With all the important things that should be said about current events, sometimes you just have to make room for noting the absurd.
Enter Heather Heying's latest Substack offering, "Not the First Woman President: but yes the First Raccoon". Anyone who has read (and re-read, and loved) Sandra Boynton's "But Not the Hippopotamus" will understand my first thoughts upon reading that title.
Heather is reacting to some particularly absurd responses to President Trump's executive order entitled, "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." I have read the order and find it cogent, rational, and much-needed; it states the obvious that should never have had to be stated.
Here's one absurdity, from the Guardian, which headlined its article, "After his executive order on sex, is Trump legally the first female president?"
Despite Trump’s decree that sex is “immutable”, the wording of his executive order left some room for interpretation. Indeed, some critics noted that because the undifferentiated genitalia that males and females share very early in fetal development are “phenotypically female”, you could argue he just made everyone legally female.
“[Trump] just declared everyone a woman from conception, based on the language of the executive order,” Delaware representative Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives, told the Independent.”
As Heather states, Nope. Wrong. So wrong. She goes on to detail why. There a lot to that, which you can easily read for yourself, but here's a snippet:
Early in development, everything is undifferentiated. Decades ago, some researchers argued that early “undifferentiated” genitalia are phenotypically female, but they’re not. They may be just a bit more female-like than male-like, but are actually, again, simply undifferentiated. Furthermore, at conception, there are no genitalia at all—nothing exists at that stage to be differentiated or not. Conception is when two cells come together—an egg, from the mother, who is definitionally female, and a sperm, from the father, who is definitionally male.
One commenter on the post pointed out another problem with the absurd headline: Even if one accepts their premise, the first female president would not be Donald Trump, but George Washington.
After all that seriousness, Heather moves into a diversion about the First Raccoon (typical biologist!), who made her debut in the Coolidge White House.
From an article in Harper's Magazine:
Rebecca, who would soon become the First Raccoon, had been sent to the White House in 1926 by a citizen of Mississippi, who perhaps thought that she would taste good with cranberry sauce. President Coolidge declined to eat her. Soon she would be wearing an embroidered collar and taking baths, which she particularly enjoyed when given a cake of soap with which to play.
Here's where I burst out laughing and decided to share Heather's post with all of you:
“And so she lived a life of luxury until she did a thing many of her fellow Americans have dreamed of but very few have achieved: she bit the president of the United States.”
