Anyone else think Trump will ultimately do more damage to the gender critical cause?

[savehannah]

I hear lots of gender critical Americans (especially despairing parents of trans-identified children) cheering Trump's changes on the gender front, and on the face of it, things like not prosecuting parents for non-affirmation of transgender status and not allowing schools to secretly socially transition pupils seem like progress.

However, since Trump is also anti-homosexual, anti-abortion and anti-reproductive (and other) rights for women, I feel this will just lead to even more of a backlash.

Gender critical people have been trying for a long time to show themselves to be on 'the right side of history' and it felt like this was starting to become realised by more and more people (at least in the UK), that it's not just right-wing nutters that believe in the importance of biological reality.

But now gender critical beliefs are being pushed hard as part of hard right-wing policy alongside lots of unacceptable things, doesn't this lend more credence to the idea of the tolerant left being correct, and mean that people who believe tolerance means stamping on women's rights and allowing lifelong medicalisation of troubled teens feel vindicated in pushing hard back the other way?

And again conflating LGB with T, something which UK gender critical groups have tried to separate. Trump hates them all and wants to take away their rights so they are all a marginalised minority and need to fight together against the fascism. Rather than people realising in many ways the trans righrs movement is homophobic, 'trans away the gay' etc.

Given the damage Biden and Harris did to womens rights it’s hard to see how things could be damaged more than that by Trump. Yes he’ll cause some damage but Biden was disastrous for women’s rights

Ugh, I feel like I am making too many posts here, but I keep thinking of other things that seem important.

I really think it would be a good idea for people to turn around these questions.

I am friendly with a lot of American conservative women - some are very very conservative.

It is in part things like this, these very obvious lies, that convince these women that the left are dishonest, stupid, and have nothing to offer them. Now, they mostly know that not everyone on the left is like that, most are more centrist. But they are now convinced this shit is baked into leftist thinking - (and some were on the left themselves at one time.)

So maybe what the OP should ask herself is - will the continued association of gender ideology and the left stop people from considering the left wing thinking a reasonable political ideology?

I agree there is definitely a risk of people (politicians) wanting to distance themselves from any Trump policies. There's also the risk it gets mixed up in the public perception of Trump's madness. But as others have said long term hopefully it's beneficial as it makes it all the harder to reverse. It's unbelievable how stupid the Dems are to not have realised the impact of this issue.

Sort of related but WoLF are keeping a list which gets updated as to which of Trumps EO are being challenged by court cases etc..
https://womensliberationfront.org/news/trumps-executive-orders-head-to-the-courts

Evidence please.

He's issued approx 70 EOs to date. You say none are 'right wing policies'. I'd love for a list of which ones are not... Please go ahead.

"You know, they're eating the cats. They're eating the dogs!"

Just one from a smorgasbord to choose from.

It is really not good to use the word racism for things that aren't about race.

It's back to this omnicause business. If someone has some kind of issue with illegal immigrants, or for that matter legal ones, that is not the same as racism. Even if their reasons are stupid. (It could also be anti-outsider. Or just not a fan of the immigration policies. )

Could a person have an issue with immigrants because of their race, sure. But that's not a necessary condition.

I also think Trump does us more harm than good. Not only because of his terrible attitude to women in general but also because anything associated with him is pretty much universally mad. He is not someone I want to “get into bed with” on any level.
Bleugh, have just made myself feel rather sicky with that image!

None of his policies relating to sex and gender are “right wing”. The majority of Democrats support the sport EO. The NYT is behind a paywall but here’s an article reporting its findings:

https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/articleb6537968-dff2-11ef-b274-9fbf7250bf7f.amp.html

When the 2025 New York Times-Ipsos poll is broken up along political divides, 94% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats, and 64% of Independents or “something else” answered that men should not be in women’s sports.

@TempestTost

It is really not good to use the word racism for things that aren't about race.

It's back to this omnicause business. If someone has some kind of issue with illegal immigrants, or for that matter legal ones, that is not the same as racism. Even if their reasons are stupid. (It could also be anti-outsider. Or just not a fan of the immigration policies. )

Could a person have an issue with immigrants because of their race, sure. But that's not a necessary condition.

Except that by making comments like "They're eating the cats" Trump reduces this particular group of people into a scourge that must be feared and removed from civilised society. It was clearly about a particular group of people (Haitians) doing particular practices (cooking dinner with captured animals). He said these things without any solid proof of his claims. That type of rhetoric is racist.

Also racist is the Trump administration change to the term 'illegal immigrant' - now 'illegal alien'. They are completely depersonalised.

Also racist is the Trump administration change to the term 'illegal immigrant' - now 'illegal alien'. They are completely depersonalised.

'Alien' is a term widely used in US law, it means someone who is not a citizen or national of the USA.

Title 8 of the United States Code is headed "Aliens and Nationality".

(The United States Code - the official codification of the general and permanent federal statutes of the United States.)

Musk hasn't been a Democrat for yomks.

DOGE is being dangerously careless. Special education students lost transition services because the word "transition" got flagged. In special education that means transition from school, so support services for college/university or job preparation. There's quite a kerfluffle about it. (Then Trump/musk went and cut transition services during their rampage of the DoE. I've got two kids in special education and these services are really important. But this administration is soaked in ableism.)

and frankly, a hell of a lot of people here care more about the jobs being lost, the damage to the economy, and the naked power grab than trans people.

Note that it's his government that has decreed the words 'women' and 'woman' as well as 'trans' and 'gender' have been put on a list of words that , if mentioned in research abstracts, will be grounds for it not being federally funded. So looks like someone is actually banning the word 'woman' after all.

Yes, I read about this. It’s very worrying.A serious but unforeseen outcome.

Alternative reading: Even Donald Trump can see that gender ideology is batshit.

I will ask again:
What do you say to those women in federal prisons or those girls trying to play sport at school?
Are you prepared to tell them they should wait for someone more suitable to sort it out?

If you read the full thread, you will see that the PP who posted that, when challenged, walked it back, replying:
""Story here, www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-science-foundation-trump-executive-orders-words/
wave it off if you want. I'll be honest it's possible they mean it just gets 'reviewed' to check it's not non-u and I could have jumped the gun on that."

That's quite funny, that PP can't have ever heard the Sting song.
When I lived and worked in the US on an H1 visa 1990ish I, like him, was a 'legal alien'. Obviously if I'd outstayed its term I'd have been an illegal one.

(Mind you, I can understand not entirely trusting a song which claims Englishmen like toast done on one side - wtf?)

genius.com/Sting-englishman-in-new-york-lyrics

I had the Sting song in my head, too.

It was released in 1987 and the chorus obviously contains a word play on the standard phrase of the time. Otherwise, it would have been incomprehensible twaddle.

I concur about the toast.

I think gender ideology is now on the way out. The spell cast by the trans activists which meant that no one was allowed to talk about it for fear of being booted out of their job, or ostracised by their peers, has been broken. Even though big institutions like the NHS, universities, police etc are still in thrall to it the general public can see what gender ideology means in practice. Politicians, always slow to catch on, are starting to understand that the electorate are really unhappy about the implications of allowing men to claim to be women.

It's one of those things that is impossible to reverse, in my view. In the same way that you can't unbreak an egg or put the genie back into the box or any other kind of analogy you can think of, once people have seen that gender self-ID means allowing six foot, entirely intact men to put on a wig and a dress and use the women's changing room, they're never going to un-see that. There isn't going to be a future in which there's some kind of compromise that allows the "nice" trans women into changing rooms but not the nasty ones.

In fact, all that's going to happen now is that we will simply see more and more coverage of the cases that Genevieve Gluck has been so diligently reporting on in Reduxx: male sexual offenders using gender self-ID as a means to harm women and girls. Now the floodgates have opened (another metaphor!), the flood is only going to go in one direction.

@TempestTost

It's back to this omnicause business. If someone has some kind of issue with illegal immigrants, or for that matter legal ones, that is not the same as racism. Even if their reasons are stupid. (It could also be anti-outsider. Or just not a fan of the immigration policies. )

Lots of us noticed during the campaign how Harris would roll out a new accent for a different audience. A variety of very fake Southern accents for black audiences, a fake Mexican accent for Hispanic audiences. She's a woman from San Francisco who grew up in Canada, and none of that was convincing.

You often find this with Democrat politicians talking to minority audiences. They adjust their accent and dumb down their vocabulary. Biden does it, Hillary does it, AOC does it. Even Obama doesn't talk to a black audience the way he talks to a mainly white audience.

I wonder how this kind of thing would go down in different contexts, like straight men playing camp for a gay audience.

I'm not saying Trump is exactly popular with minorities, though more so than people think, but I think minorities appreciate that he doesn't pander or talk down to them. He speaks exactly the same to everyone, the same way that he's always wearing the dark suit and the big red tie.

Donal Trump didn't talk down to his supporters? Not even when he said

‘Jill, get your fat husband off the couch, get that fat pig off the couch,..‘Tell him to go and vote for Trump, he’s going to save our country.’”
“Get him up, Jill, slap him around...”

I think I detected a slight John Wayne accent in the 'Get him up, Jill' bit, it sounded rather like 'Take 'em to Missouri, Matt'

I don't know if Trump also 'did' accents.
He did however mock a disabled reporter's voice - does that count?

There are women in Trump's administration, and also gay men afaik.
I had a conversation about this in the pub last night (so everyone slightly tipsy) and met the argument that hormone replacement reduces male strength and that the wheels were coming off trans ideology anyway and so the Democrats would have brought in similar legislation if they saw this was what most people wanted.

We are not in the US and we were in a pub and wanting not to get unfriendly. No actual TRA allies! But group included me, two men just met - pub is open and friendly, no TV, no music, so talking to each other is high on everyone's reason for being there - and my DS plus my dog, whose presence had initiated the contact between us (definite people pleaser!). The consensus was Trump was a bad thing and that his directives were also bad, because the evidence everyone wanted bans on men in women's sports etc isn't there. When it was there the Democrats would have legislated. We ended there and I thought it pointless to continue, having brought up the Peggie v Upton case, which it was generally agreed showed the tide was turning in the UK. The problem is that I am not sure any amount of tide turning without some corrective legislation is going to fix this and Trump has probably kick-started things in the US, but short-term has caused the Democrats to harden their stance. So, yes, I think he might have done damage simply by being him.

I think that there are many, many things we can blame Trump for but that the Democrats hardening their stance on gender ideology is a decision they have taken all on their own.

Like I said, I'm having trouble seeing this as any kind of victory for 'protecting women'. OK so you've defeated the transes, but to me this seems to be at the expense of the even greater empowerment of every misogynist man.

Who on this board do you think is personally responsible for Trump routing the Democrats? The Democrats and their supporters did that.

It's so interesting to read here. No one seems bothered by the incredible waste and graft found going on in the Pentagon, Social Security, Medicare. This + women's rights is what makes Trump so popular. Also illegal immigration.
Legal Hispanics do not want illegal immigration; they voted for Trump 42 %record numbers.
Americans don't want illegals getting social security, housing or medicare or social benefits either.
the racism, sexism, Russian tropes are all pretty dead, just like fascist and Nazi.

@Merrymouse : "I think he doesn't care beyond the short term political win. "
That goes for all issues apparently, see Riyadh on Ukraine.