By Kathryn Clancy
In 2014 I was planning to return to Poland to conduct fieldwork, after not having been there much since 2005. I had received my first National Science Foundation grant, primarily focused on the study of endometrial function. Since I was collecting urine to analyze hormones and other biomarkers, I wanted to take the chance to explore the embodiment of certain gender roles and attitudes. How might one’s lived experiences as a mother, a worker, a farmer, leave traces on the body in terms of stress hormones or ovarian physiology?
I discussed a plan to do this work with the Polish director of the field site. She told me this type of work was impossible, even dangerous. She sent me an article about how the Polish Catholic church had begun to level considerable attacks against anything to do with gender. We went on to conduct our physiological research, but did not attempt the additional work on gender roles.
The church’s obsession with gender – and with protecting children “from gender,” as though the concept itself is a bogeyman – just happened to emerge as a number of controversies were souring the public on the church itself. Gender is sexualizing, was the claim. Gender would teach children about things they should not know about, like gay or trans people. The anti-gender movement was an obvious ploy to draw attention to an imagined act of immorality in order to hide the many real acts, from pedophilia to fraud, for which the Polish Catholic church was responsible.
Right wing politicians in Poland were glad to create a similar foe in their desire to stem the tide of modernization. An “anti-gender” movement has been fruitful for those who tie gender ideology not only to LGBTQ+ people but to women working outside of the home, declining birthrates, and abortion.
So it goes now, in the United States, under Trump and Musk. As of this writing Trump has signed four executive orders relating to gender, making four at once laughable (as a scientist) and disgusting (as a moral person living in the world) claims. First, the protecting women order claims there are only two sexes; second, that being trans was inconsistent with the physical readiness needed for military service, though it was not an outright ban on trans people serving; third, he banned gender-affirming care for those under nineteen; and fourth, he banned trans people from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
These orders are bizarre propaganda documents that attempt to negate decades of research into sex, gender, gender-affirming care, and mental health. There are many well-established truths they attempt to erase. There are more than two sexes, maybe many more depending on the level of analysis you are using to build out your categories. They are a different phenomenon from gender, of which there are also more than two, and which do not align with sex for all people. Being trans has nothing to do with one’s mental or physical capacities, and certainly not as it relates to military service. Gender-affirming care saves lives, reduces anxiety and depression, and involves medical care as necessary as asthma inhalers or blood pressure medication.
Defining sex by gamete size (also called germ cell, these are the reproductive cells that fuse to create an embryo), the definition that the Trump administration thinks is so clever because they think, it being less alterable than some other sex-related characteristics, they can hang all their binary desires on it – only reveals the insignificance of their imagination and intelligence. A recent clarification of the much-mocked sex definitions in the original “Defending Women” Executive Order is just as embarrassing a misstep. The guidance states that “rare disorders of sexual development do not constitute a third sex because these disorders do not lead to the production of a third gamete.” Does this leave people with variation in sexual development without a sexual category at all? What’s more, as many journalists and scholars have shown, there exists no reliable test that can confirm the gametes a person “should” produce, no matter whether their lack of gamete production is due to age, medical treatment, variation in sexual development, or illness.
If I seem annoyed to have to tell these basic truths it’s because I am. Exploring and understanding variation in genitalia, gonads, chromosomes, hormones, gametes, developmental pathways, and more allows us to engage with one element of the seemingly unlimited ways humans can show up in the world. That’s what science is supposed to be about. But Trump and Musk, and the cowardly politicians closing rank around them, will tell any lie to fit whatever narrative serves their interest.
It’s not just that Trump’s definitions defy scientific credulity. It’s that they are part of a project intended to control girls, women, trans and nonbinary people, intersex people, and deny us everything we have shown we can be. Their assertions are unoriginal – boring, even. They are coming for trans people just like the Nazis did. Just like the right wing turn in Poland after they joined the EU. Just like Putin, and Orban, and any other number of mediocre power-hungry men.
It must be difficult to see all the capaciousness that comes with being queer – all the potential, the joy – and compare it to your own small life, one increasingly defined by a toxic, rigid definition of masculinity that requires aggression, cruelty, and isolation. At the same time, you have to work to be left behind in these moments – to see the possibilities of queer futures as excluding you rather than enjoying all it has to offer in terms of how we understand what it means to be a person, a family, a community.
When it comes to Trump and Musk we can fantasize about a forever regime, which allows them to continue to peddle misinformation and hatred, or we can fantasize about its end, which we can help bring about. In 2023, Poland’s Law & Justice party was voted out of power, following years of activist efforts and multiple women’s strikes. Regimes end, and the work to end them start well before the next election cycle. How will we as anthropologists, engaged with a global and local understanding of sex, confront and resist these changes, and show up for each other, in the coming months and years?
Kathryn Clancy is a biological anthropologist who specializes in reproductive health. She is a professor at the University of Illinois.