(LifeSiteNews) — The American transgender movement may be currently on the ropes, but their institutional power is far from over – and they are mobilizing constantly to push back against a wave of Trump administration policies designed to repudiate their ideology and break their power. This has led to multiple situations where different levels of government, courts, and bureaucracies are doing different things at the same time. Chaos has resulted.
Exhibit A is President Trump’s day-one executive order directing the attorney general to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers” and further ordering that no government funds should be used for “sex changes” for prisoners (something he promised during the 2024 presidential campaign).
In February, for example, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington issued a broad ruling temporarily blocking Trump’s executive order mandating that men who identify as “transgender” could not be sent to women’s prisons on the grounds that three gender-confused men suing over the order were, in his view, likely to succeed in arguing that it was “unconstitutional.” On January 26, a similar, more limited ruling was issued by a federal judge in Boston – a restraining order limited to the case of one gender-confused man in a woman’s facility.
The judges also declared that the government cannot deny prisoners transgender procedures, which they incorrectly referred to as “medical care.”
Despite that, the Guardian reported earlier this month that gender-confused men – whom they referred to as “transgender women” – are being transferred to male facilities, anyhow. According to the Guardian: “Lawyers fighting Trump’s directive say the court rulings prevented the transfers of 17 trans women [sic] who are plaintiffs in the cases, but others not included in the litigation are now facing placements in men’s facilities.”
Trump’s move has been condemned by judges, activists, and journalists alike as “cruel” and likely to expose prisoners who identify as “transgender” to sexual abuse. Indeed, the entire Guardian report focuses on the alleged risk of sexual assault to gender-confused males behind bars in male prisons, without dedicating a single line to the female convicts sexually assaulted by male prisoners sent to their facilities. For example:
- In 2019, a female prisoner in Illinois reported being raped by a “transgender” prisoner convicted of murder and attempted murder. The prison tried to cover it up, and the prisoner’s lawyer accused her of “transphobia.”
- In 2022, a female prisoner from Rikers Island sued New York City, alleging she was raped by a man who identifies as “transgender.”
The perspective of female inmates, however, is utterly disregarded – indeed, in most press reports, not even mentioned. In fact, the Guardian quoted one source as claiming that Trump’s prison executive order was meant to protect women, which was a problem “that doesn’t even exist.” All this, of course, while quoting self-declared “transgender” people insisting that Trump’s policies are an attack on their “very existence.”
Ironically, these internal battles highlight the truth of Trump’s executive order reaffirming the male-female sex binary, which states:
The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
This is precisely right. The federal government currently affirms the fact of biological sex – but the rulings of activist judges are premised on the rejection of those facts and the embrace of gender ideology. The internecine battles we see unfolding are evidence that when different states, levels of government, courts, and institutions disagree on something as fundamental as biological sex, chaos that does indeed undermine “the validity of the entire American system” results.
If there are only two sexes, then the women claiming to have been raped by prisoners who identify as “transgender” were, in the view of those who hold to gender ideology, raped by other women. One’s belief in or rejection of gender ideology utterly transforms the event in question, which is why a male prisoner’s lawyer can accuse an alleged rape victim of “transphobia” for referring to her assailant as a man. Gender ideology is corrosive, and even if one disagrees that accepting it does not undermine the validity of the American system, it is crystal clear that it undermines the cohesion of the American system.
