I gave an interview this morning to CBC Labrador Morning, reacting to the American presidential executive order on gender. I appealed to the public and to our leaders and prospective leaders, asking them not to follow the order’s example in their own policymaking. I asked our political representatives to continue to listen to their constituents and to the voices of experience and understanding in our public agencies. Regardless of your values, ideas, and policy positions on gender and sex, and no matter what complex and difficult governance decisions you may feel called upon to make, please do not simply declare that transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and other people don’t exist. Because a democracy cannot engage with or govern people whom it cannot recognize.

I have already struck a somewhat different tone here than in the interview, partly because the venue is a personal web site, not a public radio broadcast, and partly because I am writing independently, not speaking with an interviewer. I have listened to the podcast version of my interview with Rhivu Rashid (linked above), and I stand by it. However, in some ways, this present space accommodates and requires more directness. Also, as a critic whose best-honed ability is probably her reading comprehension, I see an opportunity to use this moment differently.

On air, neither Rhivu nor I referred to the title of Trump’s executive order, which is “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” That title could also be used for an executive order with nearly the opposite content. (George Orwell warned us about this sort of thing in the classic essay, “Politics and the English Language.”)

Most of the order’s assertions about sex and gender are familiar. They are ungenerous, and as a transgender woman, I predicate many of my beliefs about myself on disagreeing with them. However, they are neither new nor surprising, and I won’t waste time making any more specific objections.

Like many texts in post-2016 politics, this executive order makes other arguments about the nature of power and how and by whom it should be exercised. The arguments are obscured by their context, but they are actually very explicit and direct, and even obvious, if one knows what to look for. Consider the first main clause of the order’s text: “ideologues … have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means.” And its second: “This is wrong.”

These clauses have nothing to do with sex or gender. Those topics are relegated to subordinate clauses, and rightly so, because for Trump they are mostly smoke and mirrors. The executive order prioritizes establishing other more foundational ideas:

1. Trump’s opponents are ideologues.
2. Trump’s opponents use laws.
3. Laws coerce people.
4. The use of laws to oppose Trump’s policies is wrong.

This executive order is an attack on transgender people, but it is also more broadly an attack on the rule of law.

The text could have begun, “Men are self-identifying as women and gaining access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong.” Instead, it begins, “Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong.”

Why? Because the real point here is not to get trans women out of shelters and showers. It’s to diminish American lawmakers’ power to contest the will of their president.