Deleware Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, brushed off President Donald Trump’s anti-transgender executive order Tuesday evening.
Trump announced his anti-trans order on his first day in office. Specifically, the order defines a female as a “a person belonging, at conception to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” while a male is a “person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
The president also laid out the policy in his inaugural address on Monday.
“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” he declared.
But critics pointed out that genitalia at conception are “phenotypically female,” according to the National Library of Medicine.
For the first several weeks after conception, all human embryos follow a “female” developmental blueprint until the activation of the SRY gene initiates sexual differentiation. Embryos with an XY genotype will begin developing male traits linked to the Y chromosome at roughly six weeks. Before then, human embryos have only developed female traits linked to the X chromosome. One social media critic scoffed that the order was “written by morons.”
McBride laughed off the distinction between “reproductive cells” during Tuesday evening votes in the House of Representatives.
“Well, it appears that he just declared everyone a woman from conception based on the language of the of the executive order,” she told The Independent.
The executive order also targeted “gender ideology,” which it defines as replacing “the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.”
The garbled, head-twisting order requires federal agencies to “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”
The order would also require that transgender women are not placed in women’s prisons or detention centers and that the Federal Bureau of Prisons revise its policies so that no federal dollars go toward “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
During his sole debate with former vice president Kamala Harris, Trump attacked Harris and said she “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
Last week, the House passed legislation to amend Title IX, the law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs that receive federal money, to define “sex” to be “recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” Only two Democrats joined Republicans with one other Republican voting “present.”
McBride has been a particular target for Republicans. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced legislation last Congress to ban McBride and all trans women from using women’s restrooms on U.S. Capitol grounds. Ultimately, House Speaker Mike Johnson agreed to adopt the policy.
