Donald Trump holds up an executive order he signed immediately after becoming president. Do you really want to take at stab at dictating how embryonic cell development works, sir?

WASHINGTON — One of President Donald Trump’s first official acts on Monday was signing an executive order declaring there are only two sexes.

“It is the policy of the United States to recognise two sexes, male and female,” reads the order. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality.”

Trump’s action is part of the Republican’s yearslong efforts to stoke fears about transgender people and push them out of public spaces. In effect, the order means the US government will no longer provide any money or contracts to groups or people that it considers to be “promoting gender ideology.” Federal agencies will now only issue passports and visas that offer “female” or “male” sex markers, and these will be based on the person’s assigned sex at birth. The order also bans taxpayer money from being used for gender-affirming care.

The executive order punches down a particularly vulnerable community; trans people only make up about 1.6% of adults in the US. But on a more technical level, the way it’s been written is so embarrassingly ignorant of basic human biology that it would be laughable if its effects weren’t so harmful.

In its strangely constructed definitions of “female” and “male,” the order states that a person’s gender is defined by the size of a “reproductive cell” at the moment of conception, a stage when all embryos are phenotypically female. In other words, it appears that Trump just declared all Americans are female. This prospect has drawn mockery on social media and has been noted by Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the........

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