In his second inaugural speech, Donald Trump gave us so much that demands fact-checking and comment that I find it difficult to know where to start. I have chosen, though, to direct my focus here on one particular statement:
“This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” Trump said. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.”
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On “merit”
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On the topic of “merit,” Trump’s choices for his second cabinet and advisory positions lay bare the myth of meritocracy since most of his picks are unqualified for the positions they will likely hold and were chosen either on account of their enormous wealth or due to their television celebrity on conservative media.
For example, Trump has tapped a record 13 billionaires to work directly with his administration. For many, their “merit” lays primarily in their massive donations to Trump’s campaign and their willingness to continually kiss his ring and bend their knees so often that soon they will require hip and knee replacements.
In his highly choreographed inaugural ceremony under the Capitol dome, Trump placed three of the world’s richest people – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg – in full view of cameras for all to see.
On “racial engineering” and being “colorblind”
His warning to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race” into all aspects of society emanates from the claim throughout his time in politics of alleged “reverse discrimination” against white people in programs such as Affirmative Action and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Trump and other conservatives misuse and corrupt the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s oft-repeated quote from his “I Have a Dream” speech. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” King stated in 1963.
Yes, it was among Dr. King’s dreams for a racially and economically just society, but when he proclaimed those words, it was an unfulfilled dream, an aspiration, something not yet achieved.
“Unfortunately race in American history has been one area in which Americans kid themselves and pretend to be fair-minded when they really are not,” historian Taylor Branch, who wrote the new book The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, told CBS News.
Conservatives, particularly those in the MAGA-sphere, deploy King’s words, paradoxically, as a weapon against the possibility of a “colorblind” or so-called race-neutral society in their patriarchal Christian white supremacist project.
Barack Obama’s presidency led the media on numerous occasions to assert that the United States could now be considered a “post-racial” society, meaning “race” has lost its significance and our country’s long history of racism is now at an end.
During the presidential primaries in 2008, National Public Radio Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr noted on an episode of “All Things Considered” that Obama “transcends race” and is “race free.”
Responding to Obama’s State of the Union message on January 27, 2010, MSNBC political analyst, Chris Matthews declared, “He is post-racial by all appearances. I forgot he was Black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and past so much history in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about.”
Is the United States now a “colorblind” society? Or even more importantly, should it be?
The very notion of “race-blindness” is deeply problematic. It may feel righteous to tell another person, “I don’t see your race; I just see you as a human being.” But we are really telling the person, “I discount a part of you that I may not want to address,” and “I will not see you in your multiple identities.”
These kinds of statements erase the person’s background and historical legacy and hide the continuing hierarchical and systemic positionalities among white people and marginalized groups.
In addition, the assertion that we have fully addressed and finally concluded the long history of racism in the United States with the election of Barack Obama and afterward is simply unfounded.
In Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society, the authors show how the concept of “colorblindness” / “race-blindness” attempts to deny and further entrench hierarchical and deeply rooted systemic racial inequities that permeate American society.
We must as a society move beyond this false and counterproductive notion of “colorblindness” / “race-blindness” and confront head-on our history and current realities of racism. We must transcend, to use Mica Pollock’s term, “colormuteness” by engaging in honest and open conversations and educational efforts on the impact and legacy of race relations in our country.
On “only two genders”
I suppose that Trump can legally rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and that he can reimpose the name Mt. McKinley onto the highest mountain peak in North America, dispelling its original popular and proper indigenous title of “Denali” (“the high one” or “the great one”).
But not even the monarch-wannabe can decree the vast variety of “genders” out of existence.
Trump’s executive order declaring that“there are only two genders: male and female” goes against the natural world.
Does he actually believe that he can simply erase Intersex people, for example, out of the human experience?
Intersex people are born with sex characteristics that vary from what is typically considered “male” or “female.” Intersex traits can include variations in chromosomes, genitals, reproductive organs, and hormone production. Intersex bodies show the diversity of humans and other species and do not represent a form of birth defect, as some would argue.
Recently, the Biden administration released a groundbreaking paper titled “Advancing Health Equity for Intersex Individuals,” issued by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, led by Admiral Rachel Levine, the first out trans official confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The report shows the irreparable harm caused by surgeries on intersex infants that attempt to “fix” them into the “male” or “female” binary.
There is “growing evidence that surgical interventions on intersex infants can cause lasting harm, including stigma and medical mistrust,” the report details. “Historic and current medical practices have often focused on surgical interventions on infants to change their sex characteristics to conform with a single sex, rather than the health care needs of the intersex individual.”
And despite Trump and his sycophants spending $215 million on anti-transgender ads during his last campaign, the MAGA-sphere can never wipe out the existence and support for transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people in the United States or worldwide.
Within a patriarchal Christian white supremacist system of male domination, cisgender (primarily white) heterosexual male bodies matter more, while “othered” bodies matter less. These “othered” bodies include female and intersex bodies, as well as bodies that violate the “rules” for the reproduction and maintenance of the dominant patriarchal system, such as trans, gender diverse, nonbinary, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual bodies and bodies with disabilities.
Within many Western societies including the United States, those who do not have European heritage are also regarded as having “othered” bodies.
Within a patriarchal society that transmits distorted binary gender extremes, questions inevitably arise by those in favor of the gender status quo:
· How dare women demand reproductive freedoms that threaten male power?
· How dare a woman choose not to marry a man?
· How dare women compete with a man for a job or for a high social position?
· How dare gay men think of coming on to straight men?
· How dare trans men get any privileges that cis men have “earned”?
· How dare trans women relinquish male privilege and betray their gender?
· How dare intersex people choose not to identify as “one or the other”?
Many people have exposed the truth that the fabrication we call “gender roles” is a social construction, one that our society ascribes to each of us as it assigns sex at birth.
With the label “female” assigned at birth, society forces us to follow its “feminine script,” and with “male” assigned at birth, we are handed our “masculine” script to perform. As scripts are given to actors in a play, these binary gender scripts were also written long before any of us entered the stage of life.
In fact, the roles in which we were cast have, very often, little connection to our natures, beliefs, interests, and values. These preconceived binary scripts become internalized, standardized mental pictures that societies model and pass to future generations. What it is to be “male” or “female,” “girl” or “boy,” “woman” or “man,” social actors pass on as actors memorize their scripts and pass them to future actors.
Our patriarchal, individualistic society opposes and inhibits women’s reproductive freedoms, encourages inequities in salaries between men and women, and maintains massive wealth for the very few while encouraging enormous financial disparities, among other issues.
Throughout history, examples abound of male domination over the rights and lives of women and girls.
Men denied women the vote until women fought hard and demanded the rights of political enfranchisement; strictly enforced gender-based social roles mandated without choice that women’s only option was to remain in the home to undertake cleaning and childcare duties; women continue to be by far the primary target of harassment, abuse, physical assault, and rape by men.
In addition, women remain locked out of many professions. At one time, rules required that women teachers relinquish their jobs after marriage. In fact, the institution of marriage itself was structured on a foundation of male domination, with men serving as the so-called “head of the household” and taking on sole ownership of all property, thereby restricting these rights from women.
And when patriarchal social and family structures converge with patriarchal religious systems, oppression of those who transgress gender binaries becomes inevitable.
Trump’s entire raison d’etre centers on his acquisition of unlimited power and wealth, and his means to that end has been to further prop up the patriarchal Christian white supremacist project.
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