The Language Games of Gender
unpacking our new regime and the executive order re binary sex
I mostly write about sex work and sex workers’ rights. But I am also a teacher, a job that seems more and more necessary.
I like to tell my students that society exists on two levels— the cultural level and the structural level. Stated another way, society is composed of both discourse (that is, the way we talk to each other, the things we say, and the stuff we talk about) and the over-arching social institutions that operate largely outside of any one individual’s control. The latter is what Durkheim called a “social fact”—behaviors that *seem* chaotic, the product of individual choice, but that are, instead and counter-intuitively, external to any one individual. As one example, which I often use in class— if racism were outlawed, there would still be racist people. Thus, the difference between culture and structure.
So, here all of us are on Turtle Island, grappling with the often-contradictory values of our culture and the social institutions under which we all live.
People who are way smarter than I have already reported on the economic interests of America’s 1% and the way shuttering social services (from DEI programs to social security) are merely an attempt to regain losses at the hands of the sunsetting Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. As a child of the 80s and 90s, it feels like Halliburton on crack (or rather, Halliburton on the pure powder that Trump and Musk and all these other Edge Lords-Turned-Government-Officials snort or pump into their IVs with the aid of paid-off doctors). Cheney is in awe.
That’s a structural analysis of what’s happening right now in America and it’s important. But as a social scientist, I am just as concerned about the discursive changes under this new regime, particularly the executive order called, “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” And yeah, that’s really the title. I’ve pulled a few gems from this executive order that I want to unpack:
“Purpose. Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong […]
“‘Gender identity’ reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex […]
“Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
OK. So. Wow. Let me hold my tongue about the myriad times sex workers warned y’all about Project 2025. Let me hold my tongue about all the warnings Black women sounded in spaces deemed too radical for Nice White Liberals. Let me hold my tongue with every breath I take, thinking of all our trans siblings who warned us of this impending culture war.
Barring all of that, I think it’s important to talk about the power of language. There’s a reason many scholars interested in social justice and social movements talk about the “linguistic (or cultural) turn” in the social scientific study of how and why social movements arise. Many of us who study such things—likely deemed DEI hires under this regime— point to Wittgenstein’s work in linguistics, wherein he identifies what we call “language games.” If you were ever a teenage stoner like me, you’ve probably interrogated said language games.
“What if the way you see color is not, like, how I see it?” is the oft repeated refrain of many a stoner kid—me, specifically, echoing such sentiments while splayed out on a old trampoline with a harvest moon above.
The question is surprisingly profound: “How do I know that the symbols I use for things are the same symbols you’re using?” This is at the heart of Wittgenstein’s work. He was, primarily, interested in how the symbols of an empirical entity (that is, the word or words used to describe a tangible thing) relates (or doesn’t) to the entity itself. He became a hermit because he concluded that there can never be a copacetic relationship between the words we use to talk about a thing and the thing itself.
I strongly relate to his desire to become a hermit.
To demonstrate what I mean by language constructing reality, consider the Kuuk Thaayorre, an indigenous Australian people whose language is constructed around cardinal directions. To say, "good morning" in Kuuk Thaayorre is translated to “which way are you going?” Literally everything is based on direction. If you had an ant on your leg, you wouldn’t use language like “right” or “left” leg. You would say “the ant is on your northwest leg.”
Because of their language, Kuuk Thaayorre have a different experience with time as compared to, say, native English speakers. If you ask a Kuuk Thaayorre human to describe the past and the future, they will describe the past as East and the future as West. This is a clear example of how language shapes our reality.
In 1966, Berger and Luckman published their famous book, The Social Construction of Reality. Contrary to popular belief on both sides of the political spectrum, “social construction” does not mean “not real.” It means, simply, that many aspects of our everyday lives are socially and historically situated. A stop sign, for example, is a social construct. That doesn’t mean stop signs aren’t real. It means that if you were to get into a time machine and travel to see Jesus walk the earth, you would not see a red octagon with white English letters that spell STOP. Moreover, there are many countries today wherein “STOP” is not written in English.
That is to say, the stop signs we see on Turtle Island/the US are socially and historically situated. The language, the shape, the color of a stop sign—all of those things exist at a very specific moment in time at a very specific place.
In the 70s and 80s, social theorists like Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, and Jean Baudrillard started applying the theory of social construction to identity. Butler is famous for applying said theory to gender. Anthropologist Rubin famously coined the “sex/gender/sexuality system” to refer to the ways biology, self-identification, and sexual attraction exist independently. She mapped the ways primary sex characteristics (that is, XX or XY chromosomes), seemingly observed at birth and based solely on gonads, influence expectations of how a person will identify and who they will love/ fuck.
Baudrillard is famous for applying this theory to Americans, wherein he argues that we’re all destined for fascism, even though we all have good teeth. But never mind him. He also said that “women are the sexual scenario,” which is an oddly misogynistic way to identify the social construction of both gender and sexuality (if only the sexuality of cis, straight men).
So, what does it mean for Butler and Rubin to apply the theory of social construction to sex/gender/sexuality?
Something I love to do with my students is to ask them to close their eyes and think of a little girl.
“What do you see in your mind’s eye?” I ask.
I’ve been doing this exercise in my classes for over a decade, but I can say without a doubt that most students describe the symbols of femininity:
Pink dresses, pigtails, frilly socks, and the like…
Then I ask my students to take this collective image of a little girl and pretend that we send her to 1600s Salem in our time machine.
“She’s not going to have a good day,” I joke. “She’s going to be burned as a witch.”
This might seem obvious, but the aforementioned exercise is emblematic of the fact that the symbols we currently associate with femininity are socially and historically situated. The symbols we have today are not the same symbols that people in 1600s Salem had, just like stop signs, and that’s what it means for gender to be socially constructed. It’s not that gender is “not real,” but rather that the cultural symbols we have for masculinity and femininity are socially and historically situated. They change. They’re fluid.
Often, said symbols are directly impacted by whatever social institution holds the most power. That’s why Mahu in Hawai’i, nádleehi, the Zuni lhamana, Hijras of India, and even non-binary people in Mesopotamia—the region most scholars attribute to the origin of modern society— are largely left out of contemporary discourse about gender. Because when Christian missionaries and colonizers come to town, they outlaw any and all gender expressions that do not fit narrow conceptions of gender, never mind the cultural and biological truth of the matter. Trump’s regime is no different.
So, let’s unpack the language games of the executive order called “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” First:
“Gender identity” reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”
What’s ironic here is that Butler and Rubin argue this exact same thing! They argue that sex and gender are separate analytics, meaning— the genitals one possesses does not determine how said person experiences the symbols of masculinity or femininity. Of course, that’s not what Trump’s executive order means. The order continues:
“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong.”
Notice how the language specifically focuses on trans *women.* From the mouth, I might add, of a man who certainly does not care about women.
So, why the focus on trans women exclusively? As a sociologist, I would say this heightened focus is because of the social construction of femininity and how it is far more socially policed than masculinity. As an example of this social policing, keep in mind the way we refer to little girls who like to climb trees and get dirty vs little boys who like to wear makeup and nail polish. The former is often called a tomboy while the latter is saddled with any means of pejorative adjectives: sissy, fag, and the like.
This is because buying into the symbols of femininity when you do not present as inherently femme is likened to a kind of tragedy in our society and at this particular historical moment. Adopting masculine traits, alternatively, is a sign of virtue. These are, once again, examples of the social construction of gender and the way gender is policed through language games.
The language game of trans women becoming synonymous with predation is merely a contemporary kind of construct wherein trans people— and trans women specifically— are presented to the public (through discourse) as *not feminine enough,* despite the fact that, as we’ve already identified, femininity is socially and historically situated, just like many other aspects of our empirical and linguistic worlds.
What this executive order *really* does is create new, codified standards for femininity. And anyone who deviates from this narrow social construct is, as the order states, “wrong.”
Of course, trans women are not the first demographic to experience tyranny at the hands of socially constructed ideologies that attempt to police femininity. Women of color, particularly Black, indigenous, and undocumented women, sex workers, working-class women, and disabled women have long experienced the dark octopus of the regulation of femininity. Women deemed “unrapeable,” “undignified,” or “ignorant” have been brutalized at the hand of many an American political regime.
Women native to Turtle Island had their children stolen from their breasts, given to white families as a kind of sacrament. Black and disabled women were forcibly sterilized under the guise of scientific progression and co-signed by many white “feminists” like Margret Sanger.
In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld Buck v Bell, which legalized the forced sterilization of women deemed “feeble-minded,” stating that “three generations of imbecils are enough.” Women who received welfare were housed under this discursive conception of “feeble-minded,” which included Fanny Lou Hamer, a prominent Civil Rights leader who went to the hospital to have a cyst removed and came out of surgery sterilized.
Lest you fall victim to the oft repeated refrain that “that was then, this is now,” please keep in mind that a whistleblower in 2020 alleged that a for-profit ICE detention center was forcing women to undergo sterilization.
Clearly, the policing of what constitutes “good” femininity is a historical social task that many who seek power try to enforce. We should all recognize that this goes beyond any idiotic executive order stating that there are only two sexes; this is the expansion of totalitarian regulation that will necessarily harm all people who exist outside of the margins of “acceptable” social performances.
Let’s unpack another language game of the executive order demanding binary sex, which I find terribly telling and important:
“Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
OK. Let’s go with this. Let’s ask, “What is the truth of sex?”
Well, most scientists will refer to biological sex as merely “gonads,” or the reproductive organs with which a newborn is born. We typically think of primary sex characteristics as binary—either a human is born with XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes. These are also called genotypes. In many Western countries, these chromosomes determine the gender a newborn is assigned at birth: XX= it’s a girl! XY = it’s a boy!
But humans are a complex, nuanced, and diverse species and our chromosomes are not actually binary. There are many chromosomal arrangements with which humans can be born: XYY, XXX, XXY, XYYY, and XXYY, just to name a few. And while these chromosomal arrangements are often pathologized as a “syndrome,” many intersex people with these chromosomal arrangements advocate for the abolition of gonad-based gender assignment at birth. Many intersex people advocate for said abolition because the institutional practice of forcing binary gender on people with non-binary primary sex characteristics results in violence.
You can read the stories of some of these individuals from the citation I provide below, including Ruth, now 60 years old, who hemorrhaged after trying to have hetero sex with her husband in 1960 because, unbeknownst to her, she was born intersex and her vagina was “created,” without her knowledge, by a doctor who cut into her flesh.
Finally, I am compelled to examine one more quote from the executive order about sex and gender:
“Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity. Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.”
Now, if both gender and sex were binary, as our government wants us to believe, why would an executive order even be necessary? Of course, the answer is that this order is a dubiously masked attempt at creating a Christofascist society wherein everyone is required to conform to a particular vision of what men and women *should* be. Not what the beautiful spectrum of human gender and sex and sexuality actually are.
It is an attempt at eradicating the history of human complexity, it is an attempt at whitewashing the history of progression, it is an attempt at justifying colonization and white supremacy.
It is an attempt to control the cultural and structural symbols of language in service to a particular, singular, dark octopus of ideology.