Not the First Female President

But yes, the First Raccoon

The Guardian, that bastion of journalistic rigor and integrity, asked this week:

“After his executive order on sex, is Trump legally the first female president?”

The sophistry on display by these unhinged pseudo-liberals still surprises me.

They have beliefs from which they cannot be dissuaded, and they refuse to interpret information in a way that does not conform to their views. Two of their views are these: human sex is neither binary nor immutable, and the only “women’s” issue that Donald Trump cares about is abortion.

This approach to understanding the world is anti-scientific, and yet these are the people most likely to enjoin us all to #FollowTheScience. We are awash in irony.

The Executive Order in question defines women exactly as I and everyone else who understands basic biology and reality do:

Women are adult human females.

Adult and human are simple enough to define¹. What, then, is a female?

My definition: Females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs. Eggs are large, sessile gametes. Gametes are sex cells. In plants and animals, and most other sexually reproducing organisms, there are two sexes: female and male. Like “adult,” the term female applies across many species. Female is used to distinguish such individuals from males, who produce small, mobile gametes (e.g. sperm, pollen).

The definition from Trump’s Executive Order:

“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

“Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

The language of “a person belonging, at conception” is used, I think, to point to the immutability of sex in humans.

The title of the Executive Order is Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.

This is precisely what the brilliantly written document sets out to do. Remarkably, it is also what the document succeeds in doing.

And yet The Guardian makes the following incoherent argument:

Despite Trump’s decree that sex is “immutable”, the wording of his executive order left some room for interpretation. Indeed, some critics noted that because the undifferentiated genitalia that males and females share very early in fetal development are “phenotypically female”, you could argue he just made everyone legally female.

Nope. Wrong. So wrong. On at least two levels:

First: early in development, everything is undifferentiated. Decades ago, some researchers argued that early “undifferentiated” genitalia are phenotypically female, but they’re not. They may be just a bit more female-like than male-like, but are actually, again, simply undifferentiated². Furthermore, at conception, there are no genitalia at all—nothing exists at that stage to be differentiated or not. Conception is when two cells come together—an egg, from the mother, who is definitionally female, and a sperm, from the father, who is definitionally male.

Second: Genitalia are not the same as gametes.

The Executive Order invokes “reproductive cells,” which are gametes. Gametes are also known by their specific instantiations in animals: eggs (large) and sperm (small). The Guardian responds by gnashing their teeth about genitalia.

Remember how we—that’s us scientifically informed and inclined people—used to think that baby girls were born already having all of the eggs that they would ever produce? Turns out that’s not true—girls do continue to produce eggs after they themselves are born. But it is true that, at birth, baby girls already have a huge number of eggs, one or more of which might in turn become that baby girl’s baby girl (or boy), many years hence.

Of course, at conception, the being in the process of being conceived has neither genitalia nor gametes. There is merely the developmental potential for gametes (and genitalia) of a particular sort. In most mammals (exceptions being found in duck-billed playtpi and echidnas), if the father’s sperm is X, the embryo is XX, and the embryo is female, and will go on to produce large gametes. If, in contrast, the father’s sperm is Y, the embryo is XY, and the embryo is male, and will go on to produce small gametes. The genotype (XX or XY) determines sex in mammals, but it does not define it. What sex you are is defined by the types of gametes that you produce (or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies).

Baby boys don’t produce eggs, any more than baby girls produce sperm.

Frankly, and I don’t usually take this approach, but I can’t believe this is that difficult for people. It’s just not that hard. Either everyone making these arguments is truly quite dim, or their motivated reasoning is making it impossible for them to follow through on the most basic logic.

Twisting themselves into pretzels to find flaw with Trump’s fantastic Executive Order on the reality of biological sex, ideologues forgot that all words beginning with g aren’t identical.

Genitalia ≠ gametes.

The Guardian piece continues:

“[Trump] just declared everyone a woman from conception, based on the language of the executive order,” Delaware representative Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives, told the Independent.”

Not true: Trump’s EO did not declare everyone “a woman from conception.”

True: Delaware elected an extraordinarily confused person to help make laws for the country. Thanks a lot Delaware.

More from The Guardian:

“Most scientists now reject the idea that sex is strictly binary.”

Bullshit.

They can keep playing their stupid, vapid, nonsense games—and it seems that they will—but if those of us on Team Reality keep pointing out how absurd and sad they are, ultimately, they will stop. I do believe this.

I also see that they will not go gentle into that good night.

Finally, the author of The Guardian piece makes the following argument:

I’ll tell you what is clear, though: Trump’s executive order has absolutely nothing to do with its stated intention of “defending women”. Rather, abortion-rights supporters are warning that its focus on sex being determined at “conception” seems to point to Trump’s embrace of “fetal personhood”: the idea that life begins at conception and that embryos and fetuses deserve full legal rights and protections.

This argument is impressive…impressive in being simultaneously utterly confident and completely unhinged. Inside this pseudo-liberal world view, Trump could not be working to defend women. That is impossible. Therefore this must be a cryptic attack on abortion rights.

They’re wrong, these people. I am not pretending to be a mind reader, and I don’t know what the future holds. But this Executive Order is fundamentally good for women. It never should have been necessary, but it is long overdue.

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Meanwhile, in the very same White House, nearly a hundred years prior, a raccoon arrived in time to be cooked for Thanksgiving dinner.

Instead, she was made into a pet and given free run of the place.

So writes Katherine Rundell in Vanishing Treasures, as excerpted by Harper’s Magazine in November 2024.

Rebecca, who would soon become the First Raccoon, had been sent to the White House in 1926 by a citizen of Mississippi, who perhaps thought that she would taste good with cranberry sauce. President Coolidge declined to eat her. Soon she would be wearing an embroidered collar and taking baths, which she particularly enjoyed when given a cake of soap with which to play.

“And so she lived a life of luxury until she did a thing many of her fellow Americans have dreamed of but very few have achieved: she bit the president of the United States.”

Everyone recovered, and later, Rueben, a potential male companion, was brought to her. Reuben promptly ran away. First Lady Grace Coolidge hypothesized that this was because Rebecca was “a little overbearing and dictatorial.”

And so Rebecca once again became the only First Raccoon.

1. Anthropologists may take issue with the idea that “human” is easy to define, but it’s not a hot political issue. Homo erectus and Neanderthals don’t show up to fight on social media.

2. Also telling is that the paper that The Guardian (and others) are using to make the argument that we are all female at conception, which was published in 2001, specifically and explicitly comes to the conclusion that sex differences are far more common and widespread than we think. From the preface: “The picture that emerges from the study described in this report shows that there are numerous sex differences in nonreproductive tissues. Some of these differences can be explained by what we now know. Some are unexplained and point to important questions for future study. Some are large and have known effects on the health of individuals; these differences have immediate consequences in terms of health care. Some of the differences are small, with no known effects on health, but they may provide clues that can be used to solve new biological questions….Sex does matter. It matters in ways that we did not expect. Undoubtedly, it also matters in ways that we have not begun to imagine.”