One morning, I woke from troubled dreams and found myself transformed in my bed into a monstrous cockroach.

It was Jan. 21, the morning after President Trump announced that from that day forward, the federal government would recognize only two genders and that these categories — fixed and immutable — are defined according to a unique theory: “Female means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell; male means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

After 25 years as a woman, I had morphed back into a man. You can imagine my surprise.

And yet it seems Trump administration officials are not up on their biology: At conception, sex has not yet been phenotypically differentiated.

After the order was issued, internet observers ran with the idea that it had actually just reset America to one gender — female — since about seven weeks pass before a gene on the Y chromosome triggers the development of testes. I found this suggestion wickedly amusing. “Welcome to my world!” I wanted to say to all my newfound sisters. Alas, though I love the idea of calling Donald Trump our first female president, that idea, too, is a misunderstanding of human creation. At conception, we are but a single cell.

Biology and genetics are not really the point, of course. Even the order’s purported goal — “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”— is not the point.

The point, it seems, is to make transgender people’s lives as difficult as possible. The point is to isolate our small, vulnerable, maligned community and mock us for our difference. The point is to erase us from the public sphere. The point is to use our tiny, misunderstood population as useful scapegoats upon whom Mr. Trump can blame all of society’s ills.

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