Trump's Actions Harm Women
- Matilda Ziegler
- Mar 13
- 3 min read
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared,” President Donlad Trump said to American women five days before the presidential election, as cited by the Associated Press. “You will no longer be in danger ... You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”
Putting the patronizing notion that women must be protected by a male politician aside, Donald Trump and his cabinet have failed to protect the women of America, instead actively implementing policies that have had the opposite effect, and he’s taken misogynistic actions in his personal life that signal a different set of values than the ones he boasts.
Trump has attempted to appear as though he is protecting cisgender women by implementing anti-transgender policies via Executive Orders 14168 and 14201, which treat people based on their assigned sex at birth rather than their gender identity.
This means transgender people will be jailed based on their assigned sex at birth, and transgender athletes are no longer allowed to compete in college sports.
However, Trump’s transphobic attitudes in the name of protecting cisgender women are misfounded, as, according to criminology professors Henry Fradella and Alexis Rowland, at Arizona State University and University of California, Irvine, there is no data that indicates transgender women commit crime in general or sexual crimes at a higher rate than cisgender women.
Anti-trans ideology such as Trump’s not only fails to protect cisgender women, but it actively harms cisgender women who do not conform to the traditional notion of what a woman is supposed to look like.
For example, cisgender women who are tall or muscular, or who have “masculine” facial features or a deep voice, are often the subject of what is referred to as “transvestigation.”
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), transvestigation has not only impacted celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Imane Khelif, but it has also led to an increase in harassment against everyday cisgender women who are simply trying to use public restrooms due to the misconception that they are transgender.
According to a 2016 article by Vox, “the harassment cisgender women are now dealing with in bathrooms is just a small sample of the discrimination that has plagued the trans community for years and years.”
However, this discrimination is a prime example of how harmful Trump’s policies are to all women, no matter if they are transgender or cisgender. Trump’s anti-trans policies not only harm transgender individuals, but also harm cisgender women such as Aimee Toms, a 24-year-old woman from Danbury, Connecticut, who was approached in a Walmart bathroom by a stranger and was told she was “disgusting” and “didn’t belong” in the women’s restroom because she was perceived to be transgender.
It harms cisgender women such as myself, as I was approached by a stranger in a gas station restroom in Georgia and informed that “this bathroom is for real girls.” It even harms women who are prominent public figures, such as Michelle Obama, who has been accused time and time again of being transgender.
Another way in which Trump and his cabinets’ policies actively harm women instead of protecting them is budget cuts.
According to Democracy Foward, Donald Trump, who was found liable in civil court for the sexual assault of E. Jean Caroll, has threatened to cut millions of dollars of sexual assault prevention funding from cities refusing to comply with his immigration policies.
The Trump administration has also halted a Department of Labor effort to reduce domestic abuse, sexual assault and other workplace violence in the healthcare industry, and it has revoked limits on forced arbitration for workplace sexual harassment. These policies not only do not protect women, but actively harm them.
Trump may state he cares about women, and he can claim he wants to protect us. However, his claims are not backed up by reality. His anti-transgender and anti-woman policies do not serve to protect us but actively harm us.
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