The Bill That Will Turn America Into The Handmaid's Tale

Project 2025 is starting before Trump's inauguration

Photo by Umid Akbarov on Unsplash

This newsletter was originally published on Medium.

No matter where I look, because of this election, the signs are clear: we are fucked. But nothing is certain until it happens. We have to keep fighting to minimize the damage or best case scenario, prevent a lot of the damage from happening in the first place.

For now, while I still have free speech, that means sharing things that need your attention, so we know where we need to fight.

There is a bill that has already been presented to congress that is extremely important for you to pay attention to because it has the power to change many social dynamics in our lives completely. Unless we convince republicans in congress to oppose the bill, by contacting our senators and representatives, a lot can be lost in this country forever as a cascade effect.

Luckily this bill is very short, so I’m going to quote the whole thing and talk about the implications of it in this article.

Bill H.R. 9218 is called the “Defining Male and Female Act of 2024.” The name of this bill should already be setting a Handmaid’s Tale alarm in your head.

Republicans always make a point of defining things when they’re about to steal some people’s rights, like when they wanted to define marriage as only between a man and a woman under George W. Bush’s presidency, so gay people wouldn’t have the right to marry.

This bill is extremely horrible and they wrap it all up in a transphobic bow. They make it look like a gift if you don’t care about certain people’s rights to trick you into supporting it.

Here’s how it starts…

To establish a clear and consistent biological definition of male and female.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the “Defining Male and Female Act of 2024”.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

Congress finds the following:

(1) In human beings, there are two — and only two — sexes: male and female, which refer to the two body structures (phenotypes) that, in normal development, correspond to one or the other gamete — sperm for males and ova for females.

(2) Every individual is either male or female.

(3) An individual’s sex can be observed or clinically verified at or before birth.

They want to define what it means to be a man or woman with no exceptions as a way of suppressing trans people’s identities and making them illegal.

This would mean that doctors have to define it this way and therapists. School teachers and police officers.

Transgender people will be misgendered everywhere, forcible by law and therefore probably unable to access gender affirming care, guaranteeing a mass genocide of them by suicide, if they’re not arrested for violating these rules.

All of this is horrific enough, but it doesn’t stop at trans people.

They’re obsessed with targeting trans people, a small part of the population that bothers no one, because it legally gives them access and approval to hurt so much more than them.

It’s the first domino in us becoming like The Handmaid’s Tale.

The bill continues…

(4) Rare disorders of sexual development are not exceptions to the binary nature of sex.

(5) In no case is an individual’s sex determined by stipulation or self-identification.

Here, it uses trans people to attack science. Some transphobes try to say science is on their side, but this bill is directly admitting that it’s not and saying that this doesn’t matter.

They are legally recognizing that scientifically people are born outside of the binary. Intersex people (people born biologically neither male nor female), because of their biology naturally have a complicated relationship with gender and need to have a say on what gender they are later in life.

But if you say that, then there’s no reason to deny trans people from doing the same thing, so they can’t allow that.

They are legally decreeing that science should be ignored and not matter if it goes against legal definitions of things. That our government system should be upheld even if scientifically it is proven that doing such is unethical.

This opens up our rights to medicine and other stuff being violated by the government more if it decides it doesn’t like it in some way or needs to redefine it.

But then the real reason for implementing all of this comes through — misogyny and controlling women.

(6) There is increasing confusion about the definition and implications of sex as a biological truth and its relationship to concepts and terms including but not limited to sex assigned at birth, gender, gender identity, gender role, gender expression, and experienced gender.

Do you see the phrase they sandwiched in there to try to hide it from you, so you don’t notice it?

There’s all these terms that transgender people use, terms you are supposed to deem as “weird” and “other,” so that you don’t actually see what they did.

Between “gender identity” and “gender expression”, two words trans people use to describe their experiences, they sneak in other words. They wrote “gender role,” hoping you won’t notice that this bill does not only affect trans people but is meant to affect and control everyone.

Gender roles and the enforcement of them does not apply to only trans people, it applies to all people and is regularly used to oppress women.

(7) Confusion and ambiguities surrounding the definitions of sex, male, female, and related terms can hinder individual efforts to enjoy equal treatment under the law.

(8) Legal equality of the two sexes — male and female — does not imply that the sexes are identical to each other or are the same in every respect.

I’ve said this time and time again. You should care about trans people’s rights as human beings who deserve happiness and to be left alone by the government, but even if you don’t, you need to see how they are the linchpins of society, giving us access to so many freedoms.

There’s this lie going around that so many people buy into that says trans people in bathrooms are a danger to women. Getting rid of trans people in bathrooms protects women supposedly from sexual assault and harassment.

Meanwhile, if you are a cisgender woman, you’ve likely never been sexually harassed or abused by a trans woman, but you have had it happen to you by a cisgender man.

Cisgender men are the ones who are actually dangerous to us and trans women protect us from them.

Because transgender people live outside the binary, because they are different, they show what utter bullshit the binary actually is snd therefore how it doesn’t make sense to oppress women just because they have a vagina.

If having a penis doesn’t make you a man and having a vagina doesn’t make you a woman, it means all of us can be anything. Republicans mock that because it scares them.

Trans women existing show that you can have a penis at birth and still be feminine, pretty, nurturing, and all kinds of things.

Trans men show that it’s bullshit that just because someone has a vagina they should be a home maker. Because some people with vaginas are men with muscles who lift heavy things and build stuff and like watching sports.

They show that having a penis or vagina, doesn’t mean you have to be stuck in a box. You can still be true to yourself and who you are. This goes against Christian and frankly, white supremacy “morality.”

That’s why conservatives love that Trump beat a black woman for the presidency. It puts everyone in their place, in their hierarchy in society. Black below white and women below men.

Trans people (and LGBTQ+ people as a whole), have always upset that hierarchy, which involves marriage as well. If women can marry women and don’t have to marry men, then that means they can rule themselves and don’t have to submit to men.

The only way to put women back in their place is to define what a man or a woman is, so not only are trans people trapped by their genitals, but all of us are trapped by our genitals. Because we are all defined by them.

(9) With respect to the two sexes — male and female — separate facilities or sports leagues established because of or organized according to physical differences between the sexes do not constitute unequal treatment under the law.

(10) Physical differences between males and females are enduring, and the two sexes are not fungible.

They’re underscoring that men and women belong in two separate categories predestined by their genitalia.

You really think this will only affect trans people? Saying that there are only two genders and that they both have their unchangeable place by law and biology? That there’s no overlap?

You can’t see how that could lead to dress codes for men and women? Women have to wear one thing because of their vaginas and men another because of penises.

This could lead to only men being allowed to have jobs, only men being allowed to own things. Once you define what it means to be a man or a woman using the government then being yourself becomes illegal.

Because the “physical differences between male and female are enduring.” They are destiny, written by God, is what they’re saying.

And they’re not interchangeable, not “fungible,” as they put it. If they define something as something only a man is and does then no women can do it and vice versa.

(11) To prevent further efforts to undermine the longstanding meaning and understanding of sex, male, female, and related terms, it is necessary for Congress to reaffirm and codify the meaning of these terms.

To stop women from having rights, in other words, it’s necessary for Congress to codify who and what we are, as defined by our genders, so they can completely control us and all our choices by telling us what to do and who to be.

SEC. 3. DEFINITION OF “SEX”, “MALE”, “FEMALE”, AND RELATED TERMS.

Chapter 1 of title 1, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

“§ 9. Definition of ‘sex’, ‘male’, ‘female’, and related terms

“In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word —

“(1) ‘sex’, when referring to individual’s sex, shall be understood to refer to either male or female, as biologically determined and defined by this section;

“(2) ‘female’, when referring to a natural person, means an individual who naturally has, had, will have, or would have, but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident, the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports, and utilizes eggs for fertilization;

“(3) ‘male’, when referring to a natural person, means an individual who naturally has, had, will have, or would have, but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident, the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports, and utilizes sperm for fertilization;

“(4) ‘woman’ means an adult human female;

“(5) ‘girl’ means a minor human female;

“(6) ‘man’ means an adult human male;

“(7) ‘boy’ means a minor human male;

“(8) ‘mother’ means a female parent;

“(9) ‘father’ means a male parent;

“(10) ‘gender’ —

“(A) means —

“(i) males, females, or the natural differences between males and females, unless such term is otherwise specified or used alone (rather than with or as an adjective modifying other words); and

“(ii) a synonym for sex; and

“(B) does not mean a synonym for terms or ideas such as gender identity, experienced gender, gender expression, or gender roles; and

“(11) ‘gender identity’ does not mean sex or gender.”.

You will always be referred to as roles that correlate with your genitalia. They are cementing that in place. You can’t be anything else.

You can’t use words like “gender role,” which they are repeating to make it harder to argue that women are being oppressed. Because it’s not a role, it’s your place biologically. You’re not playing a role, you’re being who you’re destined to be.

They are literally outlawing even ideas you have, ideas that you are different and have your own personality and own way of doing things.

Because you need to act and identify with your genitalia. You are not allowed to do anything else, as if genitals define everything you do and aren’t just how you have sex and reproduce.

People are so blinded by their transphobia that they’re completely ignoring how much this bill wants to violate all our rights. We should be screaming at the top of our lungs about it from every rooftop.

But that’s not practical, so I ask you to please, please, follow this bill on the website for it, pay attention to it, share how disturbing it is with everyone, and regularly contact your senator and representatives about it, especially if they are conservative, threatening not to vote for them ever again if they let it pass.

Because after Trump takes office, the only things slowing down or stopping this bill will be filibusters and protests, which might only go so far, unless we can convince some of the Republican representatives that we will turn on them if they allow this to happen.