{"id":183,"date":"2026-05-20T20:39:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T20:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=183"},"modified":"2026-05-20T20:39:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T20:39:27","slug":"meet-the-mastermind-behind-trumps-definition-of-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=183","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Mastermind Behind Trump\u2019s Definition of \u201cWoman\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<div><ul><li><span>Share on Facebook<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span>Share on Twitter<\/span><\/li><li><i><?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<svg>\n<\/svg><\/i><span>Share on Bluesky<\/span><\/li><li><span>Email<\/span><\/li><li><span>Comments<\/span><\/li><\/ul><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span>\u201cBig moves on <\/span>Day 1,\u201d White House senior policy strategist May Mailman crowed on X the morning of President Donald Trump\u2019s inauguration, linking to a news article about a forthcoming executive order. Even amid the barrage of actions during the first hours of the Trump 2.0 presidency, the order\u2014\u201cDefending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government\u201d\u2014was a bombshell. It directed federal agencies to eradicate every trace of what it called \u201cgender ideology\u201d and established new government-wide definitions of the sexes. \u201cWoman\u201d meant adult human female. \u201cFemale\u201d was \u201ca person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.\u201d Men made \u201cthe small reproductive cell.\u201d \u201cSex,\u201d it decreed, was an \u201cimmutable biological reality.\u201d<\/p><p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=180\">The Folly of Trump Taking a \u201cWrecking Ball\u201d to a Crucial Science Advisory Board<\/a><\/p>\n<p>For at least two years, Trump had been promising to \u201cget transgender out\u201d of schools, women\u2019s sports, and the military. \u201cIt will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,\u201d he would tell his cheering crowds.<\/p>\n<p>But the order\u2019s sweep and audacity seemed to surprise even Trump\u2019s admirers. \u201cIt\u2019s perfection,\u201d Megyn Kelly gushed on her SiriusXM show. \u201cIn my wildest dreams, I couldn\u2019t have drafted something this beautiful.\u201d On X, the kudos flowed in from people in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Brazil. Many of the posts singled out Mailman, a Harvard-educated lawyer quickly identified as the order\u2019s chief author. Riley Gaines, the swimmer\u2013turned\u2013anti-trans activist, fangirled, \u201cMay Mailman is my Taylor Swift.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mailman had spent four years working in the first Trump administration, becoming an immigration hawk and close ally and friend of senior adviser Stephen Miller. During the Biden era, she landed at the Independent Women\u2019s Forum, a Washington power player that rose to prominence by pink-washing conservative economic policies\u2014claiming to champion women\u2019s freedom and equality while actually working to undermine them. There, she threw herself into the anti-trans cause, going from state to state to promote model legislation, known as the Women\u2019s Bill of Rights, that enshrined narrow definitions of \u201cmale\u201d and \u201cfemale\u201d into law.<\/p>\n<p>Now, at the start of Trump\u2019s second term, Mailman was stepping into the spotlight as a White House surrogate and speaking to conservative outlets about the need to \u201cprotect\u201d cisgender women. \u201cIf men can just assert that they are women and take women\u2019s privacy away, take their opportunity away, take their safety away,\u201d she told a St. Louis radio host, \u201cthen there is no such thing as women\u2019s rights anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But there were intimations that the crusade against trans people encompassed something broader. Mailman wasn\u2019t just anti-trans; she was profoundly dismissive of feminism. \u201cThere\u2019s something about, you know, swiping right and left in your apartment by yourself at 11 p.m. after working a hard day that, like, doesn\u2019t feel like feminism is the answer to all your problems,\u201d she mocked on one podcast. She was worried about how \u201cgender ideology\u201d would affect men, too. \u201cWho\u2019s going to be our firefighters? Who are going to be our policemen?\u201d she fretted on another.<\/p>\n<p>At a Federalist Society webinar last March, she urged listeners not to even use the word \u201ctransgender,\u201d so as not to give \u201ccredence\u201d to the idea of \u201cthis being a category of people.\u201d She also raised an essential question: After defining sex in the law and kicking trans women out of sports and sororities, what comes next?<\/p>\n<p>The answer, she suggested, had something to do with sorting out social roles for men and women. \u201cTrying to figure out how much do we care about gender roles, how much should gender roles infect the idea of womanhood, will, I think, ultimately affect our thinking about gender roles absent transgenderism,\u201d she mused.<\/p>\n<p>Then she stopped, as if realizing she was treading into dangerous territory, and smiled. \u201cThat conversation is maybe for another day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><span>This is the<\/span> story of an extraordinary effort by the second Trump administration to shape our ideas about who and what men and women are\u2014a campaign that began with the targeting of trans people but has vast implications for the rights of cisgender people as well. At the center is Mailman, who describes herself as \u201cone of the most effective and connected veterans of the Trump West Wing,\u201d the get-it-done woman for Trump\u2019s get-it-done man. \u201cStephen [Miller]\u2019s the ideas guy,\u201d she told <em>Blaze News<\/em> in April. \u201cAnd then I\u2019m trying to be the one who makes it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In her whirlwind tour through the White House last year, Mailman made quite a few things happen very quickly\u2014including a high-profile pressure campaign against her alma mater Harvard University to adopt Trumpian priorities in hiring and admissions or lose federal funding. Then, after six months, she left the administration, returning to IWF\u2014now rebranded as just Independent Women\u2014to direct its law center. There, she co-authored   in two of the biggest Supreme Court cases of the year, both involving transgender students trying to overturn laws that forbid them from playing girls\u2019 sports. The day after oral arguments, Mailman was on Fox News complaining that some of the justices had dared to call the students \u201ctransgender girls.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Her Defending Women executive order\u2014and the other anti-trans federal decrees that followed\u2014had an immediate, sweeping impact on the estimated 2.8 million trans Americans over age 13.\u00a0On the phone several days after January\u2019s Supreme Court hearing, Mailman tells me the push to enshrine definitions of sex had two goals: to prevent courts and administrators from interpreting existing laws in ways that are inclusive of trans people and to make voters feel alienated from Democrats. She frames the idea that transgender women are women as an \u201celite\u201d concept. \u201cIf the left can\u2019t agree that \u2018woman\u2019 means \u2018female,\u2019\u201d she says, \u201cthere is something very othering about that to most Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Now feminist scholars are also starting to raise alarms about the order\u2019s implications for non-trans women. They warn it could be used to undo 50 years of legal and economic progress in the workplace, health care, education, and much more. \u201cAt the moment, the most painful, prejudicial consequences are for trans people,\u201d says Kathryn Abrams, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor studying sex discrimination. But \u201cthe executive order absolutely has implications for heterosexual, cisgender women,\u201d she says. \u201cSometimes, I think that\u2019s their main target.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For decades, much of the conservative movement has been fighting to undermine anti-discrimination protections based on sex, explains legal historian Mary Ziegler of the University of California, Davis. These include landmark laws like Title IX, which applies in education, and court decisions like <em>United States v. Virginia, <\/em>which said the government must have a strong reason, based on more than just stereotypes about physical capabilities, to treat men and women differently. Those protections profoundly reshaped American society, giving women more freedom to pursue the lives of their choosing. But they imposed new requirements on powerful institutions that balked at being regulated, and, Ziegler says, they outraged Christian conservatives who believe that \u201cGod has a plan for marriage and sexuality and the family\u201d and \u201cGod\u2019s plan should be written into the law.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The right slowed the momentum for women\u2019s equality when it killed the Equal Rights Amendment in the early 1980s and turned abortion into a wedge issue. Decades later, the anti-trans movement\u2019s emphasis on strictly defining sex as \u201cbiological\u201d has given conservatives a new weapon to claw back the feminist movement\u2019s earlier gains, Ziegler says. The term \u201cbiological sex,\u201d she says, has become \u201cthe new takedown strategy for anti-discrimination law.\u201d<\/p>\n<div><span>Related<\/span><div>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-medium_large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"A photo illustration of a young woman with long blond hair standing in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building wearing a blue University of Kentucky swimmer\u2019s uniform. Multiple hands surround her, holding beauty tools\u2014a blow dryer, hair straightener, makeup brushes, a compact sponge, and a spray bottle\u2014while another hand holds a phone and another holds a Fox News microphone toward her. The U.S. Capitol and an American flag are visible in the background.\" class=\"wp-image-182\" height=\"432\" src=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/42a678f5e2e0e65e9ffed858fb867d86-768x432.webp\" width=\"768\" srcset=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/42a678f5e2e0e65e9ffed858fb867d86-768x432.webp 768w, https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/42a678f5e2e0e65e9ffed858fb867d86-300x169.webp 300w, https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/42a678f5e2e0e65e9ffed858fb867d86.webp 989w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" \/><\/figure>\n<h3>How Right-Wing Superstar Riley Gaines Built an Anti-Trans Empire<\/h3><\/div><\/div>\n<p>Mailman, not surprisingly, disputes that the sex definitions are part of a wider effort to weaken sex discrimination law. \u201cSimply cementing the case that sex is real doesn\u2019t change anything,\u201d she tells me. \u201cIt is the status quo.\u201d Nor does she think enshrining sex definitions based on eggs and sperm will lead to women being treated differently from men in, say, classrooms and workplaces. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing about that that forces a woman into a separate calculus class.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But Mailman\u2019s allies in the conservative movement\u2014groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the religious right legal organization that has led many of the biggest attacks on abortion and LGBTQ rights\u2014have their own agendas. \u201cWhat they\u2019re trying to do is to replace sex discrimination law with a Trojan horse sex discrimination law that no longer prohibits sex discrimination,\u201d Ziegler says. Rather than attacking protections head on, she explains, \u201cthey\u2019re going to say, \u2018American anti-discrimination law means you can treat men and women differently because they have different bodies.\u2019\u201d If courts embrace this logic, Ziegler says, it would be much harder to fight back against potential restrictions on women\u2019s lives\u2014laws that limit job options for pregnant workers, for example, or that ban women from military schools\u2014by arguing they violate the Constitution\u2019s equal protection clause. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Other Trump 2.0 priorities, like its fixation with increasing birth rates, add to this growing sense of feminist dread. \u201cThey\u2019re so open about the fact that they want women to leave the workforce and have babies\u2014the earlier, the better\u2014and fulfill the role of motherhood,\u201d says Ting Ting Cheng, director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at the NYU School of Law. \u201cThe administration is telling us what their long game is, which is to treat women\u2019s bodies as commodities and to create laws to exert control over these commodities.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe foundational piece,\u201d Cheng adds, \u201cis defining people by their biology\u2014to essentially see women as people who have one manifest destiny to fulfill.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><span>Last spring, to <\/span>mark Trump\u2019s 100th day in office, Mailman spoke with Debbie Kraulidis, vice president of Moms for America and host of its podcast. Inevitably, the conversation turned to trans kids in schools. Mailman recalled her own childhood in the 1990s and early 2000s: \u201cWhen I was growing up,\u201d she declared, \u201cit was okay to be a feminine guy. It was okay to be a masculine girl.\u201d Nowadays, she lamented, \u201cyou can\u2019t be a tomboy anymore, because you\u2019ll get your body parts chopped off.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The first child of a surgeon and his Korean-born wife, Mailman (n\u00e9e Davis) remembers her upbringing in \u201cmiddle-of-nowhere\u201d Kansas with great fondness: \u201cFor kids who are from small towns,\u201d she told another podcaster, \u201cyou really get to build up your self-esteem and try a lot of things.\u201d At Clay Center Community High School (), she was a student council officer, drill team member, and athlete (lettering in cheerleading, tennis, and track), as well as the star at the top of the \u201cSinging Christmas Tree.\u201d By college, she was also a committed conservative, serving as treasurer for the University of Kansas College Republicans and interning for US Sen. Sam Brownback, a GOP stalwart who later became governor. But she didn\u2019t seem to take herself too seriously, entering Spike TV\u2019s \u201csexiest co-ed\u201d competition in 2007 and earning a write-up in the college paper.\u00a0\u201cIf somebody was doing it who wasn\u2019t me, I\u2019d probably be judgmental,\u201d she told the reporter. Then again, \u201cWhy not, for $5,000?\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Graduating into the Great Recession with a journalism degree, she joined Teach for America, landing at Pathway Academy, a majority-Black charter school in Kansas City, Missouri. The school\u2019s executive director, Jennifer Fleming, recalls her as \u201cextremely intelligent, very self-motivated, goal-oriented,\u201d building relationships with students and their families. Mailman would later describe implementing strict discipline, like \u201cstanding silent lunch,\u201d in her classroom. Her sixth-grade class scored so high on state tests that the school got its accreditation back, Fleming says. The experience seemed to reinforce Mailman\u2019s conservative beliefs. \u201cI had always thought that Teach for America would help me equip people to be responsible for themselves,\u201d Mailman later recalled for a profile on IWF\u2019s website. \u201cBut my kids didn\u2019t have the home environment necessary to do school\u2026I became much more focused on what we can do to build families.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After two years and a master\u2019s degree in education, Mailman headed to Harvard Law, where she chafed at automatically being made a member of the Women\u2019s Law Association, she told me in an email after we spoke in January. \u201cThey gave us ladies a little pep speech, saying that women should support each other in class by applauding other women\u2019s contributions,\u201d she wrote. Men had no equivalent. \u201cI hated this. It felt so infantilizing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mailman wanted me to know that as a conservative, she\u2019s in favor of treating women equally; it\u2019s left wingers who seek, through such \u201crace and sex based identity groups,\u201d to treat women as \u201cweak or ill equipped\u201d in her view. (Equal doesn\u2019t mean identical, however: \u201cAt the same time, sex exists,\u201d she wrote, citing differences between men\u2019s and women\u2019s LSAT scores.)<\/p>\n<p>Mailman\u2019s aversion to groups like the Women\u2019s Law Association would echo, years later, in her Trump 2.0 campaign to eliminate diversity and inclusion measures at Harvard and other higher education institutions. The problem with universities, she told the <em>New York Times<\/em> last fall, is their \u201cculture of victimhood\u2014a glorification of victimhood\u2014that is ultimately bad for Western civilization and bad for the country.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>During her Harvard years, she\u2019d felt very much outside the Obama-era political mainstream. \u201cConservatism was a lonely place,\u201d especially for women, she told a podcaster last year. But that isolation was also empowering: \u201cYou end up being very comfortable with yourself, comfortable with your arguments, comfortable not having a lot of friends.\u201d She became president of the ultra-elite Harvard chapter of the ultra-connected Federalist Society. Post-Harvard, she landed a prestigious clerkship with a federal appellate judge in Denver, then moved on to a private law firm. When a Harvard friend reached out with an offer to work at the \u201ccenter of the universe\u201d\u2014the first Trump White House\u2014she accepted immediately.<\/p>\n<p>Mailman started on day one of Trump 1.0 and stayed until the bitter end. According to emails reported by the <em>New York Times,<\/em> as deputy White House policy coordinator in 2018, she floated a proposal to send detained migrants to sanctuary cities. She describes herself as part of the \u201ccleanup crew\u201d for the administration\u2019s family separation policy at the border. Later, she was promoted to the powerful White House counsel\u2019s office, where her portfolio included social issues and the administration\u2019s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>Trans issues were also on the White House\u2019s radar, including a military ban. In 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services even considered an order that would have narrowly defined sex as \u201cimmutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.\u201d But the conservative base reacted with crickets to proposed anti-trans policies, Mailman recounted on a podcast. \u201cNobody seemed to care, except for people who didn\u2019t like it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, public support for trans rights was at an all-time high. When North Carolina passed a law in 2016 restricting trans students\u2019 bathroom access in schools, Fortune 500 companies boycotted the state. Then in June 2020, the Supreme Court stunned conservatives by ruling 6\u20133 that firing someone for being gay or transgender violated the federal law banning sex discrimination in the workplace. \u201cIt is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,\u201d Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump\u2019s first appointee to the high court, reasoned in <em>Bostock v. Clayton County<\/em>. Mailman hated the decision: \u201cI would argue there\u2019s no logic to <em>Bostock<\/em>,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n<p>Mailman was still working for Trump when his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That very day, she accepted a job offer from the Ohio attorney general, anticipating that her colleagues were about to become \u201cunhirable for a very long time,\u201d she later admitted. One month after Trump left office, Mailman also began a fellowship with the Independent Women\u2019s Forum. Like many conservative organizations, IWF was starting to invest in anti-trans politics\u2014putting Mailman at the center of the next big culture war.<\/p>\n<p><span>The organization Mailman <\/span>joined had its roots in the 1991 Supreme Court nomination that was itself a turning point for the role of women in American politics. President George H.W. Bush\u2019s nomination of Clarence Thomas to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the nation\u2019s highest court was greeted with howls of liberal outrage. Even before Anita Hill\u2019s sexual harassment allegations threatened to tank his nomination, Thomas\u2019 close friend Rosalie Silberman organized \u201cWomen for Judge Thomas\u201d to vouch for his character. Thomas\u2019 confirmation activated a generation of left-leaning women around the issue of sexual harassment. Silberman and her comrades created the Independent Women\u2019s Forum to counter them. \u201cWe listened to the spin of those days\u2014the litany that women are victims and men just don\u2019t get it\u2014and decided that those woebegone women did not speak for us,\u201d Silberman said in 1998. \u201cNor did we think that they spoke for the vast majority of American women.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>IWF\u2019s policy agenda was defined by being anti-regulation and anti\u2013\u201cfemale victimhood.\u201d At various points over its 35-year history, the organization has opposed the Violence Against Women Act, women\u2019s admission to the Virginia Military Institute, the Affordable Care Act, and paid family and sick leave. It claimed Title IX was being used to defund men\u2019s sports, that sexual violence rates were overblown, and that the gender pay gap was the result of women\u2019s choices. For a time, it was run in tandem with the Koch brothers\u2013affiliated interest group Americans for Prosperity.<\/p>\n<p>From the beginning, much of IWF\u2019s influence was derived from its messaging, starting with its claim to be \u201cindependent\u201d\u2014seeming to stand apart not just from feminists, but from ultra-right groups, in part because it didn\u2019t take a public stance on abortion. \u201cBeing branded as neutral, but actually having people who know-<em>know<\/em> that you\u2019re actually conservative, puts us in a unique position,\u201d IWF Board Chair Heather Higgins, a pharmaceutical heiress, explained at an event for potential 2016 donors. \u201cOur value\u2026is taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>IWF\u2019s first public, tentative forays into anti-trans politics seem to have started around 2017, with news releases ridiculing colleges for putting free tampons in men\u2019s restrooms and for recommending that professors ask students their pronouns. Then in 2019, the conservative anti-trans movement suddenly got serious. That\u2019s when the far-right American Principles Project turned a Kentucky gubernatorial election into a petri dish for anti-trans messaging\u2014and found that a video about a boy in girls\u2019 wrestling struck a nerve.<\/p>\n<p>The Democrat won anyway. But conservatives had identified a compelling narrative: Trans people were victimizing female athletes. Within months, Republicans in 17 states introduced a new type of bill, banning trans girls from playing on girls\u2019 sports teams. It didn\u2019t matter that trans athletes were\u2014and continue to be\u2014vanishingly rare, or that lawmakers in states like Tennessee and South Carolina were unable to identify a single player who would be affected by their bans.<\/p><p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=177\">\u201cWho the Fuck Are These Men?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The sports issue became the turning point for an anti-trans coalition that included juggernauts of the religious right like the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom. IWF stepped up to provide a female face and voice for the message. Never mind that the \u201cwomen are victims\u201d narrative contradicted so much of its past work. By 2022, threat of trans athletes had become a central theme of IWF\u2019s messaging. It snapped up aggrieved athletes like college swimmer Riley Gaines, training her to communicate her story of tying for fifth place with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and eventually hiring her as a spokeswoman. Payton McNabb, a high school volleyball player injured from a spike by a transgender girl, became another \u201c.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Mailman embraced the message too,  on behalf of IWF against trans athletes in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee. IWF\u2019s media training was a big part of why she joined the group. \u201cI wanted to be on liberal media as a conservative person,\u201d she says, \u201ctrying to talk to people,\u201d the way pundits of old used television to shape public opinion when she was a kid.<\/p>\n<p>As Mailman sees it, female messengers have been critical to shifting the narrative around trans issues because\u2014stereotype alert!\u2014they are better at conveying empathy than men. For a long time, she tells me, progressive messages of acceptance and affirmation held sway, and \u201cwomen do want to be kind, and we do want to be empathetic.\u201d So conservatives needed women to challenge \u201cthe empathy play,\u201d she went on. For men, it\u2019s \u201cnot their natural language.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><span>Differentiating the sexes<\/span> based on such stereotypes is exactly the type of thing that causes left-leaning women to shudder. But one of the most confounding aspects of the Defending Women executive order is its connection to a group of activists who define themselves as radical feminists.<\/p>\n<p>In 2022, IWF announced an ambitious new project that would serve as a prototype for the Defending Women order: a model bill, then known as the Women\u2019s Bill of Rights, that defined male and female in law according to a narrow view of biology. At a press conference, IWF and other social conservatives spoke alongside current and former members of Women\u2019s Liberation Front, a small left-wing group vehemently opposed to the very idea of transgender identity. IWF leaders described their legislation as merely ensuring that policymakers were all on the same page about the meanings of \u201cfemale\u201d and \u201cmale.\u201d But former WoLF board member Kara Dansky, speaking on the call, made it clear that the bill\u2019s goal was to end legal recognition of transgender people. \u201cEveryone is either female or male,\u201d she declared on the call. \u201cEverything else is a lie.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, activists like Dansky believe that women\u2019s rights will be lost if the category of \u201cwomen\u201d includes people assigned male at birth. They\u2019ve pushed for decades to exclude trans women from women\u2019s spaces. (Some who adhere to these views\u2014including, famously, <em>Harry Potter <\/em>author JK Rowling\u2014consider the TERF acronym a slur and describe themselves as \u201cgender critical\u201d; others embrace it.) Mailman tells me that TERF activists, particularly Dansky, were the intellectual force behind the effort to enshrine sex definitions. \u201cThe ones that were really driving the charge and had just a lot more knowledge and background, and had been thinking about these issues, writing about these issues, for such a long time, tended to be people on the left,\u201d she says. (Dansky, in an email, says she did not contribute directly to the model bill\u2019s language or strategy, though she does call Mailman an \u201cextremely intelligent lawyer.\u201d Like Mailman, she doesn\u2019t believe that enshrining sex definitions could turn back the clock on women\u2019s equality under the Constitution. \u201cRadical feminists are gender abolitionists who fully support women who do not conform to sex stereotypes,\u201d she writes.)<\/p>\n<p>The Women\u2019s Bill of Rights wasn\u2019t the first time radical feminists had teamed up with social conservatives on transgender issues. In 2016, WoLF received a $15,000 grant from the Alliance Defending Freedom to fund a lawsuit over trans students\u2019 access to bathrooms and locker rooms. In 2021, WoLF took another $50,000 from ADF to sue California over a law that allows transgender women to be housed in women\u2019s prisons. \u201cIt would be foolish to let performative virtue-signaling prevent us from using available resources,\u201d WoLF legal director Lauren Bone emailed when I asked about the group\u2019s work with the far right.<\/p>\n<p>Both sides have benefited from the strange alliance, Joanna Wuest, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, points out. Right-wing money and connections allow fringe TERF groups to \u201cpunch above their weight,\u201d she says. And conservative Christian groups get \u201ca lot of rhetorical leverage out of saying [that even] radical feminist organizations are opposed to this interpretation of sex as gender identity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Soon after the Women\u2019s Bill of Rights was unveiled, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) introduced a version of it in Congress. With the midterms approaching, IWF targeted hundreds of thousands of Facebook users in swing states with ads touting the model bill as part of its supposed crusade for women\u2019s empowerment, boosted by a $100,000 \u201cInnovation Prize\u201d from Heritage. In 2023, versions of the legislation began popping up in statehouses around the country. To promote it, IWF sent Riley Gaines and Mailman\u2014a trip Mailman would later describe as her \u201cfirst foray into TERFdom.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mailman, by then married to former professional baseball player David Mailman, leaned on her own experiences as a woman to advocate for the bills. \u201c\u2018Identification\u2019 replaced the biological reality that we have been living our entire lives\u2014that I am particularly 32 weeks into living right now,\u201d she said on a stage in West Virginia, visibly pregnant with her second child. Her blitz through the state \u201cwas terrifying to watch,\u201d says Khadijah Silver, director of gender justice and health equity at Lawyers for Good Government. \u201cShe did an incredible job of flooding legal and political environments, partnering with the right groups, to normalize a regressive and anti-scientific and extremely unfeminist analysis of gender\u2014and make it pretty hard to break through that messaging.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Kansas legislature became the first state to pass the bill in the spring of 2023, and when Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed it, the Republican supermajority overrode her. (\u201cVictory!\u201d WoLF declared in a press release.) Today, 16 states have similar laws, and two more have issued executive orders likewise defining sex.<\/p>\n<p>Logan Casey of the Movement Advancement Project describes the Women\u2019s Bill of Rights as \u201cmore existential\u201d than other anti-trans bills. \u201cThey\u2019re not targeting just one policy area,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re zooming up and saying across the entire government, here\u2019s how we define the word \u2018sex\u2019 so that we can basically apply it everywhere that we want, until somebody stops us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><span>Mailman drew on<\/span> the state sex-definition bills as she drafted the Defending Women executive order. But the ink on Trump\u2019s signature was barely dry before scientists began to push back, arguing that for all the order\u2019s claim to \u201cbiological truth,\u201d a modern understanding of sex involves far more than eggs and sperm. \u00a0Today, many biologists view sex as measured by multiple indicators\u2014hormones, chromosomes, genitalia, brain physiology\u2014that typically but don\u2019t always align.<\/p>\n<p>More outcry came from reproductive-rights advocates, because the order defined sex as existing \u201cat conception\u201d\u2014language that nods to anti-abortion religious activists who argue that fetal rights begin at fertilization. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for one, was elated about that phrasing, vaunting it during the 2025 March for Life in Washington. Mailman tells me the \u201cat conception\u201d language was added not for abortion policy purposes, but to make the point that sex is determined by DNA prior to birth. Still, \u201cthere\u2019s a nice flavor to respecting fetal personhood,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s an added benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So far, the Trump administration has not used the Defending Women order to pursue anti-abortion policies. Instead, it has zeroed in on attacks on the transgender community. The order had an immediate impact on passports, federal funding for gender-related health research, and transgender prisoners. Soon came more executive orders targeting teachers who supported trans students, schools that let them play girls\u2019 sports, and doctors who provided them gender-affirming health care. Another order stated that being trans \u201cconflicts\u201d with a soldier\u2019s \u201chonorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.\u201d The Departments of Justice and Education formed a special team to investigate schools for promoting \u201cgender ideology\u201d\u2014and some universities, in this new climate, fired instructors and censored Plato.<\/p>\n<p>The changes have been so drastic that federal judges have put many of the federal government\u2019s anti-trans policies on temporary hold. But the ultimate decider will be the Supreme Court, which already has signaled its willingness to interpret sex discrimination law in ways that exclude trans people. Last June, conservative justices ruled 6\u20133 that states can ban puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. In November, the Supreme Court allowed the State Department to stop changing trans people\u2019s gender markers on their passports.<\/p>\n<p>The court is currently considering a pair of cases that directly ask how much different treatment for the sexes based on \u201cbiology\u201d is allowable. The cases involve two states, Idaho and West Virginia, which have both passed laws banning trans girls and women from playing on women\u2019s school sports teams.<\/p>\n<p>During oral arguments in January, ultra-conservative Justice Samuel Alito seemed to view the cases as an opportunity to enshrine a constitutional definition of sex: How can a court determine whether there\u2019s discrimination on the basis of sex, he asked, \u201cwithout knowing what sex means?\u201d But Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared to understand that there would be greater consequences to a decision that gave states more leeway to treat men and women differently, so long as the state claimed the reason was biological.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYour whole position in this case depends on there being inherent differences, right?\u201d Barrett asked the lawyer for West Virginia. But, she hypothesized, what if a state could produce studies showing that women\u2019s presence in calculus classes held back men\u2019s learning? Could women be excluded from calculus? \u201cSeems to me like there would be some risk on your understanding that that would be okay,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>The exchange showed that even the Supreme Court justices are thinking about how an anti-trans ruling could have wider consequences for sex equality, says Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-host of the <em>Strict Scrutiny <\/em>podcast. \u201cThey\u2019re opening up the possibility of much broader potential exclusions,\u201d she says. Such a decision could call into question decades of progress fighting sex discrimination. After all, differences between men\u2019s and women\u2019s bodies have been used for much of human history to justify treating women as inferior to men.<\/p>\n<p>The Trump administration has been open about its desire to return to those old days\u2014from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s opposition to women in combat to the White House\u2019s reported consideration of\u00a0proposals for \u201cbaby bonuses\u201d to incentivize women to have more children. Even the title of the Defending Women executive order reflects early-1900s logic that the government needs to protect women due to their inherent fragility\u2014an idea the Supreme Court rejected during the sex equality revolution of the 1970s, Shaw argues in a recent law journal article. And at a December press conference announcing a rule targeting trans teenagers\u2019 medical care, Deputy Health Secretary Jim O\u2019Neill described gender roles as divinely ordained. \u201cMen are men. Men can never become women,\u201d he paraphrased Mailman. \u201cWomen are women. Women can never become men.\u201d Then he went a step further: \u201cAt the root of the evils we face\u2014such as the blurring of lines between sexes and radical social agendas\u2014is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s the focus on transgender people that gives the administration \u201ccover\u201d to pursue this broader regressive agenda, Ziegler argues. For that strategy, she credits Mailman and her allies. The Defending Women order \u201cis about to matter in a big way,\u201d she says. \u201cIt created political cover for all of these changes that are going to affect trans people, queer people, along with cis, straight men and women.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><span>Mailman left the <\/span>White House in early August, pregnant with her third child. But she\u2019s found it hard to step away entirely. In addition to rejoining Independent Women, she has launched her own consulting firm and is representing Netflix as it attempts to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery (reportedly alongside Kellyanne Conway, a Trump 1.0 loyalist who used to be on IWF\u2019s board). She also continued to work for the administration in its negotiations with Harvard. At the time we spoke, she hadn\u2019t turned in her government laptop.<\/p>\n<p>On her last official day in the White House, the <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em> published a story titled, \u201cThe Conservative Women Who Are \u2018Having It All,\u2019\u201d with Mailman prominently featured. She\u2019d been flying on weekends from DC to Texas, where her husband, who owns a tree-transplanting company, took care of their children with a nanny\u2019s help, the <em>Journal<\/em> reported. \u201cIn theory, I would love to be a trad wife,\u201d Mailman confided. She\u2019d intentionally picked a husband who made more money so she \u201cwouldn\u2019t feel trapped\u201d in the workplace, she said. But she didn\u2019t feel guilty about missing time with her kids: \u201cI don\u2019t have a victimhood mentality.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For all the praise that conservatives heaped on Mailman for her work in the White House, these details about her home life rubbed some the wrong way. A few weeks later, the Institute for Family Studies, a right-wing think tank, started publishing rebuttals to the <em>Journal<\/em> article\u2014and to the lifestyles of the conservative women it featured. \u201cThere is no boss, no industry, no political administration or nation who needs a woman more than her children need her,\u201d one writer, Maria Baer, reprimanded.<\/p>\n<p>Baer was calling out Mailman for defying the gender ideals that social conservatives were working so hard to promote. And then Baer stuck in the knife: It was a matter of biology for women to devote themselves to mothering. \u201cWe pursue high-powered careers because we want to make an impact, to leave a legacy, to be remembered, or to change the world,\u201d Baer wrote. \u201cThere is no surer way to accomplish each of these than by mothering our own children\u2014a job which, by definition, no one else in human history can do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mailman probably shouldn\u2019t have been surprised. But the criticism from an organization she respects came as a blindside. \u201cIt was frustrating,\u201d she tells me on the phone, her baby fussing in the background. \u201cI felt like I was getting critiqued on something that I literally was actually doing the opposite on.\u201d She\u2019d joined the Trump transition team thinking her tenure would be brief, she says, then accepted a job in the administration to \u201chelp my friends,\u201d but only for six months. She\u2019d repeatedly said no to working in the White House \u201cbecause I wanted to be around my young kids and my husband, not for any cultural pressure reason, but that\u2019s what\u2019s best for me and for what I wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It was yet another reminder that, despite Mailman\u2019s insistence that defining sex narrowly wouldn\u2019t affect women\u2019s equality, right-wing groups can\u2019t be counted on to go along with that rosy thinking. Nor did it seem to strike her as contradictory that being able to pursue \u201cwhat\u2019s best for me and for what I wanted\u201d depends on the very feminist gains that those groups\u2014now armed with the Defending Women order\u2014are working to undermine.<\/p>\n<p>But Mailman was too busy to be upset at her allies-turned-critics. \u201cEverybody is going to have their own opinion about everybody else,\u201d she says. \u201cYou just move on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<footer>\n<section><h3>Keep us relentless, independent, and free to read.<\/h3><p>For 50 years, <em>Mother Jones<\/em> has offered <strong>honest<\/strong>, <strong>investigative reporting<\/strong> you can rely on:<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 <strong>Relentless in the pursuit of truth<\/strong>, unafraid to hold the powerful to account<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 <strong>Independent from influence or agenda<\/strong> from oligarchs and corporations<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 <strong>Freely accessible to every reader<\/strong>, never behind a paywall<\/p>\n<p><strong>But we can\u2019t do any of this without you<\/strong>. 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