The Trump administration’s latest wave of paternalistic policies claims to protect women. In reality, it strips them of rights, autonomy and safety.
On the first day of his second term in office, Trump signed the executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism,” which claims to defend and protect women by asserting that, as a matter of U.S. policy, the existence of transgender people will not be recognized. It further decrees that “intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women” can only be used by those “belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell”—a definition of sex disavowed by medical experts.
Safety risks do not increase when transgender people use public facilities that align with their gender identity, according to a UCLA study. But much has been made of the issue by Republican lawmakers propping up and attacking this strawman threat to women’s safety and scapegoating transgender people as culprits. While posturing as women’s protectors, these lawmakers ignore or inadequately address very real, substantiated and systemic threats to women—including in the intimate space of their own homes, where as many as one in four women experience domestic violence and more than three women are killed by husbands or boyfriends every day.
One of the first bills passed by the 119th Congress, with the support of every Republican representative, was the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. The legislation changes Title IX and revokes federal funding for schools that allow trans girls and women in sports teams that align with their gender identity. Trump followed up on Feb. 5, outlining much the same in his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order.
During the signing, Trump—who in 2023 was found legally liable for sexually abusing and defaming journalist E. Jean Carroll—said, “We will not allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and our girls.” Despite the dearth of evidence of such violence being perpetrated by trans athletes, there is evidence that trans students are more vulnerable to experiencing sexual violence in school, a situation that many believe will be exacerbated by the recent spate of stigmatizing policy aimed at marginalizing them.
Citing the protection of women as the impetus for the change, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, announced the related return to Trump’s 2020 Title IX rules crafted under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. In addition to rescinding protections for transgender students, a return to the 2020 Title IX rules rolls back protections for survivors of sexual harassment and assault and puts in place procedures that are hostile to them, according to Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools for the National Women’s Law Center.
There is a long history of laws in the U.S. based on professed protection for women, which actually do the opposite. Allusions to “Father Knows Best” style paternalism—“Women, we love you. We’re going to take care of you!”—should be viewed with caution. While Trump supporters herald his return to power with joyful exclamations of “Daddy’s home!,” he is already exhibiting his own style of harsh discipline and seems just to have begun making good on his intention to ensure that there is “some form of punishment” for women seeking to exercise autonomy in accessing abortion and other rights.
“Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,” Trump told rally-goers in Wisconsin less than a week before the 2024 election. “I’m going to protect them.” It’s not the first time he asserted that “you can do anything” you want to women, with or without their consent, but in this case he claimed that it would be for their own good.
Despite his pledge to “protect women at a level never seen before,” making them “healthy, hopeful, safe and secure,” a spate of initiatives Trump champions are making them demonstrably less so.
He has bragged that he alone was able to “kill Roe v. Wade,” which had upheld the constitutional right to abortion for half a century, then told women, “You will no longer be thinking about abortion because it is now where it always had to be, with the states.”
Yet it has long been known that there are higher maternal mortality rates in states with more abortion restrictions, making his statement both factually inaccurate and cruel. Infant mortality, pre-term birth, maternal mortality and maternal morbidity are all expected to increase with further anticipated restrictions. And his executive order reinstating the global gag rule on abortion access for U.S. aid recipients overseas is predicted to expand such deadly consequences far beyond U.S. borders.
Restrictions on abortion and other regulations on women’s reproductive capacity, including surrogacy and egg donation, are often characterized as being imposed for the sake of women’s protection. But some such legal mechanisms are based on false premises or trumped up evidence of harms, promising to protect women by limiting their liberty while serving to set back their interests and causing considerable harm in the process.
When the state or an individual interferes with another person against their will and defends it by claiming that that person or others “will be better off or protected from harm,” that is textbook paternalism. Since paternalistic action, by definition, involves some limits on freedom or autonomy, it should require a high standard of evidence for the existence and magnitude of the harm from which it purports to provide protection. It should also require sound evidence of a substantial net benefit to society to justify interfering with individual liberty in the promotion of presumedly protective measures.
Abortion access limitations such as mandatory counseling and waiting periods, supposedly intended to make women safer, have been shown instead to:
- Be medically unnecessary, since informed consent is already required from patients before undergoing medical procedures in every state;
- Exacerbate “the burdens that patients experience seeking abortion care, including by increasing costs” and risks; and
- Have a history of providing deceptive information intended to dissuade women from seeking abortion care, such as falsely claiming a link between abortion and breast cancer or warning of a risk of the medically unrecognized condition “post-abortion stress syndrome.”
In the case of gestational surrogacy—carrying and delivering a child for another couple or person, which is legal in most states, with varying restrictions—the claim has been made that a woman could not possibly be fully informed about the consequences of relinquishing a child before its birth, and as a result, the state may intervene to invalidate such a contract as a protective measure on her behalf.
Proposed restrictions on egg donation in Arizona in 2010 were based on the contention, as one state senator explained, that “donors don’t really understand all the implications” of donating their eggs and that “some young women may choose to donate against their own best interests.” There was also—as in the case of mandatory abortion counseling—unsubstantiated speculation that women might suffer long-term psychological effects from egg donation, a concern not raised on behalf of sperm donors.
Such legal interventions suggest that women are incapable of fully appreciating the gravity or implications of decisions determining their own reproductive capacity without state intervention, and both reference and serve to perpetuate stereotypes about their supposedly frail or volatile psychological make up as grounds to constrain their behavior and ability to make decisions on their own behalf.
Women’s intelligence is similarly insulted—and their autonomy further threatened—when the state asserts the intent to protect them from trumped-up threats that are overstated and insignificant in comparison to a spate of other much more common material, even mortal, threats to their lives and well-being.
