The Addled Activist Mind

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 29, 2025

 

It’s almost never just one bad idea. More often than not, the sort of activist who makes a career of political agitation — even from within the confines of an ostensibly apolitical institution — is beholden to a constellation of misconceptions and rationalizations that justify even the most self-destructive endeavors.

 

Sometimes, that condition can be hard to identify in the wild. That’s why we should be grateful to Brooklyn College professor of political science and gender studies Paisley Currah. In his latest contribution to the New Yorker, he made that task easy.

 

Currah sets out to prove the claim that Trump’s efforts to enforce an executive order aimed at “defending women from gender ideology extremism” is, in fact, “a war on government” because it is designed to make public administration less competent. Readers of a certain age will recognize the familiar left-wing shibboleth here — the implication that conservatives want government to be dysfunctional to popularize the concept of smaller government.

 

That theory certainly doesn’t apply to Trump. Nor is it supported by the analogy that Currah establishes in his opening sentence, which throws caution to the wind in pursuit of a metaphor that links Trump’s executive order to “Nazi Germany’s progressive targeting of maligned groups.” The Nazis weren’t all that high on limited government, either.

 

“The push to eradicate so-called ‘woke gender ideology’ is also part of the assault on the government itself,” Currah declares. But in the attempt to substantiate his allegation, the professor demonstrates the degree to which he hasn’t had to convince a skeptical audience in a long while.

 

“The administrative state, a term thrown around with much derision in conservative circles, is simply a label for what the government does to keep America running,” he wrote. That innocuous definition of what constitutes the “administrative state” would be unrecognizable to its opponents. Rather, those who argue that the “fourth branch of government” is a constitutional abomination base that claim on the fact that executive agencies are often unresponsive to democratic mechanisms and contemptuous of legislative and judicial efforts to constrain their ambitions. That abomination or something like it, Currah argues, is a necessary compromise to govern a country as unwieldy as ours:

 

Laws cannot specify all the minutiae involved in protecting the health and safety of the people. If a state legislature passes a law requiring its restaurants to maintain safe and sanitary conditions, its members are not sitting around deciding the correct food-storage temperatures.

 

Well, sometimes they do. Occasionally, state and federal lawmakers will get together to dictate how much water you can expect to flow from your showerhead, the amount of heat-trapping emissions your lawn equipment can produce, or whether you should have access to plastic shopping bags. Onerous as that is, it’s democratic and voters can remedy it. What’s obscene is the extent to which the courts were obligated by judicial precedent to defer to unelected bureaucrats who functionally wrote regulatory statute governing the impossibly picayune “minutiae” with which Currah concerns himself.

 

“To implement broad legislative mandates,” Currah continued, “administrative agencies must create systems that categorize information about the public they serve, breaking down the population into discrete categories based on whatever classifications best support a particular purpose.” That’s why, he maintains, executive agencies must define gender distinctions to “suit an agency’s purpose.” He praised Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who, during her confirmation hearings, refused to define what a woman is. “I look at the law and I decide,” she said. This is an “answer anyone familiar with sex in the administrative state would give,” Currah observed.

 

That may be true, but that may also be part of the problem. The state is obliged to measure the demographic makeup of its citizenry, both for census-taking purposes and to ensure compliance with anti-discrimination laws — not so executive agencies can craft bespoke policies designed to advance the interests of a minority constituency at the expense of others.

 

Currah takes issue with the Trump EO’s efforts to define sex based on the idea that the physical ability to produce either a “large reproductive cell” or a small one is conferred “at conception.” He’s right that this is not entirely accurate, since the zygote hasn’t yet developed those features, but the chromosomes that set a person down one of two biological paths are established at the time of fertilization.

 

Currah sets out to identify a variety of downsides associated with the president’s effort to curtail federal grants for transgender activism’s scientific wing. He settled on Jason Flatt, a researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Basically, they’re saying all my grants are cancelled because they also include trans people,” Flatt recently said of his research, which includes studying how LGBT people experience Alzheimer’s and dementia. Currah did not note Flatt’s concession in another interview that he “expects to pivot to less politically fraught Alzheimer’s studies.”

 

This is not to say that the Trump administration’s slapdash approach to cultural combat avoids throwing babies out with the bathwater. It does, however, throw cold water on the notion that research into maladies that can affect everyone will cease if they must comport with U.S. civil rights laws.

 

“Scientists and researchers understand that sex is a multidimensional category,” Currah continued, once again inadvertently articulating the problem as though it were a fact of nature. He maintains that researchers “choose whichever dimension of sex and gender” that “best suits their purposes.” The example he uses to demonstrate that Trump’s war on gender ideology is an attack on best scientific practice is another illustration of what has gone so wrong in this field:

 

During the first year of the pandemic, for instance, more men than women were dying of COVID-19, and news organizations were quick to point to biological sex differences as the cause. But, when researchers from the GenderSci Lab at Harvard combed through the data, they pointed out that gender-related social factors could also play a significant role. How else to account for the fact that men were more likely to die of COVID-19 than women in New York, but not in Connecticut? If the Administration forces various agencies to excise gender from the study of health, the government won’t be able to gather the evidence needed to justify policies that would benefit a wide range of people, including, in the case of COVID, men.

 

The study that Currah cites concludes that men are more likely to take risks. During the pandemic, that meant that men were more likely than others to expose themselves to environments that were more conducive to viral transmission. But “that’s not due to biology,” one of the study’s researchers concluded. That assertion flies in the face of interdisciplinary research — to say nothing of elementary common sense — that ascribes the lack of risk aversion among men to evolutionary strategies for reproductive success. It’s literally “due to biology.”

 

Having failed to substantiate the point he set out to make, Currah pivots to ascribing the worst possible motives to his ideological adversaries.

 

“The goal appears to be not just making villains out of gender and sexual minorities but, by dismantling the health, safety, and welfare infrastructure of the administrative apparatus, targeting the same women that Trump’s ‘Defending Women’ purports to protect,” he wrote. He can only conclude, therefore, that Trump’s goal is to make everything worse so that more people will die. “The part of the state that attends to the health and well-being of the population withers,” he speculated of Trump’s ultimate objective. “That may be the point.”

 

What a fantastically comprehensive example of the suite of non sequiturs that accompany the “gender ideology” Trump set out to anathematize. Argumentum ad Hitlerum. Hostile attribution bias. Unwarranted extrapolation and overgeneralization. Question begging. Appeal to authority. Straw man fallacy. False dilemma. It’s all there and more!

 

If these are the best claims in favor of the notion that gender dysphoria isn’t a construct but a biological reality, and that showering its researchers with gobs and gobs of taxpayer funds is a moral imperative, it’s no wonder that Donald Trump has won the argument.