Joe Biden started off his presidency with a bang on Wednesday, signing more than a dozen executive orders unwinding some of the terrible policies Trump foisted on the country, on issues ranging from COVID to climate change to trans rights.
It’s that last one that’s got the TERFs in a tizzy. The executive order in question, as the New York Times put it,
reinforces Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to require that the federal government does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, a policy that reverses action by Mr. Trump’s administration.
Jezebel had this to add:
Meant to tackle “discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation,” Biden’s executive order essentially calls on federal agencies to broadly apply last year’s landmark Bostock ruling, which expanded the definition of sex discrimination to include discrimination based on sexual orientation as well as gender identity. Notably, the executive order included the line, “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” and stated that Bostock should also apply to Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination in federally funded schools.
On Twitter, TERFs and assorted other transphobes quickly got a hashtag going, claiming that Biden had somehow “erased women” with the executive order extending basic rights to trans people. I couldn’t find anyone in the hashtag explaining clearly how giving trans people basic protections is a blow to so-called “real women.”
Some were a good deal less polite:
The hashtag also attracted a veritable army of trolls and reactionaries who weren’t so careful about hiding their transphobia — or their homophobic, or their racism.
Some criticized Biden for giving in to “wokeness,” a favorite right-wing epithet for anything vaguely progressive.
Happily, though, the hashtag was quickly overwhelmed with rebuttals of TERF illogic and celebrations of trans rights. By the time I got to the hashtag this afternoon, there were perhaps three pro-trans tweets for every bigoted one.
But in some ways the most heartening tweet was this one:
Celebrate this victory; fuck the haters.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@SpecialFFrog: I have had schadenfreude over Boris’ Woke-gate even this side of the pond. He was 45’s Mini-Me and now the responsible adults are in charge, including the President, who’s a big supporter of the peace process/border issues in Northern Ireland, which Boris was keen to ignore.
On-topic: I’ve found it a useful time-saver to ignore anyone who uses the word “womb”. Ugh. It creeps me out. Mostly you hear it from MRAs, terfs, forced-birthers, so there ya go.
(Yeccch. Shudder.)
Biden also erased all black people by abolishing single-race bathrooms, single-race locker rooms, and even single-race sports teams! Clearly Biden must hate people of color: he isn’t fighting for “race-based rights” to separate but equal facilities!
\end{sarcasm}
Honestly, I think the most dumb thing in those tweets was the one who referred to health care as a mockery of “nature’s perfection.” Anyone who says the “natural” human body is perfect doesn’t know a thing about biology or medicine.
@SpecialFFrog
To be fair, it kind of doesn’t mean anything at this point, at least the way the right uses it.
Re: Caesareans
You’d think the fact that caesarians essentially originated as a way to save the baby but kill the mother would make fundamentalists of the TERF sort not like them. Or is it that babies not born the natural way don’t get their skulls crushed properly on the way out, and therefore escape some of what makes us proper humans?
Out of curiosity, how are the TERFs reacting to the fact that Biden even named a trans person to a fairly senior position?
@GSS ex-noob
Thank you. I think most cis women feel this way, it’s only a very vocal minority of bigots that want exclusion (and, on average, cis women are significantly more likely than cis men to support inclusion).
Unfortunately, I think a lot of TERFs have a hard time distinguishing sitcoms from reality, much like how MRAs think that life resembles a teen comedy. This is partially due to the fact that many people have never met a trans person IRL, so their only exposure to the concept is through TV, which tends to ignore trans men entirely and show trans women as predators and/or objects of ridicule or fetish.
@bcb
When arguing with TERFs on Twitter I’ve asked multiple times and never received an answer as to why they think “sex based rights” are a good idea but “race based rights” aren’t. The whole concept of “sex based rights” is blatantly anti equality and anti feminist because it implies that rights should be given on the basis of sex (similar to the Christian right wing idea of complementarianism) rather than given to all people regardless of sex.
@rabid rabbit
I haven’t seen all of their reactions to Rachel Levine, but I’ve seen quite a few post memes making fun of her appearance or saying she looks too masculine. Because true feminism is when you mock women’s appearances, apparently.
Because how a woman (cis or trans) looks is the most important thing about doing a Cabinet job.
People whined a LOT about elevators, ramps, curb cuts, extra-large bathroom stalls, etc. that make it easier for disabled people to get around too. Instead, people who are tired or carrying heavy loads get to avoid the stairs, and the Sacred Earth Mothers who are pushing organic baby strollers don’t have to maneuver the kid down a jarring drop off the curb to cross the street and can roll their precious into the loo with them.
Nobody was “erased” there either.
This whole topic is hopelessly swamped by transphobia and misogyny, Etc. But can there be some carve out? Does anyone legitimately feel it’s fair for a biological man to take estrogen for a couple of years, and then compete against (and often dominate) biological women in sporting events?
Martina Navratilova and many other great female athletes have had comments on this and it’s easy to call them TERFS. But just look at it realistically. You can support everything in the world about equal rights, and still want genetic differences to mean something in competitive Sports. ?♀️
A note about weight classes in fighting. They’re somewhat ridiculous because they’re actually about being able to make a set weight at the weigh in. Boxers Joe and Steve are scheduled to fight at 130 pounds. So at the weigh in, held the day before the fight, they both have to weigh at or just below 130 pounds. But in most cases they won’t weigh that by the time the fight starts the next day. At fight time Joe might weigh 139 pounds, and Steve 144 pounds, because they’ve rehydrated themselves.
@Eric
Setting aside for a moment the question of whether it’s scientifically accurate to refer to trans women as “biological men” (spoiler alert: it really isn’t), I ask you this:
Trans women have been elegible to compete as women in the Olympics since 2004. Since then, not a single one has qualified. Not a single women’s world record in any sport is held by a trans woman. Given that knowledge, how can it be argued that trans women are “dominating” women’s sports?
If you’re suggesting that cis men are transitioning in order to win at sports, there is no evidence that this has ever been the motivation for anyone transitioning.
This is sounding a lot like a “separate but equal” solution. Also, I’m not really sure what genetics have to do with this. Yes, some people have genetic traits that give them an advantage in sports, but that’s a separate idea. If you mean that having XX or XY chromosomes should separate sports, then we run into some new issues. For one, those aren’t the only two possible sex chromosomes. What of people with XXY, XXX, XYY, or X? Or what of people with XX male syndrome, who develop externally male genitalia but have XX chromosomes? Should they be forced to compete with women? Or people with androgen insensitivity syndrome, like Caster Semenya? She’s a cis intersex woman who has XY chromosomes, should she be forced to compete as a man?
@tim gueguen
That sounds potentially unhealthy. Why don’t they perform the weigh in closer to the fight, such as right before?
@Eric
Define “biological man”
@Eric
I find it very suspicious that, in an article about an EO guarenteeing everyone the right to access very important things like public education and health care, you have chosen to focus on something of very low importance: who is winning reality TV competitions. But assuming you are actually posting in good faith, I’ll respond to your claims, one at a time.
Let’s start with this one. The goal of professional sports, all professional sports, is to create a show which is entertaining for the viewer, so that they can make enough money to get renewed for another season. Some shows plan the “winners” in advance, like wrestling, while others don’t, like Soccer. Either way, they function as really big budget TV shows, and they have the same goal as other TV shows: making enough money to get renewed. The rules of professional sports are not designed to be “fair” to the performers any more than Game of Thrones was designed to be fair to the performers: they are designed to be entertaining to the viewer.
If the organizers of competitive sports leagues wanted to make things “fair,” there are many things they could do differently with regards to sex. For example, testosterone is known to give a substantial advantage in many sports, so they could have every athlete take a blood test and sort them into “testosterone classes” with people who have similar T levels. That would be “fair.” But if they did that, then there would be some cis women with high testosterone in a division with mostly men, and some cis men with low testosterone in a division with mostly women, and that would upset sexist viewers with pre-conceived notions about the human body. And, by emphasizing that testosterone is the only aspect of sex which is actually relevant to most sports (height is also relevant to a few of them), it becomes obvious how far from being binary human sex is (since no two humans have the exact same T level). Sexists who have a belief that human bodies fit into two neat categories are agitated when faced with evidence that sex is far more complicated, and the organizers of reality TV shows don’t want to upset sexist viewers because their goal is profit, not fairness.
Someone who has taken estrogen for a couple years is not a “biological man.”
Often dominate? The Olympics have allowed trans women to compete in the women’s division since 2003, so if there were any validity to your claim then there ought to be a lot of trans women with gold medals. Can you name some of them?
And finally:
Do you also believe that you can support everthing in the world about equal rights but still want “genetic differences” between Caucasian and African American people to require a separate but equal “Negro League?”
@Eric
I see where your coming from, but considered this, People used to say African American men shouldn’t compete with White men in sports because things like an longer heel bone made them faster and able to jump further because their “primitive” bodies were closer to monkeys then White men’s were and that gives them an “unfair” advantage in sports.
@ naglfar
That’s how it used to be done. The problem there was people would dehydrate to make weight; and then have to immediately fight when they were in a sub-optimal condition.
The 24 hour rule was introduced for safety reasons. Allows people to get to their base weight; and then plenty of time to rehydrate and get some food inside them prior to the actual fight.
@Full Metal Ox mostly the former but they’ve considered trans men only because they’ve got vaginas and will consider them only as women I think.
@Rabid Rabbit,
Uhm, in ancient times weren’t C-sections normally done on women who were already dead / may as well be dead as a way to save their baby? Like, using a C-section to kill an otherwise healthy woman who could deliver normally for the lolz was kinda frowned on, I think.
Now killing an otherwise healthy woman via C-section for other motives was undoubtedly done more than a few times. The Roman Emperor Caligula killing his pregnant sister that way because he genuinely believed that their kid would grow up to overthrow him the same way Zeus overthrew his father to become King of the Gods (at least if I, Claudius is accurate on that point). Or any other political motive to remove a rival, or such an intense desire for kids that killing a pregnant stranger for their baby is seen as an acceptable way to get one.
Tennis vs Serena Williams: I’d take that woman on in an instant. Not because I have any expectation of winning—I’d be lucky to get even one point off of her—but damn, imagine the bragging rights!
Transwomen in competitive sports: If transwomen actually do have an innate athletic advantage over ciswomen, then in any athletic venue which allows transwomen to compete with ciswomen, a disproportionately large percentage of honors (medals, championships, etc) in those venues should be held by transwomen.
Seems like this sort of thing should be fairly easy to back up with hard data… if it actually were, you know, what’s that word—oh, yeah!—true.
@Quentin Long
If the transphobes cared about hard data or truth, they wouldn’t be transphobes.
It’s amazing the number of cis men who all of a sudden, just now decided that women’s sports need to be “protected” or that they care about women’s safety in toilets / prisons.
They never have this energy when it comes to other measures to protect and increase the profile of female athletes / sports (by actually watching them play and supporting equal remuneration.) Nor do they have this energy when talking about the danger women face by cis men (who are are far bigger threat to the average cwoman than any trans woman could be.)
I hate that they try to hide their transphobia by pretending they care about women.