adult human female.' The Executive Order directs that Government identification like passports and personnel records will reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity. The Executive Order ends the practice of housing men in women’s prisons and taxpayer funded 'transition' for male prisoners. The Executive Order ends the forced recitation of 'preferred pronouns' and protects Americans’ First Amendment and statutory rights to recognize the biological and binary nature of sex. This includes protection in the workplace and in federal funded entities like schools.... This order is one of nearly 200 executive actions the White House is rolling out today. Among them: orders to declare a national emergency at the border; end all DEI programs across the federal government; withdrawal from the Paris climate accord; and a return-to-office directive for federal workers."

From "EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s Day One Executive Order on ‘Male and Female’/The White House strikes out at gender ideology and pronouns. Also: ends housing of biological men in women’s prisons; self-ID on passports; and more" (Free Press).

"Schools have begun using gender-neutral terms such as 'uniform A' and 'uniform B' instead of boys and girls...."

"Some schools have also introduced a third option of 'uniform C.'... Blofield Primary, in Norwich, set out its uniform policy last year which allowed pupils aged 4-11 to pick clothing based on their 'self-identified gender.' It said that to prevent discrimination it would 'avoid listing uniform items based on sex, to give all pupils the opportunity to wear the uniform they feel most comfortable in or that most reflects their self-identified gender.'..."

From "Skirting the issue? School uniform names go gender-neutral" (London Times).

Do the students also have the "opportunity" to choose clothing they simply like — say, for fashion reasons — or must your choice of clothing always represent a statement of how you truly feel inside? I remember when it was possible to play with gender and for boys and girls to wear each other's clothes without being so earnest about it. 

But if the uniforms are no longer designated "boys" and "girls," the youngest children won't know how to use these clothes to express "their self-identified gender." Without a foundation of gender conformity, how can you be a gender nonconformist? 

"I was raised on Proverbs and pushups... I subscribe to Judeo-Christian beliefs... I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ."

"I think if you think about my political ideology, where it really stems from, you know, my ethics and my morals and what I think is right and wrong, you look to ancient Jerusalem, you got ancient Judeo-Christian values. So right and wrong... I also cling to a lot of traditional values and a lot of traditional ideas, because they’ve worked in the past."

"I think that we have bred a generation of soft men and that generation has created a lot of problems in our society and our culture... designed to reclaim and restore masculinity in a society that is ever more dismissive of what it means to be a man."

Those are quotes from Madison Cawthorn, from 2020 and 2021, presented by Politico in an effort to shame him over 2 photographs that show him in what looks like a party setting and wearing women's lingerie, in "Exclusive: Madison Cawthorn photos reveal him wearing women’s lingerie in public setting/The embattled congressman has outraged Republican colleagues with accusations of orgies and drug use." 

Cawthorn is running for reelection and has a lot of rivals. After Politico published this exposé, Cawthorn responded the photos are from some game show on a cruise ship: "I guess the left thinks goofy vacation photos during a game on a cruise (taken waaay before I ran for Congress) is going to somehow hurt me? They’re running out of things to throw at me... Share your most embarrassing vacay pics in the replies."

Cawthorn asks to be treated the same as any other politician with an embarrassing old photograph. But if he's made the masculinity of men a core political value, a photo of him in women's clothes is a different problem for him than it would be for a politician who eagerly embraces an ideology of gender fluidity. 

But I would say that within the tradition of distinct gender roles, there has long been playful cross-dressing. It's perceived as comical precisely because you believe in the immutability of the 2 sexes. That's what's going on in the great movie comedy "Some Like It Hot" — with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis trying to pass as female in the presence of Marilyn Monroe. Old-time television with Milton Berle and Flip Wilson in drag isn't  hilarious because they were displaying any inner femininity but because people saw them as obvious men wearing women's clothes.

"In 2018, I officially changed the gender marker on my passport from M to F. By that point, I had socially transitioned, undergone top surgery..."

"... and been on hormone replacement therapy for years. But updating the marker didn’t make travel easier. Traveling while transgender only became more difficult. I’m well over 6 feet tall. Unless I decide to dress extremely femme and put on a full face of makeup — to then sit for hours on a cramped, sweaty airplane — the F on my passport actually invites extra scrutiny. Because I don’t always 'pass,' it frequently outs me as trans. The U.S. State Department... will soon have the option to choose X as their gender marker as an alternative to M or F.... But given the trouble that often accompanies being out as non-binary, the move won’t 'advance inclusion' as much as the department’s announcement claims. If the State Department really wanted to take a step forward, there’s an easier, cheaper and more powerful option: remove gender from passports altogether.... In the future, we may live in a society that doesn’t require trans people to out ourselves at the airport."

From "There’s a better solution than offering X-gender passports" by Abeni Jones (WaPo).

Yeah, why is the government involved in your genitalia? What are you bringing onto this plane?

"Many of us view the practice of pronoun declaration as asking us to sign on to an ideology we do not share: that we all have an internal gender identity..."

"... which may or may not 'match' our sex, and that the third-person pronoun someone uses to describe us should reflect this identity rather than our sex. People call me 'she' because that is the third-person pronoun we generally use to describe female humans (and other animals), and I take that to mean nothing more than that they have correctly recognized me as female. However, announcing that 'my pronouns are she/her' would mean something very different: an indication that 'woman' represents my identity rather than simply my bodily reality; in other words, that I identify in some way with the social role of 'woman' or with stereotypical femininity (which I do not). People who have transitioned should of course be addressed with courtesy, but imposing the idea of 'gender identity' with corresponding pronouns on all of us is regressive and coercive. Not to mention that women in particular have good reasons for not wanting to foreground 'gender' in our interactions with others, particularly in a work setting."

That's a comment on a NYT advice column titled: "Do I Really Need to State My Pronouns?/A reader asks whether a workplace policy actually makes trans and nonbinary people feel more included." 

The reader was someone who worked in sales and had experienced losing a sale to a customer who said he was "turned off by the pronoun thing." The advice columnist only gave a vague answer. The commenter made a brilliant point and put it quite well. It fits my tag "gender privacy."

(This is a post about a comment over at the NYT, a comment that interested me more than what the NYT advice columnist wrote. But how, you might wonder, can a reader comment on this Althouse post? The answer is — because some trolls made open comments impossible — you have to email me here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Lyssa writes

I’ve often thought that the gender concept is functionally a religion - the idea that there’s some deeper, non-biological concept of “man” or “woman” is non-falsifiable, a matter of faith which is, at least for some, deeply and sincerely held. Like a religion, it’s not appropriate for me to disrespect, or to point out my disagreement with its dogma outside of an open discussion. I won’t stop you from praying to say you’re doing it wrong, or “correct” you if you make a benign statement about your faith with which I disagree. But when you expect me to pray with you, to personally declare the beliefs of your faith, that’s a bridge too far.

I have 2 responses to that. First, being required to declare your faith at all — even your own true faith or lack of faith — is a fundamental violation of your privacy. This is the domain of your thoughts, and it belongs to you and deserves respect.

Second, the conjunction of religion and your experience of the meaning of your own body can be seen Supreme Court's understanding of the right of privacy, as articulated in the most important opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which declared: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." 

AND: Another emailer, who requests not to be named, writes: 

"Eddie Izzard doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. In December, it was reported that the standup comic/actor/campaigner/endurance runner had adopted the pronouns 'she' and 'her'..."

"... and wanted to be 'based in girl mode' from now on.... Actually, Izzard says, she had not intended to be so definitive about it. She had always talked about being in boy mode most of the time and girl mode part of the time, and she was still hoping to keep her options open. For her first half century, boy mode had dominated, and now it was time for girl mode to take centre stage, but on occasions she would still like the freedom to be a he. She soon discovered that wasn’t an option, though.... At the moment, Izzard is self-identifying as a trans woman. Does she think she will ever physically transition? 'I might do. I feel that boy mode has had a good innings in this one life that we get. It would be great to get up in the morning and think I look like a woman so I’m going to throw on a tracksuit and have breakfast. It is getting better and better. I do feel I can express myself in a more feminine way, which may be the age thing.' Would she like boobs? 'Yeah! I’ve had boob envy since my teens. Just when teenage girls of my age were going "I want boobs," I was thinking yeah me too. But I couldn’t say it. They talk about penis envy, and I believe some women suffer penis envy. I cannot for the life of me get my head around this. But yes, I’ve always had breasts envy.'... I ask if she is taking hormone pills. She smiles and, for once, declines to answer. 'I’m very happy to transition and I feel I have been transitioning,' she says. 'But I do feel I’ve told everybody everything in my life, so I’m going to keep a certain amount of privacy.'"

From "Eddie Izzard: 'I'm just trying to create a space for myself'/The actor and comic on making her female pronouns permanent, shouting down abuse, enduring a marathon a day – and running for Labour" (The Guardian).

"I have never felt desired. My past boyfriends never made me feel desired. None of them."

"And it’s a big thing in my life that I feel I have never been physically desired by somebody. So I dress the way I dress as I don’t like to think of you guys – I mean anyone, everyone – judging it, or the size of it.... And sometimes I feel trapped by this persona that I have created, because sometimes I think people view me not as a woman.... But my body is mine and yours is yours. Our own bodies are kind of the only real things which are truly ours. I get to see it and get to show it when I want to.... All I ever wanted was a boyfriend. Any time when it was rainy or cloudy, all I would wish is I was with some boy. That was my thing. Whenever we were somewhere nice, a beach or a balcony with a sunset, I would never be able to enjoy the experience as I just used to wish I was with some boy....  I have never felt powerful in a relationship. I did once and, guess what, I took advantage of that person’s kindness. I wasn’t used to it. It’s been months and I am not attracted to people any more."

Said the big pop star Billie Ellish, quoted in "Billie Eilish: Confessions of a Teenage Superstar" (GQ). She's 17. CORRECTION: She's 18.

"... Grimes, the Canadian singer, and Elon Musk, the co-founder of Tesla, announced that they were calling their baby boy X Æ A-12..."

"... saying the name is inspired by the fantasy Elvish language, artificial intelligence and a CIA spy plane. Grimes, 32, whose real name is Clair Boucher, explained their inspiration last night, telling followers on social media that: 'X [represents] the unknown variable. Æ is the Elven spelling of Ai (love &/or artificial intelligence). A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent,' and added that the A additionally stood for Archangel, 'her favorite song.'... Grimes told followers before the birth that she would allow her child to choose its own gender. She described 'being knocked up' as a 'very feral and war-like state of being'...  She and Mr Musk have been a couple for more than two years after bonding online over an esoteric joke about artificial intelligence."

The London Times tells us.

There's artificial intelligence... and there's goofball intelligence.

Anyway, nothing wrong with gender privacy. And if Clair Boucher can rename herself Grimes, then this gender-private offspring can stop being X Æ A-12 any time said entity chooses.

What is the song "Archangel"? Is it this? ("So contorted and twisted/Condemned and submissive....")

Is it in poor taste now to show enthusiasm about the news of whether your baby is a boy or a girl?

That's my question, reading "Why Are Gender Reveal Parties a Thing?/They say a lot more about our culture than they do about the sex of our soon-to-be children" by Jennifer Finney Boylan in a NYT op-ed.

[C]elebrating a child’s gender before it’s born... sets expectations for who that child will be. It also leaves the unfortunate impression that gender is the most important thing to celebrate about that child. And sometimes it’s just plain wrong. As a late-transitioning transgender person, I’ve experienced both sides of a lot of this world....

What does bringing a new life into the world actually mean, in the end, besides lighting a fire, passing the flame of your own life on to a new generation? But I can assure you, that fire will glow whether your child is male or female or even something in between.

There are a lot of things to celebrate about a new baby. Gender isn’t one of them. Instead, we should celebrate our child’s humanity — with all of its complex, contradictory potential — with openheartedness and with love.

Gender-reveal parties are a recent fad, and in the old days we couldn't do them and we therefore didn't do them. We did send out birth announcements that usually said "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl!" That always felt like poor taste to me. It's a specific individual, a stranger arrived from the beyond, who will gradually be revealed to us. Yes, there's one thing we can see right away, what kind of external genitalia this new person has. But instead of making a big deal about that one specific we do know, we could show awe and respect for what we do not know: Who is this? I thought all of that years ago and without the influence of the trangender-rights movement. But I'm happy to see this new basis for disapproving of parental over-enthusiasm about the genitalia of babies.

Celine Dion is a super-hero who bestows gender privacy on babies... with her new fashion line.

This weird commercial is worth watching — if only for the expression of philosophy:



Gender privacy for babies... and older kids... with stuff like this:



ADDED: At the shopping site, called CELINUNUNU, the brand explains itself in the kind of prose I've seen too often on wall cards at art museums:

"Only two thirds of Generation Z identify as 'exclusively heterosexual.'"

The UK Telegraph reports.

Maybe they don't like the absolutism of the question.

Research by Ipsos Mori found that 66 per cent of young people, aged between 16 and 22, are "exclusively heterosexual" - the lowest figure of any generation.

Among millennials, 71 per cent say they are exclusively heterosexual, as do 85 per cent of those in "Gen X", and 88 per cent of baby boomers....

Researchers said the statistic showed that the youngest generation were "being affected by more open and fluid attitudes".

Why do pollsters think it's okay to ask about the sexual inclinations of people they don't even know? I'm giving this my "gender privacy" tag. The question might be experienced as retrograde or politically incorrect. The thought might be: These old people with their stupid categories. And then: I'll give the answer that most challenges their pathetic little minds.

That's how I thought when I was 20 (and kind of still do).

"Germany must create a third gender category for people who do not identify as either male or female or were born with ambiguous sexual traits..."

"... the country’s constitutional court ruled on Wednesday, finding that binary gender designations violated the right to privacy.... The ruling arrives as society, medicine and law increasingly recognize the ways in which gender is socially constructed and not necessarily fixed or stable.... 'The assignment to a gender is of paramount importance for individual identity; it typically occupies a key position both in the self-image of a person and how the person is perceived by others,' the court found. 'It also protects the sexual identity of those persons who are neither male nor female.''

The NYT reports.

"Rep. Blake Farenthold on Monday blamed 'some female senators from the Northeast' for hampering Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare..."

"... telling a local radio station that he might challenge them to a duel if the allegedly obstructive lawmakers were men."

What a loser. His attempt at posing as manly is so lame he doesn't even get the ethic of dueling right.

How does Gillette know you are an 18-year-old guy?

It doesn't always:

Dear @Gillette
Two things: I am no longer 18, and no amount of shaving will make me a man.
I am keeping the razor though, it's really nice pic.twitter.com/5BvDZuEUPx

— Kody Meyer (@KodyMeyer17) June 30, 2017

Via the NYT, which says: "Gillette, which is owned by Procter & Gamble, has mailed razors to young men for their 18th birthdays since the 1990s." The spokeswoman for Gillette says: "it takes a lot of data to reach two million men — and there are a number of steps between identifying the men, securing shipping information and then fulfilling the razors."

Fulfilling the razors is a funny expression — as if the razors were getting off on their skin contact with you.

"There they were, gathered around the fire at Tribal Council on Wednesday night’s episode of 'Survivor.'"

"One of the contestants, Jeff Varner, in a last-ditch attempt to keep himself from being voted off the show, turned to a man by his side. 'Why haven’t you told anyone you are transgender?' he said.""

That was a very intense episode of "Survivor," with everyone turning on the man who outed the transgender contestant and that man, Varner, suffering so much opprobrium that I would think almost anyone watching at home would be thinking: Never let that happen to you.

ADDED: The linked article, at the NYT, is extremely unfair to the other contestants on that tribe. The next 2 paragraphs are:

Zeke Smith, familiar to viewers of the previous season, went blank. His eyes lost focus, and it seemed, for a moment, as if he were disassociating. The thing that he had wanted to avoid was now about to unfold, on national television.

Mayhem ensued. Words like “deception” were thrown around. Repeatedly, Mr. Smith was accused of having misled his fellow tribe members because, yes, he was — or had been — trans.

Look at all the passive voice in the last 3 sentences! It gives the impression that a lot of tribemates turned on Zeke, but everyone was strongly supportive of Zeke. Varner, fighting for survival, called Zeke deceptive. Everyone else criticized Varner so severely that I said out loud "He's going to have to commit suicide." Varner was so deeply shamed that he apologized over and over and he too was extremely supportive of Zeke after he realized, under the pressure of all of his tribemates, that he had made an abysmal social blunder.

Mayhem ensued. Yeah: against Varner.

Words like “deception” were thrown around.  Only by Varner, and only trying to save his own skin. No one — absolutely no one — took the serious position that Zeke had done something wrong by following a personal policy of what I call gender privacy.

The antagonism against Varner — who is openly gay — was so intense and obvious that they didn't even need a vote to oust him. Jeff Probst (the host of "Survivor") simply observed that everyone already knew the outcome and all Varner's tribemates agreed.

You can watch the episode on line, here.

"I knew just what one of my graduate students meant when I asked her how millennial feminists saw Hillary and she said 'a white lady.'"

"A white woman herself, she wasn’t referring to the colour of Hillary’s skin, or even her racial politics, but rather what was perceived as her membership in the dominant class, all cleaned up and normalised, aligned with establishment power rather than the forces of resistance, and stylistically coded (her tightly coiffed hair; her neat, boring pantsuits; her circumspection) with her membership in that class. When I looked at Hillary, I saw someone very different – but I understood the basis for my student’s perception.... These young women... didn’t believe in sisterhood – a relic of a time when, as they had been told (often in women’s studies courses) privileged, white feminists clasped hands in imagined gender solidarity, ignoring racial injustice and the problems of the working class."

Writes the University of Kentucky gender studies professor Susan Bordo. (Bordo is American, despite that "colour" and "normalised" business in that extract, which is in the UK paper The Guardian. The book itself — "The Destruction of Hillary Clinton" — goes with "color" and "normalized.")

There's a lot going on in the phrase "relic of a time when, as they had been told (often in women’s studies courses) privileged, white feminists clasped hands in imagined gender solidarity, ignoring racial injustice and the problems of the working class." Was there really such a time?

I've closely watched feminism developing since 1970, when "Sexual Politics" was published. I remember when Ms. Magazine came out in 1970 that I thought it was for older women (pre-Boomer) who hadn't really caught up with the times and needed help with a kind of conventional married life that had nothing to do with me. And I remember criticisms of Ms.-level feminism coming from the left throughout the 70s and coming on strong in the 80s. The idea that feminism needed to take account of race and class was there all along as I remember.

So who's imagining? Bordo seems to be saying that there was a time — circa 1970? 1980? — when "privileged, white feminists" didn't think of themselves as privileged and white but that femaleness was a single and important category worth thinking about and these women gave themselves the room to go ahead and think about what women have in common instead of hobbling themselves with continual attention to the ways is which women differ from each other and belong in other meaningful categories.

I don't think what Hillary tried to do with sisterhood would have worked in those earlier eras either. It's one thing to say "sisterhood is powerful" when what you mean is that women, by recognizing what we have in common can, given our huge number, have an immense political effect and win many protections and benefits for ourselves. It's another thing for one political candidate to say all the women should vote for me because I'm a woman. I don't think sisterhood ever worked like that.

"Even gender-neutral pronouns don’t feel as if they fit me. I feel no identity or closeness with any pronouns I’ve come across. What describes me is my name."

Said Patch, formerly known as Patrick Abbatiello, formerly designated as male, who not only acquired a legal name change — to Patch, just Patch (It's Patch*) — but got the legal gender designation changed to "genderless."

This happened in Multnomah County, which happens to be a county name I know, because it's that county with the idea of spending $22 million building 300 "tiny houses" in the backyards of homeowners who agree to take in a homeless family for 5 years.

The linked article is at HeatStreet — which has an attitude that I find unappealing and where there's a Gender Identities quiz that's freeze-framed on an image that I'm not going to click on but is either snarkily or unwittingly trading in surprising phallus placement:



I'm creating a new tag — "gender privacy" — for this and yesterday's post "What a deceptive headline at The Daily Caller!"

Yesterday's post was about a teacher who, after losing her breasts to cancer, wanted to present herself as gender neutral and to say to any children who wondered about her gender: "We all have private lives, and it would not be appropriate to talk about our private lives during the school day." In the comments, people focused on the problem of what pronoun to use (which really is troublesome as we maintain an interest in speaking in a natural way), and I said:

I didn't take a position on the pronouns.

I talked about etiquette and decency in interpersonal relationships.

Note that this isn't a woman demanding to be spoken of as a man or raising the issue whether she somehow really is a man. This is a person who is asking for no reference to be made to her sex. It's a request for privacy about her body.

Out of simple empathy, you could respect that.

You could also ask why a person's sex is considered properly in the public realm. Why don't we all demand privacy about the body parts we cover up and demand that others cover up. If they must be covered up, why do we feel entitled to talk about them?

These are questions I really want to discuss.

Also, I see an analogy to something that happened in the development of the same-sex marriage issue. Many people started to ask why the government is involved in recognizing people's personal/sexual relationships at all. Why not privatize the whole thing, get government out of marriage? Now, you might want to think about why government concerns itself with our private parts. If you want to say gender is more than genitalia, that it's a state of mind, the question of privacy is only heightened: Why should government concern itself with how we feel deep inside?

As for those pesky pronouns, we have freedom of speech. That too belongs in the sphere of the individual. We get to decide for ourselves how to speak. There are many difficult decisions here, and the government should not be solving them.

________________________

* Let's never forget what the Saturday Night Live people found hilarious in the early 90s:



The movie was a big flop, but the character had been hugely successful on SNL in many sketches.

What a deceptive headline at The Daily Caller!

"Transgender Teacher Gets $60k After Co-Workers Won’t Call Her 'They.'"

I shouldn't reward them with traffic, so let me not leave this post too enigmatic. There was a lot of harassment against this teacher — who adopted the self-presentation as gender neutral after she had breast cancer surgery and opted for reconstruction to a masculine rather than feminine-looking chest.

Here's the underlying article in The Oregonian, so I recommend getting the facts there, not at The Daily Caller, with its fake-news click-bait headline.

Leo Soell... identifies as neither male nor female and uses the pronoun they instead of he or she. But, Soell wrote, coworkers continuously called Soell "she," "lady" or "Miss Soell." Someone smeared Vaseline on Soell's cabinets, the complaint said, and another yelled insults in the school hallway. Others conspired to prevent Soell from using the school's lone gender-neutral bathroom, the complaint said....

If kids asked whether Soell was a boy or a girl, district leaders told Soell to respond, "We all have private lives, and it would not be appropriate to talk about our private lives during the school day."...

Soell said coworkers responded by intentionally calling Soell "lady" or "Miss Soell."

"Another teacher yelled at me openly in the school hallway, saying that my gender is a 'belief system' that I do not have the right to make other people follow and that God is on her side," Soell said in a complaint, obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

I understand that many people are traditional about maintaining the distinction between the sexes, but if you want to be taken seriously as traditional, you'd better display traditional etiquette and decency.