I remember the weeks following January 20, 2025, as a blur of story drafts, phone calls, and panic on the Mother Jones team covering gender and LGBTQ issues. Almost every other day, President Trump signed another decree targeting the transgender community, from schools to doctor’s offices to the military. The bombardment started with one foundational executive order laying out narrow definitions of “male” and “female.” It reduced transgender existence to “ideology” and women and men to egg- and sperm-producers.
Once I could finally catch my breath, I decided to start reporting on where these definitions, and the effort to enshrine them in law and policy, came from. That’s how I found out about May Mailman.
Mailman, a former Trump administration lawyer and policy strategist, is sort of like the Stephen Miller of Trump’s gender policy. To write the sex-definitions executive order, she adapted state legislation known as the Women’s Bill of Rights, which was in turn produced by an unlikely alliance between a powerful conservative interest group called the Independent Women’s Forum and a fringe group of radical feminists who do not believe trans women should be treated as women.
As I delved deeper, I started to hear warnings. The effort to enshrine a narrow legal definition of sex has mostly been discussed as an attack on trans rights. But its potential consequences could be much broader, feminist legal experts told me—upending 50 years of progress fighting sex discrimination.
The term “biological sex,” says legal historian Mary Ziegler, has become “the new takedown strategy for anti-discrimination law.”
—Madison Pauly
