Donald J Trump and the Two Gendered USA
I am not famous or an influencer so who will even read this. But going to have my say here in my tiny little corner of the noosphere.
This kind of thinking:
“It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,”-Donald J. Trump.
…invariably points to a kind of self projection onto the world. Anyone who thinks this way is guilty of a kind of self centered imagining. They pat down their ego’s and think “If I am only seeing two genders then there must only be two genders”. Even when done with sheer ignorance and not malice, you are daydreaming that your way of being is the only way of being. That alone is proof of how misguided such an idea can be…to think that you actually can just make an announcement and then BAM…only two genders exist, or ever existed.
It means you are seeking to overturn an entirety of proof and evidence of history available to you. It’s like saying Native Americans don’t exist. Which reminds me of Japan’s historical perspective and policies regarding the indigenous people there, the Ainu people. The Ainu were not officially recognized by the government via policy until 2008. When people in control of policy believe that is their right to force their limited views onto an entire nation, they are not fit to serve. But it happens all the time. If their scope of work is self serving, they are not fit to serve. If they only seek to benefit and pander to the people who support them, they are not fit to serve.
Okay but…how many sitting presidents have done exactly this before Trump? Pretty much all of them. Remember when women couldn’t vote? Who kept that going because women were seen as unfit to vote? Presidents helped that…and the mob of men who honest to goodness didn’t believe that women had anything to contribute to the voting booth kept it going.
Slavery? Kept in place due to decision makers at the top.
The Native American purge and removal to reservations? Hell, an entire wave of non-native people hungry for their “own” land fueled that. The USA was settled coast to coast by “settlers” because of the exact kind of thinking that Trump displays now in 2025. The point is that Trump is how humans think, writ large. He’s an allegory that we all need to learn from.
The ideas that Trump is expressing sadly aren’t new. We just haven’t heard anything quite like it from a President in a very long time. And it’s a jarring return to old ways of thinking that I had hoped we had graduated from.
If you have to announce that no other genders exist, it’s because you are afraid that they are already there. You don’t have to make a bulwark against something you think isn’t real.
If you have written off Trump’s statement as a throw away, don’t count on it. This is a warm up. As he continues to follow the Project 2025 Doctrine you can bet he will be approaching saying that “if only male and female exists, then only heterosexuality can exist”. I mean..that’s really what his announcement meant to imply, he just didn’t go that far the first time around. But you really need to go to some of the conservative media sites and see what their doctrine is. Read about what kind of world the people who give DJT his talking points are trying to achieve. It’s a world for white, straight, exceedingly conservative Christians-full stop. And sure it’s always been kicking around. But aren’t we supposed to be graduating from fear based suppression by now? Haven’t we seen the damage that humans can construct when they live in fear of something different?
Trump personifies the spirit of colonialism and manifest destiny in a unique way. He is the ultimate expression of how people should have stopped conducting themselves a very long time ago. What’s been wrong with America in the past…is what’s wrong with Trump now. Trump is an opportunity to really think about what America could be…for the first time ever.
So far, it’s always been a place where the encoding promised by the Declaration of Independence…of Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness has only applied to some of us some of the time. Those who enjoyed the freedoms were nearly always white and wealthier and until recently, male. And of course, always CIS gendered white male.
Trump isn’t saying something new, he’s just saying what I expected to hear back in 1970 or the 1950’s. We are in the process of finally getting around to culturally accepting that the stilted way freedoms and support have been distributed to all people here have been done very poorly.
To me, Trump’s CIS-gendered declaration is also a reaction to the newest test of whether or not we will work harder to live up to the high notions the country can be built upon. My hope is that Trump comes to represent a time that makes Americans reflect on where this country has actually been and where it could be going.
He’s a good reminder about where we need to be going, which is to say…the opposite of wherever he is going.