RE: “Restoring Biological Truth”

Mr. President,

I’ll skip the “Dear.” We both know it wouldn’t be sincere, and you of all people should appreciate not wasting words on a pleasantry nobody believes.

I want to talk about your homework. On day one of your second act, you signed an order with one of the great titles in the history of bureaucratic self-regard: Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. Restoring biological truth. As if biology were a customer who’d wandered off and you, personally, were going to march out to the parking lot and bring it back. As if the most complex, variable, exception-riddled system in the known universe could be settled by a man signing his name with a marker the size of a chair leg.

You declared, by executive fiat, that there are two sexes and they are fixed at conception. You can declare that. You can also declare the tide will hold at the seawall and the sun will rise in the west, and you’ll find the ocean and the sun share a certain quality with us: a complete indifference to your signature. Biology did not consult you before it made intersex people, before it made the whole shimmering range of what bodies do. You didn’t restore a truth. You overruled one, and put your name on the override, and called the lie “truth” in the title so nobody would check.

Then you got to work. You moved to throw trans servicemembers — people who volunteered to die for this country, which is more than can be said for some — out of the uniform, on the theory that the nation is endangered not by its enemies but by the gender of the people pointing rifles at them. You went after the passports of trans and intersex Americans, so that a citizen’s own government document would call them a stranger. And you reached, as these movements always eventually reach, for the children — not to protect them, but to cut off the care that keeps trans kids alive, while wearing the word “protection” like a Halloween costume.

Here is the thing I actually came to say, and I want you to sit with it, because it’s the part your aides won’t.

You are the most powerful man on the planet. You command armies, courts, the keys to the whole machine. And you looked out over everything you could have done with that power — every war you could have ended, every sick person you could have healed, every hungry kid you could have fed — and a measurable chunk of your very first days, you spent on us. On a few million people who only ever wanted to use the right bathroom and be left alone. You aimed the full weight of the federal government at the smallest, least-armed people in the room.

Do you understand how that reads? Strength doesn’t do that. Strength has bigger things on its mind. Only fear punches down with that much enthusiasm. You didn’t come for us because we’re a threat to the country. You came for us because a frightened base needed a monster, and we were cheaper to conjure than a real one. We are not your problem. We are your distraction. And somewhere, you know the difference.

So let me tell you how this ends, because the file’s been written before and the ending doesn’t change. Men with far more power than you have spent ten thousand years trying to legislate people like us out of existence. Empires did it. Churches did it. Better-organized tyrants with longer memories and no free press to answer to did it. Every one of them is dust, and we are still here — getting married, raising kids, designing the chips in the phone you post from, burying our dead and dancing anyway. You are not the first to try to delete us. You’re just the latest to discover that we don’t take to deletion. There’s no rm command for a people. Believe me, they’ve checked.

Your order will be challenged, and softened, and in time repealed, and your name will end up in the same chapter as every other official who mistook cruelty for courage — the chapter schoolchildren read with their noses wrinkled, asking how anyone ever thought that was the strong move. The arc you’re trying to bend back is going to spring forward the second your hand comes off it, and it’s going to launch a generation queerer and louder and freer than the one you tried to scare quiet. You will have made us more visible, more organized, and more beloved than we were the day you took the oath. Thank you for that, genuinely. It’s the only competent thing you’ve done for us.

Restore biological truth? Fine. Here’s some. Life is durable, strange, and gloriously unwilling to stay in the boxes frightened men draw for it. It diversifies. It adapts. It keeps producing exactly the people you wish it wouldn’t, generation after generation, no matter who’s holding the pen.

That’s the biology. You should read up on it sometime.

We’ll be here when you’re done.

Signed,
Everyone you were hoping would disappear.

root@theresistance:~# logout
logout: not while you're watching.