August 12, 2025
Transparent Hypocrisy: Examining an Executive Order
By Laura Trachtman
In January 2025, the President Trump Administration issued an Executive Order claiming that gender is binary, and a person is either a man or a woman. Let’s take a brief step into this document and review the reasoning behind the same.
President Trump claimed that “[a]cross the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. 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.” There’s a lot to unpack here.
First, this Executive Order references single-sex domestic abuse shelters as places of refuge for women, but that’s it. Despite the acknowledgement, however brief, that women are the demographic group to suffer by far the most from domestic abuse, no plans have been iterated to support relief in this area. In other words, the President has said that this is an area that women in particular need assistance with, but no plans have been made to help women in this area. On the contrary, the recent federal budget cuts have reduced federal spending in this area by a third. So here we have an Executive Order that specifically referenced a need unique to female Americans, and not half a year later, the President reduced spending by over one hundred million dollars ($100,000,000).
It goes without saying that there have been no Executive Orders directed towards reducing domestic abuse by increasing education to male Americans, or increasing spending on mental health treatment. Furthermore, it is the apex of hypocrisy for President Trump to accuse trans women of attacking cisgendered women. I myself know a woman who admitted to me that she was groped by President Trump against her will before he assumed office, and the news outlets have publicized myriad accounts from myriad women who alleged that President Trump sexually assaulted them. In other words, President Trump believes that men will sexually assault women because President Trump himself has sexually assaulted women – which he freely admitted.
This indicates clearly that President Trump is uninterested in doing the work to actually protect women, but simply seeks to blame a disenfranchised population, that of transgendered women, for the crimes of cisgendered men.
Second, this Executive Order discussed women’s workplace showers. While I have never worked at a location that has workplace showers, I believe the assumption implicit therein is that these showers are communal (this is not necessarily the case, but let’s assume that it is). The point that President Trump implied is that men will be unable to control themselves in a room full of scantily-clad or naked women and that the women will be in danger of sexual assault from predatory men. Again, accounts from contestants in the Miss America pageant (which President Trump owned from 1996-2015) who were required to change backstage in between performances complained that President Trump regularly went backstage while they were changing, and also sexually assaulted them.
Again, no plans were revealed to help prevent sexual assault. As in domestic abuse shelters, women are by far the demographic more likely to suffer from sexual assault, but instead of training men not to assault women, sexually or otherwise, President Trump chose to blame transgendered women for the crimes of cisgendered men. It is noteworthy that the same budget cuts described above that affected funding for domestic violence shelters also affected funding for victims of sexual violence, so again, instead of putting funding into areas where women in particular need it the most, President Trump reduced it by a third.
Our third and final point for today is the commonly mentioned topic of transgendered women in women’s bathrooms. While this is not specifically mentioned in the Executive Order I’m parsing today, it certainly is common enough in certain states and was surely a contributing factor to the issuance of this Executive Order; Florida, Montana, Ohio and Wyoming are some, and you can see here a full list of the specific states and their prohibitions.
When I first came across this topic, I was really, really confused. Why would it matter who was peeing in the stall next to mine? But after thinking about this for a spell, I realized that men who have never been in a women’s restroom don’t know that, unlike in men’s restrooms, there’s no bullpen. Women simply cannot watch each other using the facilities, as we use individual stalls, so unless the person goes under or over the wall dividing each stall, it’s a non-spectator sport. While I repeat that this isn’t mentioned in the Executive Order, it’s something that most men are simply unaware of (this was a big discussion in the Trachtman household while Alan was alive, and he had literally no idea how women’s restrooms were laid out) so I think it’s important to discuss it here for the benefit of my readers, like my father, who never set foot in a women’s restroom.
In the Executive Order, President Trump claimed that he was mandating this recognition of gender as a binary in order to protect women’s “dignity, safety and well-being.” He entirely failed to explain how transgendered women in traditionally cisgendered women’s spaces violates women’s dignity, although the argument can certainly be made that by walking around backstage at the Miss America pageant, President Trump attacked the dignity of those contestants. Furthermore, President Trump has acted against the preservation of women’s wellbeing and safety by stripping over a hundred million dollars of funding from programs that are critical to women, as I discussed above. Finally, for a man who has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault, and who actually admitted to sexually assaulting women, to claim that he does anything for women’s dignity, safety, and wellbeing, is a fucking joke. This Executive Order is nothing but base hypocrisy, fear mongering and pandering to bigots, and nothing about it actually seeks to protect women, as indicated by the complete omission of any language condemning men for committing acts of violence against women.