‘First Female President?’: How one of Trump’s executive orders inadvertantly declared everyone female

President Donald Trump’s executive order may have just declared everyone female, users on X pointed out, after the document said that gender or sex, as the EO would rather say, is defined at conception. 

Trump issued the order on Monday after his inauguration, saying there are only two sexes: male and female. In the definition of terms, it said female “means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” 

The order, in its own words, was meant to restore the “biological truth to the federal government.” However, the internet slapped it with another biological truth: that at conception, all human embryos start out as female, until sex differentiation kicks in several weeks after. 

“For an ideology that's supposedly 'science-based' these chumps really can't get high school biology right,” said one user.

Another joked that this order, in effect, might have just made Trump the first female president of the United States.

"Holy fuck, Donald Trump declaring every female at conception to be recognised as a woman technically makes him the first female president no????" they wrote.

Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, poked fun at this, too. She told The Independent that it “appears that he [Trump] just declared everyone a woman from conception based on the language of the executive order.”

But while the jokes may mock the language of the order, its intent is still clear: to erase other gender identities including trans and intersex that don’t fit the perceived binary of male and female. 

“You cannot claim to unite the country while enacting policies designed to erase an entire community,” said Dr. David Kilmnick, President and Founder of the New York LGBT Network, in a statement on Jan. 20. This, he said, leaves transgender individuals “questioning their basic right to exist in this country.”

This was echoed by interACT, an advocacy group for intersex youth, which said in a statement that while the order will likely face legal challenges, its most immediate effect “isn’t to change policy but to stoke fear, encouraging young people to hide their existence.” 

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