Blog / 2025 / A Female America

Legally speaking, if you live in the United States, you are now female. It doesn’t matter how you identify and it’s got nothing to do with your biological form: according to President Trump, he’s a lady and so are you.

On Monday, the 47^th POTUS made a big production of officially declaring a whole slew of things, including:

• “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.

That’s a whole lot of science talk for someone who thinks we can inject ourselves with bleach to kill COVID, so, maybe not surprisingly, he got it wrong.

At conception and for a few weeks afterwards, an embryo doesn’t produce any gametes—those are the things Trump calls “reproductive cells.” In fact, if the SRY (the sex-determining region of the Y chromosome) doesn’t initiate a number of processes, an embryo automatically develops ovaries and a uterus.

In other words, without chemical intervention, all fertilized eggs tend towards female, so, at conception, we’re all in the lady boat. Therefore, according to Trump’s Executive Order, legally speaking, he’s a woman and so are you.

I realize you could say the mistake happened because Trump is a bigoted dummy and any scientists who follow him would have to be more than a little tweaked, and you’d probably be right. But I think there’s more to it.

The President and his merry band of know-it-alls failed to define gender because it’s not as obvious as we’ve been lead to believe

Gender and sex are not unambiguous concepts among humans, and they’re certainly not straightforward for lots of other kinds of animals either.

Among elk, for example, males generally grow antlers while females do not. This is true, and it also feels true, because it’s what many of us learned as kids. But what we probably weren’t taught was that some males are like females in that they don’t grow antlers either.

All of which is to say that the clear-cut concept of male elk having antlers versus female elk being antlerless is a simplification, a little like Trump’s official descriptions of female and male humans—except of that he simplified to the point of veering off into out-and-out error.

If you’re interested in more examples of how the gender binary isn’t as precisely defined as all that among nonhuman animals, check out my book, Crime Against Nature. It’s 135 beautifully illustrated pages of how we’ve been misled about the true diversity of nature when it comes to gender and sex.

I just released the 13^th Anniversary Edition of the book, which you can purchase or download for free.

Get the book!