President Trump’s public exclamation in Gov. Janet Mills’ exchange with him that he is the federal law (and for that matter the Judiciary and the Legislative Branch of government), suggesting that he has unchecked power to deny federal funds to schools allowing transgendered athletes to compete in sports, still does not give him control over developmental biology.

Please look it up in your human growth and development textbook (which I taught, as a minimum-wage-earning University of Southern Maine adjunct professor, 15 times). Chromosomal assignment at the moment of conception must be followed by an array of gene-directed processes that foster (or don’t) development of secondary sex characteristics.

I would not pretend to be an expert but here’s a quote from Developmental Biology, 6th edition: “In mammalian primary sex determination, there is no ‘default state.’ The formation of ovaries and testes are both active, gene-directed processes. Moreover, as we shall see, both diverge from a common precursor, the bipotential gland.”

Trump’s remark and the right-wing evangelical self-appointed geneticists (and miffed parents blaming schools) repeat what the ruling male elitists did in the 19th and early 20th centuries with the concept of intelligence and IQ. They did everything possible to try to “prove” that it was genetically dictated at conception.

Stephen Jay Gould identified in “The Mismeasure of Man” (1980) the biased tests that were developed to “prove” that white males have superior intelligence. Now, I taught testing and measurement three times as a minimum-wage-earning USM adjunct professor, and again I am no expert. We know now that intelligence and performance on Weschler IQ tests is dependent on many factors beyond an individual genome’s attributes. Howard Gardner, one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Genius Grant, in “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences “(1985), began the solid dismissal of heralding high IQ as the hallmark of “smart” or many other human abilities.

Trump and his non-experts are tying gender to the same genetic stamp white male supremacists of the last two centuries tried to link with intelligence. This was all toward the end of asserting innate superiority over differences people have, which they then developed tests to “prove.”

This tendency is described in Hannah Arendt’s historical review of totalitarian governments, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” as “… the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition.” (pg. 333).

When people live in an atmosphere of respect for the broad array of their abilities and experiences, the opportunity to reclaim what their mind, heart and body tells them can thrive and their contribution to society flourish. In its absence, a terrorist preoccupation can arise, but this one an internal one that takes emotional and mental health as its hostage.