While recently re-elected U.S. president Donald Trump previously took credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a key line in Trump’s new sweeping executive order around gender identity could signal even more attacks on reproductive rights to come during his second presidency.
This week, the freshly sworn-in president signed dozens of executive orders, including a particularly nasty one taking aim at trans Americans titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.”
That order calls on the federal government to only recognize two genders, restricts trans people’s ability to have gender markers that match their identity and forces incarcerated trans women into men’s prisons. But folded into the language around gender markers on ID and “biological reality,” the Trump administration seeks to define a difference between “female” and “male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell [or] a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
Senior editor Mel Woods breaks down why we should pay attention to the key phrase “person at conception,” and what it could say about how the administration will approach reproductive rights.
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