United States President Donald Trump just announced that the United States federal government would only recognize two genders, “male and female,” hinting at his plans to restrict the availability of gender-affirming to trans patients.
In his Thursday, January 23, address to global leaders at the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump said, “It is now the official policy of the United States that there are only two genders, male and female; men will no longer be allowed to compete in women’s sports; and transgender operations, which have become the rage, will occur very rarely.”
Trump’s first week in office has been rough for transgender Americans, including me (who, ironically, was also able to start hormone replacement therapy on inauguration day). Though the trans community has been doing its best to emotionally prepare itself for what we knew was coming, a.k.a. the outlawing of our right to exist, freely express ourselves, and get life-saving care, it hasn’t made the recent onslaught of anti-trans rulings by the new administration any less terrifying. Even for those of us who currently live in U.S. states that said they would protect our rights, we are acutely aware that those privileges may be fleeting and are asking ourselves: What will federal-level anti-trans rhetoric mean for our safety? What do the new anti-trans laws mean for our bodily autonomy? And, how, in a country founded on the idea of free speech, is it even F-ing American to restrict an entire community’s right to express themselves freely?
Reaction to his World Economic Forum address has been swift, with many social media commentators roasting President Trump online as “an absolute f—— stooge.”
Approximately 1.14 percent of the U.S. adult population, which equates to 3 million people, identify as transgender, according to the Household Pulse Survey. To me and others online, it’s evident from those statistics that we can’t be that big of a problem for a nation of 340,110,988 people. Because of this, people on X are calling out the administration for creating imaginary issues because they are “easier to solve than real ones,” adding that the speech is “utter BS” that’s “trying to distract from the REAL destruction he’s causing” and one the “most embarrassing moment[s] in the history of the United States.”
Meanwhile, some X commentators have also noted that it’s extreme (not to mention false) for Trump to call gender-affirming operations “the rage.” Although Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers found that the number of GAS operations increased substantially between 2016 and 2019, from 4,000 GAS procedures annually to 13,000 respectively, the number of them being performed started to decrease in 2020, with that year’s estimated number of procedures being 12,818. Furthermore, the study found “little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender-diverse minors in the U.S.” and that “cisgender minors and adults had substantially higher utilization of analogous gender-affirming surgeries than their TGD counterparts.”
Here’s an X post that uses The Princess Bride to communicate exactly that:
Now, if only online roasting could impact actual policy.
Published: Jan 24, 2025 08:38 am