Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) introduced a bill this week to legally erase transgender people, entitled the “Defining Male and Female Act of 2024.” He claimed that the bill will stop what he called the Biden administration’s attempt to “replace biological sex with dangerous radical gender ideology.”
The bill is a long list of terms and definitions, where words like “father” and “girl” are defined with the words “male” and “female.” Those two words are then defined as “an individual who naturally has, had, will have, or would have, but for a congenital anomaly or intentional or unintentional disruption, the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports and utilizes [sperm or eggs for male or female, respectively] for fertilization.”
The use of the word ‘radical’ by these Republicans is grimly interesting and perverse, since I associate this mammalian definition of gender with a subset of radical feminism (the RF in TERF). They presented the idea as liberating (in the sense that since your gender has already been singly defined by your reproductive role, everything else - e.g. your name / job / hobbies / how you present yourself - was irrelevant, and no-one should be able to use any of those to question your gender). I very much doubt that these measures by US politicians will ultimately be liberating for anyone though, since trans people are just the first on a list. (It’s not like no-one warned the ‘gender critical’ gang about who they were cosying up to)