Published February 24, 2025
President Trump’s Second Inaugural Address and day-one executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” along with his subsequent executive orders “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” and “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” will mark the beginning of the end for gender ideology in the United States. But only the beginning. The gender ideologists won’t go away without a protracted fight, especially since they have captured so many of our institutions that are deeply embedded in American life.
We should celebrate what President Trump has done, but we should also gear up for the long haul. Of particular importance will be holding accountable those who forced this scandal on the nation and those who engaged in medical malpractice and child abuse. Now is not a time to let bygones be bygones.
The Onset of Trans Mania
I’m often asked, “Where did this trans stuff come from?” As one of the first people willing to speak out publicly against it, I had something of a front-row seat. There had been a variety of cultural and legal developments during the Obama years: things like the 2013 Netflix hit “Orange is the New Black,” with star Laverne Cox becoming the first person who openly identified as transgender to appear on the cover of TIME magazine in 2014, and the first to be nominated for an Emmy Award. Or the 2015 film The Danish Girl. And there had been a variety of legal memos from Obama agencies giving guidance on trans issues starting back in 2010.
I capture these early developments in the second chapter of When Harry Became Sally, the book Amazon refused to sell during the Biden administration. (After selling it throughout the first Trump administration, the online marketplace promptly cancelled the book shortly after Biden’s inauguration, only to reinstate the listing two weeks after Trump returned to office again.)Though a lot of this early work hadn’t captured the general public’s attention, the issue certainly was a priority for the radical activist class.
I first realized trans was going to be the next big thing in April of 2015. Attending the wedding reception of a friend of mine (who would go on to serve in both Trump administrations and helped write the first draft of the Transgender Executive Order), I got a text message from the producer of “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” asking if I’d be willing to discuss the Bruce Jenner interview the next morning on George’s Sunday show. I replied asking who Bruce Jenner was, as I hadn’t been keeping up with the Kardashians, and had been at the rehearsal dinner the previous night and missed his 20/20 interview. I went home from the reception, streamed the 20/20 interview on demand, and prepared.
The next morning, Stephanopoulos interviewed me and Chad Griffin, then president of the Human Rights Campaign, the world’s largest LGBT activist organization. We were scheduled to discuss the oral arguments that would be taking place at the Supreme Court later that week in Obergefell, the case involving whether states could continue to define marriage as the union of sexually complementary spouses or whether our Constitution required a sex-blind definition. It was during that interview, and then again the following morning during a sit-down interview with Chris Cuomo on CNN, that I realized that the activists knew they had Anthony Kennedy’s vote in Obergefell, and they were laying the groundwork for a pivot from LGB to T.
Activist organizations don’t declare victory and send their money back to their donors once they reach their stated goal; they move forward in a continuing revolution. Most Americans had no idea what the T even stood for — we had spent the prior decade or so debating marriage — but suddenly, every liberal politician favored what they called “trans rights.” In January of 2020, Joe Biden would tweet: “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.”
For many on the Left, they had supported what they called “marriage equality,” and so they’d support what their leaders called “transgender equality” — whatever that entailed. They were in favor of gay rights, so they were in favor of trans rights. The LGBT acronym came as a total package. They had never really stopped to think what embracing “trans rights” meant for women, girls, sports, privacy — or children’s medicine.
This wasn’t a bunch of soccer moms clamoring for boys in their daughter’s bathroom. This was imposed from the top. Obergefell was decided in June of 2015. In May of 2016, the Obama Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services all announced new regulations or policy implementations (via the infamous Dear Colleague Letter) requiring that the term “sex” in federal law now include “gender identity.” All of a sudden, so-called “gender affirming care” (i.e., attempts at the impossible, “sex change”) was required under our civil rights law. All of a sudden, students had civil rights to be treated as the sex with which they “identified.” And anyone who had doubts was a bigot. Trust me, I have the hate mail and was served subpoenas.
The Sources of Trans Ascendance
So my first answer when people ask where this all came from is: power politics. The assumption at the time was that the Obama administration would simply declare that “sex” meant “gender identity.” Hillary Clinton would win that November’s election. And social conservatives, having gotten their teeth kicked in on the marriage debate, would keep their heads down on the trans debate. (Sadly, to their eternal shame, certain religious communities did.)
But the November 2016 election did not go as expected, and in February of 2017, the Trump administration rejected the Obama-era gender policies. Other constituencies found their voices, and one of the most unique political coalitions was formed in opposition — radical feminists and conservative Christians, LGBs against the T and medical whistleblowers, evolutionary biologists (some of them famously proselytizing atheists) and barstool conservative MAGA-hat wearers. Yet you can easily imagine a timeline in which neither Trump administration took office, allowing the Left’s hope of steamrolling Americans on trans issues to become reality.
But it wasn’t just power politics. The soil was receptive to trans ideology, and for three main reasons: changes in technology that made trans ideology seem plausible, other ideological revolutions that paved the way for trans, and cultural brokenness that allowed so many young people to be seduced by the fantasies, lunacies, and lies.
Start with the technological causes. If there were no synthetic estrogen, no breast augmentation, no Adams Apple- and knuckle-reducing surgeries, very few people would even be tempted to give second thought to the claim that Bruce is really Caitlyn. Synthetic sex hormones and the various surgeries (top surgery, bottom surgery, and tertiary surgeries) all made slightly more plausible the claim that someone could be “trapped” in the wrong body. If technology couldn’t refashion bodies, who would think that sex was merely “assigned at birth” — and therefore able to be reassigned later in life? And no one can deny the role that puberty-blocking drugs played, especially for the parents who were emotionally blackmailed (if not coerced) by the question “would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”
New technologies allowed trans ideology to seem plausible, but trans ideology didn’t come out of nowhere. A certain type of conservative would start the narrative with William of Ockham and John Duns Scotus, and the rise of nominalism and voluntarism in the late Middle Ages. No doubt there is some truth to this. But we might consider more proximate ideological predecessors as well, most notably the Sexual Revolution, where transgender ideology is just the latest wave of a rolling revolution that denied any importance or normativity to nature — particularly the body.
Both abortion and same-sex marriage taught us that biology doesn’t matter. The body doesn’t matter in the womb, and the “plumbing” doesn’t matter in the bedroom. Both are predicated on a body-self dualism, where the real me is the psyche, excluding the body, such that the unborn baby (not yet having thoughts and feelings) isn’t yet a human person, and adults should be free to use their bodies in whatever way brings greatest satisfaction.
But why limit this just to adults, and why limit it just to sexual actions? Why not sexual identities, and why not for children as well? If we should be free to engage in (consensual) sex however we want, why shouldn’t we be free to be whatever sex (“gender identity”) we want? There is a certain debased logic to it all. The movement saying that sex doesn’t matter for marriage was followed by a movement saying sex doesn’t matter, period. And should we be surprised that the logic of “my body, my choice” was then applied to gender identity? The conclusion follows naturally from the premise. It’s hard to insist on the biological reality of sex while denying the biological reality of the unborn child. “This far and no farther” has its limits.
None of this is to cast aspersions on the impressively diverse coalition opposing gender ideology. I was the one who first platformed many of the voices on the left, including the LGB left, to speak out against gender ideology. We’re winning on trans right now precisely because we didn’t make agreement on other issues a prerequisite for partnering here, or relitigating the past a requirement for working toward a better future. We’d have to agree to disagree about these other aspects of the ideology that got us here. Agreeing to disagree, however, isn’t the same as ignoring or pretending that the disputed issues don’t matter.
Of course, the Sexual Revolution itself flowed from various ideological streams. Clearly what the late sociologist Robert Bellah labeled “expressive individualism” is at the heart of trans ideology, where the guiding mantra is that each of us has our own unique “inner truth” and the purpose of life is to give expression to it. Contrast that, for example, with the lyrics of “America the Beautiful,” where each of us is told to “confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
Though most outrageously exemplified by trans mania, this expressive individualism was already on display decades ago in theories of androgynous feminism and the social construction of reality, where “one is not born, but becomes a woman” in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, or Judith Butler’s theory that “gender” is a “performance.” I detail the history of how this second-wave feminism led to transgender ideology in chapter 7 of When Harry Became Sally.
Such social manifestations of expressive individualism intersected with the rise of critical theory — and its oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, and its contention that reality is simply constructed by the powerful, not something given in nature or created by God — especially the felt need from students to be unique and to gain a higher spot on the hierarchical totem pole of victims; and with the rise of scientism, where “science” is the only source of truth. (Note how, in the early days of transgender ideology, it was the doctors and the scientists — especially at the “World Professional Association for Transgender Health” — who claimed to have the expert knowledge, peddling metaphysical claims as if they were scientific or medical.)
Equally important is the rise of what I’ll call technologism, the ideological current without which the destructive potential of new discoveries could not have been unleashed so fully. Where scientism declares that science alone can discover truth, technologism declares that if we can do something, we should — an uncritical embrace of whatever the latest tech is. Even among the broad anti-woke coalition that now seems ascendant, this trend is apparent in its most extreme forms in the transhumanist aspirations of the technofuturist camp.
All of these currents converged at a moment when the classical Western heritage of natural law and biblical revelation was at a nadir in the United States. Transgender ideology obviously conflicts with “the laws of nature and nature’s God” invoked in the Declaration of Independence, but we haven’t exactly been living in a golden age of reasoning about the truths embedded in creation.
Detrans-ing America’s Broken Culture
Power politics, new technologies, a wave of faulty ideologies — these three things created the conditions for transgender ideology to be imposed on us and for many to go along with it. But there is a fourth cause as well, particularly of why so many young people were swept up in it: cultural brokenness (some itself fueled by new technologies and bad ideologies). Talk to most parents who have had children come out as trans or non-binary or gender diverse, and they’ll share stories of other social and psychological struggles. The 4,000% increase in the U.K. of young women going to a gender clinic wasn’t because they were embracing a male identity as such, but because they were running away from a female one — hence the rise of the “non-binary” identities, and not just transgender ones.
Navigating the pathway to adulthood is difficult even in the best of circumstances. But it’s been particularly difficult in recent years, and especially for girls. The unrealistic sexual expectations and experiences young women face are something truly new under the sun. Whatever you make of the #MeToo moment (and certainly some of its accusations have been shown to be false), the underlying reality of women feeling like the sexual objects of men is real. Some girls and women have responded by rejecting their female identity. Meanwhile, we’ve had ideological forces that have pathologized puberty through social media influencers and school counselors who have taught a generation of young people that normal development is somehow weird.
But even this takes place within the context of an unprecedented breakdown of the family, of religious belief and practice, and of local civic engagement in schools and neighborhoods. Bowling Alone and all the books written on the collapse of marriage and church attendance record something taking place that has eroded the sources of identity. And if you don’t find your identity in your family, your faith, or your local community, you’ll look for it elsewhere. And, again, talk to any parent of a child who has come out as trans, and they’ll tell you the role that social media played. Young people find new communities where they’re “accepted for who they are.” Many parents describe it as more akin to cult, and many of the detransitioners have testified to how they were fed a script to recite about their new gender identities. That schools facilitated the transitioning of kids behind their parents’ backs only made matters worse.
All of this took place in the hyper-woke campus culture of identity politics and victimology. The intersectional hierarchy of victim status left ordinary “straight, cis, white, Christian” girls in a lurch — at the bottom of the pack, just above the dreaded “straight white male.” If you were just a normal white girl, coming out as non-binary made you untouchable.
So, my basic answer to where did trans come from? Power politics, new technology, bad ideology, and cultural breakdown. But I’ll close with a fifth: fear. Too many people were afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes. And of course it wasn’t just power politics, but also the powerful — in the media, in business, in medicine, in academia, etc. — who bullied and tried to railroad anyone who would speak out. Look at the attacks on Dr. Paul McHugh, the first elite medical doctor willing to take a stand. Look at how Abigail Shrier was treated. Take my own experience not just with Amazon but with hit pieces from the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Yes, the radical trans lobby succeeded at making the price of speaking out high. But too many of us were willing to cower as a result. There is far less reason to fear today than there was on November 4. But there is still much work to be done. We cannot let the opportunity to undo this damage pass us by.
Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
