How Donald Trump became a feminist icon

Cast your mind back eight years. The day after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, hundreds of thousands of women marched on Washington in opposition to the incoming president. Adorned in pink “pussy” hats, they were joined by protesters in London, Sydney, Zurich and at least 30 other American cities. As I argued at the time, beyond expressing general distaste for the incoming administration the precise aims of this movement were never particularly clear. But it was feminism and therefore good.

Yet in his second inaugural address last night, Trump did more for women’s rights than all of these cutesy hat-knitters put together. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” declared the new President. In just this one sentence, he showed himself to be more of a feminist than the entire sanctimonious sisterhood of Handmaid’s Tale cos-players. 

By asserting the basic, biological reality of two-sexes, Trump will safeguard women’s right to single-sex prisons, hospital wards, changing rooms and public toilets. Female athletes will no longer risk injury or lose scholarships after being forced to compete against bigger, stronger males. Children will not be taught to choose from one of hundreds of so-called “gender identities” and encouraged to bring their bodies in line with this new sense of themselves through a lifetime of popping pills and surgery. The need for pronoun badges or declarations will be done away with and even the transgender Pride flag, with its baby pink and blue triangles, can be retired.

Of course, not all of these things will happen at once. Some might not happen at all. Trump’s directives alone cannot turn the tide on an ideology that has come to dominate America’s cultural, educational and even medical establishment. But with biological reality — the existence of only two sexes — now the official policy of the United States government, there’s a chance that arguing for sex-based rights stops being career-suicide and instead becomes the norm.

When combined with Trump’s order to end diversity training programs within the federal government there’s a real possibility that in the not-too-distant future, people will find it incredible that the reality of two sexes ever needed stating in a Presidential address. There is already hope that the tide is beginning to turn. This time around, the pussy hat marchers are notable only by their absence.

But let’s not forget that, up until late last year, Democrats were busy hyping up Trump as a bigger threat to women’s rights than the Taliban. Indeed, the whole of 2024’s Presidential campaign was heralded as “the gender gap election” with women predicted to back Kamala Harris in far greater numbers than men. Believe the acres of press coverage that preceded November’s election and women were motivated by one issue alone: the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the need to defend reproductive rights. A vote for Trump was supposed to turn back the clock and see women confined to the home.

Yet despite the panic generated by Democrats, women voted with their brains not their genitals. Overall, a smaller proportion of women voted for Harris this election than voted for either Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020. Younger women were more likely to have voted for Trump this time around than they did in 2020 and Hispanic women swung massively towards Trump. No true-feminist can tell these women they called it wrong.

By 2019, the original women’s march organizers were in disarray following accusations they had made antisemitic comments (allegations they denied). Pussy hats were disowned amid concerns that the garment “excludes and is offensive to transgender women and gender nonbinary people who don’t have typical female genitalia.” Biden appointed a Supreme Court judge unable to define “woman” and signed an executive order that called for an expansion of access to so-called “gender-affirming” care — in practice, permitting life-altering medical interventions that could leave young people infertile. Harris, meanwhile, publicly congratulated Dylan Mulvaney as he celebrated his “365th day of living authentically” as a “girl.” With feminists like this, many women seem to have concluded, women’s rights are far from safe.

For all the fearmongering, banning abortion was not one of the executive orders Trump signed within hours of taking office. Instead, the President declared that he will “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” and “forge a society that is colorblind and merit based.” With these words he proved himself to be a better defender of women’s rights than any number of trendy intersectional feminists.