What The Hell America!

From abortion bans to anti-trans policies, attacks on gender freedom are not fringe—they’re foundational to the new authoritarian agenda.

In the whirling, swirling hellscape of illegality and cruelty that is the current American political scene, it’s hard to keep track of all the individuals and groups demonized, deported and derided by an administration seemingly motivated by a Machiavellian desire for power that might make Machiavelli himself blush with shame. In the midst of an apocalyptic news cycle, one targeted segment of the population seems to be fading from view: women.

Yet we now live in a country led by a man convicted of sexual assault, filled with a Cabinet and policy-making apparatus that—at my last count—had at least a dozen of his inner circle credibly accused of sexual harassment, domestic violence or assault.

One of the first acts of the administration was to issue Executive Order 14168, titled, with no hint of irony, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” What Trump refers to as “gender ideology” is the core of feminism: that gender is a social construction riven through with relations of power and dominance, and that because it is socially produced—much like our concept of “race”—how we live it personally and engage with it politically is changeable.

As feminist foremother Simone de Beauvoir so cogently put it, “One is not born but rather becomes, a woman.” (Or a man, for that matter.)

Like so much else in the upside-down world of Trumpland, where violent insurrectionists are innocent victims and no-nothing anti-science conspiracists are in charge of that science, the avatars of violent masculinity are now claiming to “defend” women. Women do not need “defending.” We need—as Ruth Bader Ginsburg (riffing off abolitionist and suffragist Sarah Grimke), famously said—for men “to take their feet off of our necks.”

The demise of Roe in the 2022 Dobbs decision and the subsequent collapse of the right to bodily autonomy (for women and others capable of gestating) in dozens of states and counting, was exactly the opposite. It was the reassertion that women’s necks, and indeed entire bodies, were not theirs in the first place.

Add to that the explicit call for women to be baby machines, from people like Vice President Vance and rabid baby daddy and neo-eugenicist Elon Musk, and musings by transportation secretary Sean Duffy on tying funding to high birthrates. The Gilead-esque intentions of this administration should be apparent to all. 

Indeed, they are screaming it from their manly rooftops: Go back! Back to the home, back to secondary status, back to being objects and not subjects. Back to sexual assault chalked up to boys being boys. 

The attacks on trans people (particularly trans women, because … women) and nonbinary people is in part an attempt to rein in gender freedom and possibility in the name of a resurgent patriarchal structure that is dependent on both women’s disempowerment and a forced insistence on a gender binary ruled by biological difference and masculine prerogative. 

The phenomenon of ‘women’s issues’ is a familiar one… being shunted off to the side or minimized … as if being forced to bear a child against your will weren’t both economic and intimate.

But somehow, the media and punditocracy seem to have forgotten all this and to be spending more time on Trump’s demolition of the economy than on the ongoing attack on women’s ability to live freely and control their own bodies.

Perusing the past weeks of news headlines in major outlets, too little time is spent detailing and analyzing the attacks on reproductive healthcare access and women’s rights—such as abortion bans and limits, fetal personhood laws, pronatalist edicts, and the gutting of resources for clinics, shelters and services for women and families. 

News cycles do of course come and go, and it makes some sense that the recent deportations and attacks on university autonomy—which so blatantly flout the law—should be front and center. But the phenomenon of “women’s issues” (which is already a framing that narrows such a core part of human thriving such as bodily autonomy) being shunted off to the side or minimized is a familiar one, often invoked by both the left and right as “cultural” or “social” issues that are sidenotes to the “real” issues of the economy … as if being forced to bear a child against your will weren’t both economic and intimate.

A recent piece in The Washington Post exemplified this rendering of reproductive justice as secondary: “Most Democrats … consider it essential for the party to expand beyond that cultural issue.” Even when reproductive rights are covered, a Reuters Institute study found that 68 percent of abortion-related articles used a passive voice.

It would be wrong, therefore, to say that the fall of Roe was the first shot across the bow, because that displaces the harm done to women as a conduit to supposedly more important or serious harms. 

Attacks on gender equity—from the undermining of reproductive access, to the policing of speech about gender, to attacks on those who live outside the gender binary, or fiscal cutbacks on women’s health initiatives—remain a core feature of this assault on civil rights and citizenship. Yet they have become buried under the everyday fire alarms of surging authoritarianism.

But reasserting patriarchal power is key to the new authoritarianism, as it has been for those leaders Trump admires such as Orban and Putin. It might be a sign of how all this is connected when a Fox News “reporter” declared Trump’s tariffs to be “manly” and designed to fix a “crisis in masculinity.”

Let us not, as Abigail Adams wrote so many years ago, forget the ladies.

In 1776, witty Adams penned an oft-quoted letter to her husband John, then a member of the Continental Congress and working with, yes the other men, to draft the Declaration of Independence. 

“I long,” she wrote, “to hear that you have declared an independency. And by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” 

Perhaps knowing he would, alas, ignore these mild pleas for a modicum of equality in the new nation, she added a bit more forcefully, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.”