A Texas History Lesson on Trump’s Biological Truth Proclamation
President Donald J. Trump’s unequivocal statement on Inauguration Day—that there are just two biological sexes in America—ends the heinous practice of using laws designed to protect women from sex discrimination to promote men pretending to be women.
Trump’s Executive Order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” is monumental. The battle for “biological truth” has been going on for almost a decade.
Here’s how it went down in Texas:
In 2017, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made Senate Bill 6, the Women’s Privacy Act, a legislative priority. The bill was authored by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, and was Texas’ emergency response to President Barack Obama’s federal edict, issued in 2016, that all public schools must allow boys who think they are girls to use the girls’ restrooms. If they didn’t, they would lose their federal funding.
Kolkhorst, an NCAA champion athlete, could see the writing on the wall. The language of the legislation was straightforward, simply stating that in Texas public schools and in state-owned buildings men and boys would not be allowed in women’s restrooms. The bill was later expanded to prohibit men and boys from participating in women’s and girls’ sports.
Although property tax reform and school choice were also legislative priorities for the lieutenant governor in 2017, the media snidely referred to the Women’s Privacy Act as “the bathroom bill” and made it the defining issue of the session. They used it to push a narrative that the Republicans who’d been elected to lead the state were actually crazed right wingers, too radical for everyday Texans. To demonstrate this point, they created a tasteless video featuring some “everyday Texans” standing up for the right to “Pee with the LGBT.”
Polling consistently showed that the public supported separate restrooms for girls and women, but pollsters and the media went all out to obscure that data, ultimately insisting it was an issue that could not be polled.
Kolkhorst rightly defined the bathroom bill as a women’s rights issue, but news reports rarely included her statements on her legislation. Instead, they distorted her message, portraying her and her fellow senators who supported the bill as bigoted and out-of-touch. Hundreds of screaming left-wing activists mobbed the Capitol to testify against it.
Many major Texas businesses weighed in against SB 6, prodded to act by a new generation of DEI officers who had infiltrated corporate board rooms and propagated the lie that Texas would lose billions in tourism dollars because gay people would boycott travel in the state. AT&T, Dell, Kimberly-Clark, Southwest Airlines and Texas Instruments joined with national firms including IBM, Facebook, Apple and American Airlines in sending a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott, Patrick and then-Speaker of the House Joe Straus insisting that SB 6 would “seriously hurt the state’s ability to attract new businesses, investment, and jobs.” They produced a serious-looking impact study that purported to show that passing SB 6—or even talking about it—would cost the state $8.5 billion and 100,000 jobs. Even left-leaning Politifact admitted the study was bogus.
The NCAA threatened to pull the Final Four out of Texas (they didn’t) and the National Football League (NFL) suggested it might not hold another Super Bowl here (it did).
Despite being ruthlessly attacked in both the state and national media, Patrick and Kolkhorst stared down Obama and stood their ground. The Texas Senate passed the Women’s Privacy Bill on a party-line vote. The bill was gutted in the Texas House.
Looking back a decade later, Texas Democrats and the media can still be heard muttering “bathroom bill” under their breath from time to time, but Texas lawmakers have passed strong legislation protecting women’s spaces and women’s sports, prohibiting puberty blockers and sex change operations in children as well as the strongest anti-DEI bill in the nation. DEI officers are being purged from corporate conference rooms and female athletes are pushing back against males participating in their sports and it looks as if the NCAA is on the path to finally institute a ban.
History should not be kind to Obama. With the help of the DEI cartel and the left-wing media, he created a country where men were not only able to go into women’s restrooms, but also women’s prisons, simply by claiming to be women. Thanks to him, we got federal documents that give a half dozen options in addition to male and female to report what sex you are, teachers can be prosecuted for refusing to refer to a boy as “her,” and a Supreme Court Justice of the United States can say that she is not qualified to define a woman because she is “not a biologist.”
Trump’s Executive Order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” restores biological reality and ends a long ugly decade of this gender insanity. Trump’s Executive Order makes it clear that a woman is defined as an “adult female.” Gender is over. Sex is back!
Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
