On the first day of the new administration, January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order: "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government," which did the opposite. The order denied decades of science about sex and gender, and began a policy of diminishing the rights of anyone who rejects conformity to gender stereotypes. This order targets transgender and nonbinary Americans, but it does much more than that: It also targets feminists, women, and men who refuse to be constrained by gendered social norms.

Let me explain. As a social scientist who has studied gender for four decades, I can assure everyone that no one has ever denied the biological reality of sex, despite the executive order's claims. Scientists who study gender have not, as the order reads, tried to replace the "immutable biological reality of sex with an internal fluid and subjective sense of self." Scientists know, as does everyone else, that

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