President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders, signed on his first day back in the White House, are riddled with illegal and unconstitutional demands. The order aimed at eradicating trans and gender-nonconforming people is no exception, and bears the added honor of spouting unscientific nonsense.

It is a bizarre, wide-ranging document, premised on a pseudoscientific definition of binary sex classification that would be impossible to implement to the letter in everyday life. The order would not stand up to scientific scrutiny or sound legal challenge, but it’s not designed to. It is, like most of Trump’s illegal executive orders, a political speech act intended to sow fear, give license to discrimination, and make life for marginalized communities materially harder.

The text is worth interrogating, however, insofar as it reveals the Trump administration’s brute-force approach to pushing trans people out of public life, couched in unambiguously pro-natalist rhetoric and the risible claim that it is “defending women.”

In the current preferred lexicon of anti-trans campaigners, long desperate to point to something immutable in science to ground their delusional rejection of trans existence, the executive order says, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” And that “‘Sex’ is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity.’”

The order then defines “female” and “male” as follows:

“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. … ‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

Observers were swift to note that by adding “at conception,” the order bundles in a notion of fetal personhood — a nod to the fact that attacks on gender nonconformity are part and parcel of a pro-natalist agenda, which requires attacks on all reproductive freedoms. It is no accident that the definitions of “female” and “male” are centered solely on reproductive function. The definition is also senseless; at conception, embryos are not sexually differentiated. And at conception, fetuses are also not producing reproductive cells, or gametes, large or small.

But the definition need not make scientific or practical sense to appease gender conformity fanatics. Since this language has now made its way into Trump’s executive order,........

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