The President is female, the Supreme Court is female, we are all female

The order also rescinded several initiatives introduced during former President Joe Biden’s administration, including the “White House Toolkit on Transgender Equality”, “Supporting Transgender Youth in School”, and “Confronting Anti-LGBTQI+ Harassment in Schools: A Resource for Students and Families”. These actions represent a stark shift in federal policy, prioritising biological definitions over gender identity. At the same time, they underscore a deeper divide in public discourse — a growing inability to understand and empathise with perspectives that challenge traditional notions of gender.

In recent decades, gender has increasingly been viewed as both universal and autonomous. It is universal in that gender seems to appear in all societies, spanning cultures and historical periods. Simultaneously, it is seen as autonomous, existing in a realm of individual choice, with an expanding vocabulary of identities that often seem disconnected from other aspects of social life. However, this understanding has sparked confusion and discomfort for many.

In gender sensitisation workshops I have conducted, participants often admit they struggle to grasp concepts like gender identity. “How can gender be different from sex?” they ask. Some express outright hostility, openly berating transgender individuals or dismissing same-sex attraction as unnatural. Is this resistance rooted in ignorance, a lack of empathy, or something deeper? Perhaps it reflects an existential discomfort with the very idea of gender.

The American critic Andrea Long Chu explores this discomfort in her book Females (Verso, 2019). She declares provocatively that “everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” Even women hate being female as much as anybody else, because to be “female” is a psychic condition “in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another”. This suggests that being female is a shared experience of vulnerability for all humans, and we try to constantly protect ourselves from it. When she writes, “The 1 per cent is 100 per cent female. The entire Supreme Court is female. The entire United States Senate is female. The president is, obviously, a female,” she is implying that the President and his followers are so unreasonably cruel to women, queer folks and trans persons because we are all, in some way, too much female — and that terrifies us.

Counterintuitively, the condition of being female feels so uncomfortable, that it blocks all of us from extending consideration to the desires of others. When we feel vulnerable and unable to confront or acknowledge our fears, our responses often become rigid and harsh.

This fear manifests not just in gender policy but in a broader resistance to addressing vulnerabilities in modern society, including environmental degradation, inequality, and systemic discrimination in citizenship. Policies that roll back protections for marginalised groups are part of a larger trend — one that resists the open-ended, empathetic approach needed to address complex social issues. Resistance to these policies is visible through court challenges, op-eds, and activism. However, we cannot always expect resistance and activism, so prevalent in the 20th century, to come consistently from those most aggrieved. To endure the fury of the state is exhausting and fear-inducing.

The United States has grappled with this fear for decades. One person who intimately understands this dynamic is Joan Nestle, a teacher and the co-founder of the pioneering 50-year-old Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City. Joan shared with me her experiences growing up in 1950s America. Reflecting on the McCarthy era, and having attended the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the age of 17, she said, “If you are going to be different, you are going to understand what dehumanisation means.” Joan, now 84, is my friend and my guide, impressing upon me the importance of bearing witness to the pain of others and preserving those memories for future generations. This is an archivist’s work in a time of disconnection and anger — what, then, is the work of a teacher? Public anger and pain over contentious policies have made their way into classrooms, and educators are struggling to respond adequately to students’ opinions and questions.

At the National Law School in Bengaluru, we are adopting a “learning by doing” approach to help students engage with contemporary realities. This method allows students to engage actively with the world around them while simultaneously challenging traditional notions of teacher authority in the classroom.

Diya Deviah, a colleague in the law faculty, reminds me that “doing” does not imply following a pre-designed “Do-It-Yourself” kit where the outcome is predetermined. Instead, learning must remain open-ended. As educators, therefore, our work is to nurture students who are comfortable with a patient, exploratory approach. Such open-endedness requires an empathetic intelligence on the part of both students and teachers.

To better understand this approach, I keep a box of Lego bricks on my desk. Building something with these bricks isn’t straightforward, and I’m often unsure where to start. So, I observe as Diya, Vijetha, and Megha gather around to construct helicopters, flag masts, and oceans right there on my desk.

Like gendered bodies, the plastic bricks are familiar and colorful, yet the worlds they allow us to create are new, inventive, and thought-provoking. Building with Lego bricks confronts us with a multitude of possibilities, and dismissing any of those options without consideration defeats the purpose of education. As educators in a polarised world, we must adapt our methods, often doing so quietly but with steadfast resolve.

The writer is assistant professor, social science, at NLSIU, Bengaluru