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One of Donald Trump’s first acts as President was to sign an Executive Order insisting that there are only two biological sexes: male and female. While it’s not within the power of the President of the United States or any other country to mandate such a thing, Trump’s move had immediate effects. It went hand in hand with an order eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in federal agencies. Across the United States, corporations and universities dropped their DEI programs, either out of fear of losing federal funds or contracts, or simply to impress the administration with their ability to change with the times.
Trump’s actions most immediately affect transgender and nonbinary people, denying access to gender-affirming care, gender-marker changes on IDs, and a variety of other services that allow trans and nonbinary people to safely and comfortably exist in their bodies and in the world. If this were all the administration did, it would be enough. But orders enforcing so-called biological sex are about much more than banning trans people from public life. Reinforcing a supposedly “traditional” binary is about gender roles broadly: It is about men getting manly-man jobs and women returning to the kitchen and the nursery.
As historian Jules Gill-Peterson writes in her book A Short History of Trans Misogyny, rightwing authoritarianism comes first for trans women “because it aims to preserve, or entrench, existing social hierarchies through the production of an imagined threat from those with the least demonstrated power, demanding violence to put them down.” (Trump’s Executive Orders are clothed in the language of “defend[ing] women’s rights,” marking out trans women in particular as a threat.) Misogyny broadly is not simple hatred of women, nor is trans misogyny or transphobia a somehow natural fear of trans people’s bodies. Rather, Gill-Peterson writes, it is social and often state policing and punishment inflicted upon “certain women for their perceived failures to stay subordinate to men.” Transphobic violence and policy are tools to keep us all in line—and the line they want us toeing is one of a very particular set of gender roles.
This is visible in Trump’s policies, Sharita Gruberg, vice president for economic justice at the National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF), explains to me. The Executive Order, she says, allows members of the Trump Administration “to review anything that has gender in it.” The public face was the attack on trans people, but the implementation goes beyond, “trying to claw back gender equity projects and work and data.”
NPWF’s research shows that states that have attacked or banned gender-affirming care have also banned or attempted to ban abortion; the laws are written by the same set of politicians broadly aligned with Trump’s agenda. (Commentators have noted that the Executive Order’s fixation on sex “at conception” aligns with attempts at legislating a fetus as a person.) Those same states often lack the kinds of equal pay protections and paid leave that have made it possible for women to enter and succeed in the workplace. These states have low minimum wages and often have not expanded Medicaid.
“The biological essentialism reinforces gender essentialism, which is just not how most families work regardless of their gender and biological sex makeup,” says Kate Bahn, chief economist and senior vice president of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “The reality of modern American family life requires much more flexibility. The reality is that it’s mostly two working parents these days who are piecing it together the best way they can, because we have an economy that requires both parents to work. Reinforcing this binary harms families that are actually trying to figure out ways to care for each other.”
Such retrograde gender roles are central to the ideal that “Make America Great Again” aspires to, yet that ideal was never a reality for most people, Bahn notes. Women—particularly Black women—have always participated in the workforce more than the idealized Leave It to Beaver, mid-century memory shows. And today, that reality is even less likely to apply, despite the best efforts of “tradwife” influencers. Women are in the workforce out of necessity as much as desire, and most children, even if they do grow up in a family with one man and one woman as parents, will see both of them going to work because the rent is too damn high. That means that birthing parents probably need access to lactation rooms or at least a private space; meanwhile, a man might have to bring his young child into the restroom regardless of the gender on the restroom door. Today’s realities, though, are the last things on the minds of Trump Administration policymakers.
The Trump playbook, Gruberg notes, looks very similar to the one that has existed around the globe since at least the 1980s. The Vatican, for example, opposed not only abortion, but also women working outside of the home, the entire existence of queer people, and then trans people as a more recent addition.
“The attacks that we’re seeing in the administration on trans people are aligned with that worldview, [which is] trying to re-establish in multiple ways this belief that they have of not only two genders or two sexes, whatever word they’re using that day, but that those two also have some prescribed role by God that they’re supposed to uphold.”
While it’s easy to see that social conservatives, like former Vice President Mike Pence, think this way, researchers such as Melinda Cooper have noted that neoliberalism, too, is invested in propping up a certain kind of “family values.” In her book of the same name—Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism—Cooper writes, “It would not be an exaggeration to say that the enormous political activism of American neoliberals in the 1970s was inspired by the fact of changing family structures.” Cooper points out that Chicago school economists like Gary Becker “understood the breakdown of the Fordist family wage to be the critical event of his time, and one whose reverberations could be discerned in everything from shifting race relations to the recomposition of the labor market and the changing imperatives of social welfare.” Neoliberals, she argued, were concerned with the “social costs” that come from the breakdown of the Fordist family—the wife at home supported by a husband making enough money to pay all the bills. Those costs are financial: Neoliberals were, of course, obsessed with welfare reform and refusing to pay for children who were not born in the right kind of family.
Becker, Bahn notes, argued that “under modern capitalism, specialization is the most productive way to allocate resources . . . . But he thought households worked that way as well. He thought households should specialize.” He described people as different “types” rather than explicitly referring to gender, she notes, but still, “basically in his ideal world, girls would just go to home economics and boys would take the other suite of classes, because if, generally speaking, girls have more of an affinity for caregiving, why would you train them in anything else?” Such families, organized into hierarchies, were the building blocks of the broader hierarchical society that thinkers like Becker wanted to uphold.
Of course, since the decline of the Fordist factory job, few families can afford such specialization—or rather, the specialization continues, and women continue to do most of the care work, but they do it as a “second shift” after a paid job that contributes to the family and the broader economy. “The rise of inequality would be much worse, but the fact that women have increased their labor force participation and have more access to a greater variety of jobs is the thing that has stabilized families in the past forty years,” Bahn says.
But the MAGA longing for the Fordist family is about more than the loss of family-wage jobs. Cooper chides those who would treat gender, race, and sexuality as merely “social” issues; today many people are calling Trump’s gender orders “distractions” or purely “culture war” red meat for a social conservative base. But, Bahn reminds us, “the Fordist politics of class was itself a form of identity politics inasmuch as it established white, married masculinity as a point of access to full social protection.”
The economic and the social are deeply intertwined, and while Trump and his cronies aren’t even offering the carrot of bringing back good factory jobs anymore, they’re hoping instead to force us back into the old social hierarchy—with white, married, working men on top—purely through the use of sticks. Gruberg points to a directive from Sean Duffy, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, which states that “the department’s grant and loan programs should prioritize projects in ‘communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,’ to the extent allowed by law.”
“It’s a very specific view of what kinds of families, what kind of marriage they want,” Gruberg notes. The Family Research Council, one of the contributors to Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for Trump’s second term, has a long history of “hand-wringing about Black children born to unmarried moms and the fatherlessness contributing to crime [and] mental illness,” she says. “They’re just doubling down on it by centralizing power and pushing this worldview through at all costs.”
It’s a politics of anxious masculinity filtered through the family: Note Trump’s Executive Order taking aim at ensuring that the Department of Defense focuses on “developing the requisite warrior ethos.” Rather than providing the kinds of things that actually incentivize childbearing—family and medical leave, paid child care, and most importantly, higher wages and stable costs of living—they’re relying on rhetoric and punishment. There is an aspect of these policies, again, that is about reinforcing dominance. And white supremacy and patriarchy are both about dominance.
It’s no surprise that the administration is joining rightwing politicians around the world in its attack on what it calls “gender ideology,” just as it does in its attacks on migrants. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, for example, has framed his attacks on LGBTQ+ media as “child protection,” a common pose among the global far right. Declining birth rates—but only the right kind of “native” births—are an obsession, as is the fear of being replaced by immigrants, who are often portrayed as having too many children. The desire to turn back the clock on human rights is global, and while it is unlikely that any of these politicians can return us to 1945 with an Executive Order, “they can cause a tremendous amount of damage in the process, even if they don’t succeed in their goal,” Gruberg notes.
But what would it look like to really support families in 2025? Far from a warrior ethos and an end to women at work, what parents (and, importantly, children) need, Gruberg says, is equal pay and jobs free of discrimination, paid family leave and sick time, paid child care and elder care, and a raise and paid overtime. Yet conservatives have moaned over child care requirements in the CHIPS and Science Act, and made sure that the child tax credit—the Biden Administration’s flagship success for working families—was dead. Trump benefited—and Biden suffered—electorally from precisely the demographic that such policies would—and briefly did—help.
As economist J.W. Mason points out, “During 2020-2021, the federal government did more than ever before in history to support the incomes and living standards of ordinary Americans. Then it took that support away.” He adds, “When Democrats boasted, in 2021, of the largest-ever reduction in child poverty rates, was there an understanding that it would be followed, a year later, by the largest-ever increase?”
It is hard in this moment to point to a lesson beyond the obvious: that Trump is unconstrained by any belief in precedent or compromise, while Democrats often let their wins slip through their fingers, giving policies expiration dates or, Gruberg notes, calling something a “down payment” on the end goal that never comes. The Family and Medical Leave Act, for instance, just passed its thirty-second anniversary, but still provides only unpaid leave.
There is one bit of advice to take away from all of this: We do not, as the saying goes, live single-issue lives. “Communities are being connected through the shared experience of being under attack,” Gruberg says. “And the only way to effectively fight back is to recognize our shared future here and the reality that our ability to thrive and survive this relies on us working together across issues and across identities to fight for—not restoring, but advancing—more equitable policies.”