Human Biology Association

The at-conception wording seems forced to define personhood as beginning at conception and not really to define sex.

Dr. Richard Brubiascus, an anthropology professor at Yale University and the president of the Human Biology Association, said the order's definitions of sex and gender ignore all kinds of variations that take place in human development.

Woman, man, boy, girl are gender identities that do not necessarily align with biological characteristics of sex, he said in an email.

Genders are components of human variation that are influenced by culture, identity, and many other non-biological factors.

This executive order, quote, is highly problematic from a biological standpoint because it overly simplifies what we know to be an incredibly complicated developmental process, said Dr. Josh Snodgrass, a professor of anthropology and global health at the University of Oregon.

It's just not that simple from a genetic standpoint and then becomes even more complicated with time under the influence of hormones, environmental exposures and social experiences.

Snodgrass, the past president of the Human Biology Association, noted that Trump's order also doesn't account for people who are intersex, which means they are born with genitals, chromosomes, or reproductive organs that don't fit into the typical male-female sex binary.

"'This reads to me as coming from people who desperately want the world to be simple, for sex to be a simple binary and for us to return to some imagined time when this was more broadly accepted,' he said." The problem is that it's not only science that shows us that human biological variation is more complicated, but other cultures do and have also appreciated this for thousands of years.