When “Biological Truth” Becomes the State Religion
When the state preaches “science,” what it’s really worshiping is power.
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According to ProPublica, the Department of Veterans Affairs has reversed course: breast cancer in male veterans will no longer be presumed service-related, forcing them to prove the link before receiving care. The reason wasn’t science—it was Trump’s executive order on “restoring biological truth,” a phrase that signals how this administration has turned a rigid, politicized view of biology into something resembling state religion.
In the name of defending so-called “biological reality,” the government chose to make care harder to access for the very veterans it claims to honor.
Many of us could have predicted this as the inevitable outcome of the right’s hyper-fixation on trans people. In particular, this new rallying cry of “biological truth,” which has been used as a convenient justification for transphobia by conservatives and liberals alike was always going to lead to this type of result. Because the fact of the matter is that the way this administration is wielding the concept of “biological truth” flattens not only the complexities of the human experience that cannot be explained by the so-called “hard sciences” but steam rolls the complexity out of the even the fields it claims to respect. What remains then is not “truth” – it’s dogma.
The New Dogma
Trump’s “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” executive order was one of the very early chaos bombs dropped by this administration at the start of Trump’s second term. The entire order was filled with tired claims about “protecting women” from the dangers of “biological men”, “protecting children” from a form of healthcare that has been best practice for decades, and replacing “ideology” with “truth.” The truth offered? As assigned at birth “biological males” can only ever be men and “biological females” can only ever be women. Anything that might suggest a possibility the contrary, allow for nuance or complexity, or otherwise defy this hard line rule was declared a “dangerous subversion of scientific reality.” This stance, which declares a single framework as absolute truth while ignoring not only other ways of viewing the world, but also even more detailed understandings of the fields it relies on had immediate consequences.
Trans people have been in passport limbo for months now, with on and off windows of availability to get updated documentation. Colleges and universities quickly capitulated as federal funding increasingly became dependent on reversing any trans-inclusive policies they may have previously adopted, regardless of the actual impact of said policies. Hospitals have increasingly ceased providing gender affirming healthcare services, even in states where it is still legal. Even without government interventions, social policing has increased as well, with gender non-conforming cis women facing public scrutiny in public restrooms and locker rooms.
This concept of “biological truth” has become dogma, an unerring truth about the world, that cannot budge or be questioned, regardless of the consequences. The VA’s policy change is just yet another example of how this new governmental gospel of transphobia ultimately results in real tangible harm, even for cis people.
Thanks to the horrific conditions created by war and combat scenarios, service members are often faced with increased and unique medical needs, some of which stay with them for life. The Department of Veterans Affairs is supposed to help them with this, though historically those services have been a poorly administered nightmare of red tape and bureaucracy. One part of that bureaucracy is that with some exceptions, veterans have to go through an extended process to prove that an illness has a connection to their service. But due to the use of chemical weapons and other toxins, veterans have an increased risk of cancer and other health issues that often manifest well after their service – illnesses that often respond best to early intervention. When advocates and medical providers began noticing patterns surrounding these types of illnesses and service histories, they lobbied Congress for a new law, called the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act (PACT). The PACT Act was a major expansion in veterans healthcare benefits, and required the VA to presume that when a veteran presented with one of these illnesses related to toxins, and their service history aligns with certain patterns, their illness would be automatically presumed to be connected to their service. The PACT Act was passed three years ago with bipartisan support, and the VA, under the Biden administration, was tasked with implementing it.
Writing legislation is harder than a lot of people think. There are a million different ways to interpret certain words, and it is nearly impossible for legislators to account for every single scenario that might fall under the intended scope of the legislation. So when they wrote this bill, Congress didn’t necessarily include an exhaustive list of conditions that they intended to cover. Instead, they listed general categories of illnesses, one of which being “reproductive cancers.”
“Reproductive cancers” refers to cancers of the reproductive organs – think ovarian or testicular cancers – and often includes breast cancer in females, as female breasts are classified as “secondary” reproductive organs due to their function of feeding babies. Breast cancer in males has often existed in an odd limbo, because it is less culturally recognized that males can even get breast cancer, and male breasts, since they do not serve the same type of secondary reproductive function, are not traditionally categorized as “reproductive organs.”
As the VA began to interpret and implement this legislation, they were left to contend with this grey area. Male veterans have an increased risk of breast cancer, likely due to the exposure to toxins associated with military service, which means that it is clearly the type of illness the bill was intended to cover. But it didn’t have a clear categorical fit. What the doctors and administrators did know, however, is that male breast cancer appears using the same mechanisms and genetic markers as female breast cancer, and the treatment methods are essentially the same. So they made a logical choice to categorize like with like, and classified it as a "reproductive cancer." Male veterans presenting to the VA with breast cancer and a service history that aligned with a high likelihood of connection now no longer had to go through the process of proving their individual connection, easing access to treatment. It was functional, interpretive shorthand, rather than a political or ideological statement about gender.
This functionality doesn’t mesh with the literalism around terms even vaguely related to “sex” and “gender” demanded by the Trump administration under the executive order (and the wider anti-trans movement surrounding it) however. Rather than seeing this as a side effect of the inherent limits of categorization, the Trump administration has apparently determined that this was a case of “gender ideology” violating “biological truth” along the lines of other forms of inclusive language. (Though the spokesperson ProPublica spoke to never said this directly, the VA’s reliance of the anti-trans executive order makes this a pretty logical conclusion when the facts are drawn together.)
As a result, while veterans who were previously covered under the old interpretation of the law will not lose their coverage, future veterans who present with breast cancer will now be forced to return to the bureaucratic nightmare of proving that their illness is related to their service on an individual basis. This process can take months, or even years, which can result in a wasted time and resources that would be best spent actually treating the illness. Meanwhile veterans and their families are placed in an impossible financial, medical, and logistical position. These delays can quickly become a matter of life and death, which was the entire reason behind the law in the first place.
The VA’s policy on male breast cancer had absolutely nothing to do with trans people, and I’d go so far as to bet that when they made the call to classify male breast cancer as a “reproductive cancer” not a single person in the room even had a passing thought about trans people. There is no sound scientific reason to change this policy. But under the new dogma of “biological truth,” this type of functional interpretive weirdness becomes heresy. The VA committed the sin of not adhering to what the Trump administration wants to peddle as “truth,” and as a result, real people are being punished.
Why “Biological Truth” Was Never Neutral
All too often in my work I encounter people who truly and deeply believe that “science” is a perfectly objective, rational endeavor that is free from any bias or politics. Typically only referring to the so-called “hard sciences” like physics, chemistry, and even biology, many people believe that if they rely on “science” to understand the world, they will be freed from the influences of bigotry, prejudice, and yes, religion. In their world view, “science” has a right and wrong answer, with perhaps a marginal amount of space for “we don’t know…yet.” Unlike those messy social sciences and humanities where there might be many “right” answers, all they need to know can be observed through a microscope or tested in a lab, and therefore present objective fact.
Historical reality though paints a very different picture.
“Science” has always been wielded as a political tool by governments to enforce their preferred world view, and especially when it comes to social order and hierarchies. Far from being an exception to this historical rule, the United States has instead presented us with some of the most prominent examples of this in practice.
Much of our history of racism has been propped up using “scientific” evidence. Phrenology, “the science that claimed an individual’s character and talents could be determined by examining the size and shape of the head,” was widely held as firm science in the United States during the antebellum period. A phrenologist’s claim was generally that certain traits, such as length of ears, the shape of the skull, or the width of the nose, amongst other things, were indicative of a person’s ability for moral reasoning, their capacity for leadership or inclination to passivity, and their general intellect. Reaching its height in the United States in the lead up to the Civil War, it is no coincidence that the measurements and shapes that indicated positive, dominating traits were those associated with men of Western European descent, while those traits that were associated with negative or passive traits most aligned with the traits of enslaved Black men. Though these statements were based on “objective data,” that is the literal measurements taken, they were not a reflection of any actual reality. Instead they were used to reinforce systemic racial hierarchies and sooth both the political anxieties and growing guilt of the white political elite. Phrenology was not considered firm, “hard science” because it carried some absolute "truth" but because it gave people in power an outcome that allowed them to continue to enforce their preferred social order guilt free. It allowed them to view American chattel slavery not as the deeply immoral horror that it was, but as a natural, biologically sound ordering of society.
As phrenology died down in popularity (though it is making a comeback in the 21st century), other forms of race science (and scientific bigotry more broadly) began to take its place. Early craniometry and anthropometry (the somewhat more scientific study of skull and skeleton measurements and proportions) carried with them the lasting echos of phrenology that continued to be used to justify racial hierarchies and segregation in the post Civil War era.
At the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, the early American Progressive movement made eugenics all the rage, not just in the context of race, but also in terms of disability and class. Peaking in the 1930s, the American eugenics movement was also considered objectively scientific, relying on the “biological truth” that certain traits were inheritable, and that a society has a responsibility to prevent the continuation of “undesirable” traits. The eugenics movement was used to justify the forced sterilization of Black people and other people of color (with women being disproportionately victimized), disabled people (particularly women with intellectual disabilities and mental health conditions) and poor women (note: these categories were not distinct, and often had significant overlap.) It also informed racist immigration policies, placing limits on certain non-white immigrants on the basis of limiting “undesirable” traits associated with certain races. Overlapping with this was the concept of “Social Darwinism,” combining forces with eugenics to create a scientific and moral justification for bans interracial marriage and efforts to protect “whiteness” from the effects of miscegenation – the beginnings of the “Great Replacement Theory” that underpins much of the alt-right today.
While all of these movements (and many others not mentioned here that were used to justify bigotry) faced criticism and dissent in their own day, they were still widely accepted by the public as policies being drawn from “biological truth.”
This is because the process of biological categorization, and particularly the categorization of human traits and experience, isn’t actually as “objective” as they seem. They’re mediated through social lenses, and what is and is not “normal” often depends on who is in power and what their end goals are. Phrenology was popular in the mainstream consciousness in large part because its greatest supporters needed a justification for slavery. Eugenics and Social Darwinism were popular because they provided an avenue for the wealthy to justify the suffering and oppression of their fellow humans as a matter of biological destiny instead of a moral failure. This type of scientific rhetoric was propagated by governments and other institutions because it seemed to offer the public a clear answer to life’s messy questions while still maintaining the current structures of power.
The anti-trans “biological truth” movement functions much in the same way. Trans people present a world view and approach to the social order that is often messy and confusing, and doesn’t conform to the neatly prescribed boundaries much of our culture insists on. Critically in our current political moment, the very existence of trans people delegitimizes a large number of the patriarchal assumptions surrounding gender roles and the nature of “creation” that are necessary for the structure of many conservative Christian American theologies. Many of these communities rely on a structure that places men in positions of authority, second only to God, and forces women into a secondary, subservient role. These structures are justified with claims that “men and women are created differently, with different, inborn, biologically influenced skill sets.” The existence of trans people tips the gender essentialism these communities rely on to maintain both internal and external power on its head, and that is why they are so hyper-fixated on the elimination of trans people.
These communities know that they cannot solely rely on a theological argument when it comes to trans people, though, despite the significant amount of political power the Christian nationalist and broader Christian conservative movement holds. Demographically, the United States is too religiously and ideologically diverse for that to hold up. Thus came the creation of the anti-trans pseudoscience network, funded and staffed by Christian nationalist heavy-weights. Its primary agenda? Flooding the public scientific consciousness with junk science, intentionally manipulative studies, and decontextualized statistics intended to place a secular mask over theocratic authoritarianism.
This mask is incredibly effective with large portions of even the most secular demographics of the American public, because even amongst atheists who claim to have eschewed religion, they have not eschewed the very human impulse to search for certainty. In much of the secular American cultural imagination, information that is presented in the right, “sciencey” looking format have slotted in neatly where the Bible and sermons used to sit. Much like how the average American does not have formal theological training, science literacy in the United States is devastatingly low. Instead of relying on clergy to interpret scripture, then, we rely on public scientists and policy makers to interpret data for us. And instead of an omnipotent God, many non-religious folks have created a nebulous concept of “science” to serve as a one-to-one replacement in their cultural imagination. This is why so many secular folks don’t even realize (or understand when trans advocates point it out) that they are buying into Christian nationalist authoritarian politics. In their minds, the fact that they are justifying it with “science” means that their transphobia cannot possibly be influenced by theology. Instead it’s only a coincidence that it aligns with conservative Christian theologies. They don’t take the next step to pull the mask off further, to see the Christo-fascism lurking just underneath the surface.
This “faith” in science, as ironic as it is, in conjunction with a desire to maintain existing power structures, is also what makes it so easy for certain old-school celebrity atheists who should have the scientific literacy to see behind the mask (and they likely do), to cast themselves in the public imagination as the “high priests of reason,” and declare trans people to be nothing more than hysterical heretics. They are happy to legitimize theocratic pseudoscience and throw out nuance, complexity, and any field of study that does not confirm their own biases, so long as they continue to maintain cultural relevance and a position of power.
The State as Theologian of Biology
As “biological reality” becomes dogma in American theopolitics, we need to return again to the idea of who gets to outline the boundaries of this dogma. While trans people have never been a politically popular group, for a short period in the 2010s, it at least seemed like society was perhaps starting to veer towards something resembling neutrality. As right-wing Christian conservative groups caught onto this and realized the threat it presented to their power structures, however, they began a concerted, unified effort to oppose trans existence, which would snowball into the anti-trans movement we are contending with now.
As this evolved, and as the concept of “biological truth” solidified into anti-trans dogma, the state has become increasingly hijacked to act as a public theologian, determining just what exactly gets to qualify as “biological truth” and what is heresy that must be stamped out.
Literalism has become the interpretative policy of the day, pulling from the worst versions of both the legal interpretation method of “textualism” and the theological interpretation method of “biblicism.” Both of these tactics rely on a “plain reading” understanding of the text, in which whatever definition the interpretative body determines to be “most simple” or “most literal” is the correct interpretation. This is touted as an objective, originalist form of interpretation that is meant to be free of modern bias, but of course, the “plain reading” method will always depend on the political agenda of the person doing the reading. The cost of a literalist interpretation framework is clear, because once you make a declaration on what certain words mean, like, say “reproductive,” you cannot then backtrack to account for lived realities.
This is precisely what has happened with the VA. The state has made a theopolitical declaration that body parts may only be associated with the most simple, literal categories assigned to them. Vagina = woman. Penis = man. Female breasts, used for feeding offspring = reproductive. Male breasts, not used for feeding offspring = not reproductive. But these aren’t really biological realities in the sense that the government has declared, where every body part neatly fits into these socially predetermined boxes. Breasts are one of the greatest historical examples of this in western culture. There are plenty of cis women who are unable to breastfeed, or even lactate. While far more rare, there are historical records of cis men breastfeeding (typically related to some issue with the pituitary gland.) And it goes beyond function. Because we have socially categorized female breasts as “reproductive” placing them on the same tier of privacy as genitals, we have also placed them on the same sexual tier as genitals, to the point that indecent exposure laws carry one of the most glaring sex-based double standards on the books. These are standards and categories that might have an origin of sorts in “biological function,” but are more so the socially constructed reaction to said function.
This leaves the government with a conundrum when faced with questions like “how do we categorize male breast cancer?” Do they look at the functional, lived reality, and accept that some wiggle room is necessary for the practical administration of healthcare?
No, of course not.
Because the state has made its priority clear: there is a binary division of sex, and everyone fits into only one of those two boxes, and ne’er the twain shall cross. That is the unquestionable, literal rule, regardless of what any real life situation may look like. Any policy interpretation to the contrary would threaten the stability of the social categories this regime needs to survive, and therefore must be squashed at all costs.
This was a major goal of the Christian nationalist project. None of the actual political power players on this chess board are unintelligent, and this method of disguising their concept of divine order as “objective truth” has been a particularly effective piece of strategy. Just as they are using trans rights issues to roll back precedent in order to eventually infringe on the rights of other marginalized groups, they are also using this method of interpreting terms related to sex and gender to redesign the roles of our public officials in their image.
Governmental bodies have always been held to the whims of the current group of power players. The administrative state in particular has always been rife with political red tape and interpretation that is directed by the political preference of whoever is in charge. What we are seeing the Christian nationalist movement do here isn’t necessarily new, but they are pushing beyond what was once a more normal political process. Take George W. Bush’s restrictions on stem cell research as an example. During the Bush administration, the government implemented a restriction that limited federal funding for stem cell research only to embryonic lines that already existed. This wasn’t justified by saying that stem cell research was false, ideological junk science, but by making a clear statement that it was about the ethics of using human embryos in this manner. This was theocratic policy making, certainly, but the Bush administration wasn’t necessarily trying to deny the scientific reality of stem cell research. At most one can argue that they were attempting to declare “life begins at conception” as scientific truth, but it still cast a somewhat different shadow than the current policy tactics used by the Trump administration, because it was explicit in its framing.
This policy approach takes it a step further, with the government not only acting as a reflection of a president or political party’s subjective code of ethics, but as a grand arbiter of "truth" itself. The state becomes a public theologian, declaring what counts as “real” or “false” biology, and branding dissenters as heretics against “nature.” This leads to public servants, administrators, and bureaucrats actings as priests and moral judges. As these roles become more clearly redefined, and more empowered to enforce orthodoxy, their authority will expand beyond policing issues of trans existence, and be increasingly utilized to enforce any and all future dogma as they continue to develop.
The Consequences of Dogma
The consequences of this type of political dogma are clear, immediate, and far reaching.
As our already sluggish administrative bodies move forward, attempting to interpret legislation and effectively administer government services, there are going to be increased delays in guidance as they attempt to ensure that they account for any possible way their recommendations might accidentally stumble into heresy. New laws, programs, or other agency action, whether good or bad, will become even more delayed than before.
Outside of our administrative system, the confusion that we are already seeing grip vital services like hospitals and educational institutions will only continue to get worse. As they attempt to not be burnt at the stake for missteps, they will continue to over correct, disproportionately impacting queer and AFAB people. We’ve already seen cases of hospitals ending gender affirming care and denying certain reproductive health services. We’ve seen schools ending trans inclusive policies, and even going as far as to ban a cis student whose birth certificate had to be amended due to a clerical error on his gender marker at birth from playing on the boy’s basketball team (ironically forcing a “biological male” to play on a girls’ team) for fear of violating the state’s laws on trans participation in sports.
Across the board, resources are going to be misspent, services are going to be delayed, and people are going to get hurt. And as further result, there will be increased violence, malice, and political division, as people will naturally search for a scapegoat on which to blame for these delays and loss of function.
We’ve already seen it happen. Despite the data that shows that trans rights were not a determinative factor in the 2024 election (in fact, voters were more likely to trust pro-trans than anti-trans politicians), trans people were almost immediately blamed by liberals as the cause for Harris’ loss. People who were only masking their transphobia to fit in with the liberal movement relished at the opportunity to take the mask off, and those who were uncertain of their stance went with the fully human impulse of not just finding someone they could blame for their woes, but someone they felt that they had the power to control and eliminate. Every single conversation about 2028 has eventually circled onto telling trans people that we asked for too much, that we were too loud, and that we need to be sacrificed to prevent the next person from harming anyone else. As if that has ever worked at any point in history.
People are buying into the dogma for the same reason that people have always bought into dogma, it provides a sense of psychological safety and security. And the peddlers of this particular dogma know that it helpfully divides and distracts the groups that might otherwise be politically capable of tearing them down.
Ultimately though, there is no level of adherence, there is no process of creating new categories that will work to meet everyone’s needs and reflect “truth” as so many people desperately want to cling to. Because the Christian nationalist movement, who at least for now gets to set the government’s definition of “truth” is far more concerned with maintaining power and their preferred social order. The goalposts will change, and “truth” will continue to evolve in order to ensure division, create scapegoats, and maintain the hierarchies that serve them. This is because “truth” isn’t a concept to them, but a weapon, and once truth becomes a weapon, it stops being truth at all.
Reclaiming Science and Faith from the Idols of Certainty
With all of that being said, I want to be incredibly clear that I am not anti-science. I am in fact incredibly pro-science. I get all my vaccines, take my medications as prescribed by my doctor, and when I do buy cow’s milk, it is always pasteurized. I am not cautioning against “science” but instead how we, as a society, have cast this incredibly vague and nebulous concept as the one true path to “certainty,” and the harms that certainty causes on the individual, community, and societal scales.
We have to stop viewing “science” as an end result, with a final answer that can never change or become complicated. “Science” is a process, a living and breathing continuity, of which our understanding changes and evolves. It is not a search for doctrine, but a search for understanding that will never be truly complete as long as there are human beings that are brave enough to ask questions, and open enough to engage with the answers. In an odd way, being “pro-science” is a almost an act of faith – a statement I know will ruffle some feathers. But it’s not faith in the dominating sense of “here is the truth, and I am choosing to believe it regardless of any other information,” but in the more humble sense of being able to admit that “there are things I do not understand, and science is the process through which we can get closer to understanding.” It is a faith in the process, not in any particular creed or individual statement of ultimate truth. “Faith” requires a sense of doubt, “science” requires a sense of uncertainty, and those two parallel lines run far closer than you might think.
We also cannot fully rely on this concept of “science,” on pure biology, physics, and chemistry, to answer all of life’s questions. As messy as they are, we need the nuance and complexity that the soft sciences, the humanities, and the arts bring into understanding the human experience. Particularly when it comes to law, policy, and governance, we need the flexibility that an interdisciplinary approach provides us with in order to create a functional, thriving, democratic society. We need frameworks that let us stop and think critically about what we are actually trying to accomplish, and accept that sometimes grey areas are a necessity. We need to be able to ask more than “what is the literal definition of ‘reproductive’” when we are making decisions about people’s lives. We need to be able to consider lived experience and the broader impact of the systems we create. Humans are complex organisms that have complex societies that require complex ways of thinking in order to serve us well. We cannot flatten that complexity without flattening the entire human experience into a singular, oppressive mold.
For both religious and non-religious folks alike, it is uncomfortable to consider that in an increasingly secular society we still struggle with the creation of “false idols.” But the fact is we do. The human impulse to trust in something larger than ourselves to make sense of a chaotic world, the basic craving for the psychological safety of certainty, these are not things that can be easily discarded, if at all. But the thing about “false idols” whether religious or otherwise, is that they can always be manipulated by the human actors controlling them. And if we want to be free of the power players in our government that can see these idols and move them to suit their needs, we all need to have a healthy skepticism of anyone claiming to be the arbiter of absolute truth. Even when that “truth” comes in our preferred packaging.
AI-Free Guarantee: Due to the intellectual, environmental, and creative impacts of generative AI, Kat does not, and will not, ever use ChatGPT or any other AI program in the process of brainstorming, researching, drafting, or editing their work. Don’t outsource your brain.
Kat (they/them) is a Wisconsin based queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.