Posted on Thursday, January 30, 2025
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by Hunter Oswald
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Less than two weeks into his second term, President Donald Trump has dealt two devastating blows to the gender ideology regime. But the signs of that movement’s demise were obvious even before the 47th president’s victory last November.
Trump’s latest move to dismantle the lies of gender ideology came on Tuesday with a new executive order on “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation.” Following shocking revelations that hundreds of children as young as 12 have undergone irreversible gender surgeries and kids as young as eight have been prescribed cross-sex hormones in recent years, Trump’s order affirms that “it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
That order comes on the heels of his day one executive order establishing that the government will now only “recognize two sexes, male and female.” Moreover, that order affirms that those sexes “are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
Just a few decades ago, those statements – that there are only two sexes, that sex is a biological reality, and that permanently mutilating children is wrong – would have seemed like common sense to all but an extremely small minority of people. But given the astounding rise in the number of people identifying as transgender in recent years, along with the Biden administration’s complete embrace of gender ideology, Trump’s orders nonetheless represent a significant shift in the national discourse.
However, Trump isn’t trying to change public opinion on gender ideology – he’s following it. New research like the Cass Report and whistleblower testimony about the tragic consequences of so-called “affirming” transgender medical practices have shattered the foundation of gender ideology and destroyed the public support – support grounded in lies and deception – that transgender activists had worked so hard to build.
A survey out earlier this month from The New York Times and Ipsos further confirms that gender ideology is falling out of favor at a remarkable clip – particularly when it comes to the issue of women’s sports.
“Thinking about transgender female athletes — meaning athletes who were male at birth but who currently identify as female do you think they should or should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports?” The survey asked. Out of the 2,128 respondents, 79 percent said males who identify as female should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports.
But even more concerningly for gender ideologues, that number included 67 percent of self-identified Democrats.
The survey also asked, “Thinking about medications used for transgender care, do you think doctors should be able to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs or hormone therapy to minors between the ages of 10 and 18?” 54 percent of Democrat respondents said that “no one under the age of 18 should have access” to those drugs.
In other words, Trump’s most recent executive order has the support of a majority of the American people, and even a majority of Democrats.
It’s worth noting just how much of a shift this represents from just a few years ago. A 2022 poll by Pew Research Center found that just 37 percent of Democrat respondents supported “requiring that trans athletes compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth.”
Additionally, just 26 percent of Democrats said they were in favor of “making it illegal for health care professionals to help someone under 18 with medical care for gender transition.”
One year later, in 2023, a Gallup poll found that number had already moved significantly – 48 percent of Democrats in that survey said they believed that trans athletes should play on teams that match their birth gender.
Such a dramatic shift is virtually unprecedented in the history of public polling – and some Democrat officials see the writing on the wall. In an interview with the New York Times last year, Democrat Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York stated plainly, “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”
Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts likewise criticized his party in the Times for constantly pandering to gender ideology extremists. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” Mr. Moulton said, “but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Since Trump’s election, other Democrats have also blamed their leftist colleagues for going too far on the gender issue, arguing that it cost them the election by putting the party out of step with the majority of voters.
None of this, of course, occurred in a vacuum. Conservatives have been working tirelessly for years to shift public opinion back toward “team sanity.” The success of Matt Walsh’s 2022 documentary What is a Woman? exposed the inherent contradictions in gender ideology and the dark underbelly of the transgender medical industry. Riley Gaines’s clash with Lia Thomas brought international attention to the injustice against women losing to biological boys in women’s sports. Incidents like the efforts to cover up a pattern of sexual assaults by a transgender identifying student in Loudoun County, Virginia, also raised public awareness about the dangerous downstream effects of gender ideology.
To be sure, transgender activists are unlikely to give in anytime soon, and they still hold an immense amount of sway within key American cultural institutions. But it may well be that we are witnessing the last days of the gender ideology regime.
Hunter Oswald is a Research Fellow for The American Spectator. He is an alum of Grove City College, where he graduated Cum Laude with a B.A. in Political Science. You can follow him on X @HunterOswald8.
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