Donald Trump gave us so much in his second inaugural speech that demands fact checking and comment that I find it rather difficult to know where to start. I have chosen, though, to direct my focus here on one particular paragraph:
“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.”
On “Merit”
On the topic of “merit,” Trump’s choices for his second cabinet and advisory positions lay bare the myth of meritocracy (“merit-based”) since most of his picks are unqualified for the positions they are to hold (some are tasked with abolishing their departments and agencies) and were chosen either on account (pun intended) of their enormous wealth or by their television celebrity on conservative media.
For example, Trump has tapped a record 13 billionaires to work directly with him in 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, he placed three of the world’s richest people – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg – in full view of video cameras for all to see.
On “Racial Engineering” and Being “Colorblind”
His warning to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race” emanates from a common theme and warning throughout his time in politics of an alleged “reverse discrimination” against white people in programs such as Affirmative Action and Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives.
Trump and other conservatives misuse and corrupt the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s often repeated quote in his “I Have a Dream Speech” that,
“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,” stated King in 1963.
Yes, it was among Dr. King’s dreams for a racially and economically just society, but when he proclaimed those words, and arguably still today, 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,” says historian Taylor Branch who wrote the new book The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement.
Conservatives and particularly those in the MAGA-sphere deploy King’s words, paradoxically, as a weapon against the possibility of a “colorblind” or race neutral society in their patriarchal Christian white supremacist project.
With the ascendancy of Barack Obama during the primaries and his election twice as the forty-fourth president of the United States, on numerous occasions the media have asserted that the United States can now be considered as a “post-racial” society, where the notion that “race” has lost its significance, and where our country’s long history of racism is now at an end.
For example, National Public Radio Senior News Analyst, Daniel Schorr, during the presidential primaries on January 28, 2008 on “All Things Considered” noted that with the emergence of Barack Obama, we have entered a new “post-racial” political era, and that Obama “transcends race” and is “race free.”
And according to MSNBC political analyst, Chris Matthews, responding to Obama’s State of the Union message on January 27, 2010:
“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.”
These commentators and others imply a number of claims in their statements: The first is that we have become a “race-blind” or “colorblind” society – that race has become unimportant, that we don’t see “race” anymore. The second implication states that racism (i.e., prejudice along with social power to enact oppression by white people over people of color) is a thing of the past.
Is the United States now a “colorblind” society? Or even more importantly, should the United States be a “colorblind” / “race-blind” society? The very notion of “race-blindness” is deeply problematic.
Though when we tell another that “I don’t see your race; I just see you as a human being,” this may seem as a righteous statement, what are we really telling the person, and how may this come across: “I discount a part of you that I may not want to address,” and “I will not see you in your multiple identities.”
This has the tendency of erasing the person’s background and historical legacy, and hides the continuing hierarchical and systemic positionalities among white people and racially minoritized people.
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 their book 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 and privileges accorded to white people that permeate throughout our society.
We must as a society get beyond this false and counterproductive notion of “colorblindness” / “race-blindness” and confront head-on our past history and current realities of racism and 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 officially and legally rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and reimpose the name Mt. McKinley and dispell its original popular and proper indigenous title of “Denali” (“the high one” or “the great one”) onto the highest mountain peak in North America.
But not even the Monarch-want-to-be Trump can decree out of existence the vast variety of “genders.”
Trump’s Executive Orders to ban trans athletes from school and professional sports, from using the public facilities of their choice, and from choosing to have gender affirming procedures to maintain their bodily autonomy because “there are only two genders: male and female” goes against the natural world.
Does Trump actually believe that he can simply erase Intersex people, for example, out of the human and most other species’ experience?
Intersex people, representing approximately .018 – 1% of human births, 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 Adm. Rachel Levine, the first out trans official confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The report shows the irreparable harm surgeries on intersex infants have in attempting to “fix” them into the “male” v. “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.”
In addition, contrary to Trump and his sycophants’ expenditure of $215 million on anti-transgender ads during his last campaign, no matter how hard they try, the MAGA-sphere can never wipe out the existence and support for transgender, non-binary, and non-gender conforming people in the United States or anywhere around the world.
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, and bodies that violate the “rules” for the reproduction and maintenance of the dominant patriarchal system, such as trans, gender diverse, non-binary, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual bodies, and bodies with disabilities.
In addition, within many Western societies including the United States, non-European-heritage bodies are regarded also as “othered” abject 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 their reproductive freedoms, which would reduce or even take away males making the decision whether to carry or terminate men’s genetic offspring?
- 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 transmen get any of the privileges by transitioning that men assigned at birth have “earned”?
- How dare transwomen relinquish male privilege and betray their gender (read as betraying patriarchy itself)?
- How dare Intersex people, in fact, anyone not choose to become or identify as “either one or the other”?
Many people have exposed the truth regarding this fabrication we call “gender roles” as a social construction, one which our society ascribes to each of us as it assigns us a 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 also were 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 theatrical actors memorize their scripts and pass to future actors.
Laws are built upon and reflect the society in which they are meant to affect. Our patriarchal individualistic society opposes and inhibits women’s reproductive freedoms, encourages the inequities in salaries between men and women, establishes and maintains the massive development of wealth for a very few while encouraging the enormous financial disparities between the very rich and everyone else, and many 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, though women in some countries today still are restricted from voting; 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 were and continue to be by far the primary target of harassment, abuse, physical assault, and rape by men.
In addition, women were and 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, which reinforce strictly defined gender hierarchies of male domination, women and girls’ oppression and oppression of those who transgress sexual-, sexuality-, and gender binaries and boundaries becomes inevitable.
In other words, women have been constructed as second-class and even third-class citizens, but through it all, women as a group have challenged the inequities and have pushed back against patriarchal constraints.
Donald J. Trump’s entire political 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.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
***
You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project
 |
 |
 |
 |
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: iStock
