Trump’s executive order is about keeping women ‘pure,’ professor says...
President Donald Trump’s executive order to keep men who claim to be women out of female prisons is “dangerous” and hints of racism, according to an anthropologist.
Kate Clancy, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, analyzed the president’s directive that the federal government define sex on biological terms.
He also said prisons should not house men who claim to be transgender with women. The administration has also frozen people from requesting an “X” gender marker, for “nonbinary,” on their passports.
The order is “stupid” and “dangerous,” Clancy told LGBTQ Nation. Clancy disputed the idea that sex is biologically determinable. However, biology experts have affirmed there are only two sexes and it is not possible to change one’s sex.
“I think Trump, in whatever terrible language is available to him, is trying to control women and control people he perceives to be in the woman category,” Clancy told the news outlet.
“A lot of this is keeping the category of women pure—and also, obviously, about doing immense harm to trans people.”
But she also finds a racial element in the executive order.
She stated:
There’s also a very racial, white supremacist thing going on here with this “defending women.”
It’s a very old idea—it appears in travelogs, early writings of Europeans, as well as in the United States when they started encountering North American indigenous folks, and the way that they thought about enslaved peoples.
There was this belief that in the “lower races,” men and women were less different and that in the “higher races,” there were more differences between women and men.
This was about saying men and women are differentiated, clear, non-overlapping categories because that makes us a more evolved people.
Clancy also said “sex is also socially constructed.”
“We’re seeing it take place right now with these executive orders, where they are trying to impose their own definition—an ahistorical, a-scientific definition of supposedly a scientific phenomenon,” she said.
She again called it “stupid” when asked about the executive order another time during the interview. The directive has also left the professor in “incredible distress.”
Trump is “signaling particular things” with his order, the professor said. This includes “protecting the purity of the female category and trying to lay claim to personhood and sex as early in the existence of a human as possible.”
That really says something about how big a step this executive order is trying to take—they’re trying to make it as all-encompassing and as absolutely draconian as possible,” according to Clancy.
The anthropologist has previously launched a research project on why women, or as she calls them, “menstruators,” were facing problems following vaccination against COVID-19.
