President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders restricting transgender surgeries and drugs for children and directing the U.S. Department of Justice to criminally prosecute teachers who affirm students’ transgender/non-binary identities have, as expected, created howls of protest and cries of “bigotry” from those on the political left. 

But, surprisingly, when Trump declared there are only two genders — male and female — he also struck at the very roots of radical feminism. What most Americans don’t know, because they’ve never been told, is that transgender ideology and radical feminism (the kind that hates and rails against masculinity, marriage, family, motherhood and God) began together and have long gone hand in hand.  

It’s time for a short, quick history lesson.  

The roots of man-hating feminism and the transgender movement in our nation can be traced back largely to the theories of two despairing French philosophers whose nihilistic ideas leap-frogged across the Atlantic into the U.S. after World War II and have deeply infected much of American intellectual thought for the past half-century.   

These two unhappy French philosophers were existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and his lifelong mistress Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). In Being and Nothingness and other books, Sartre invented a gloomy theory that’s been dubbed “the philosophy of despair.” Following Sartre’s dark philosophy, Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, a book laced with subtle poison that has been called the “feminist bible.”  

Both hated Jesus’ teachings without a cause. Sartre rejected God the Father when he was only 12 years old and he fancifully imagined seeing God tumble out of the sky and disappear. Beauvoir, who attended a Catholic convent school and claimed that as a girl she even wanted to be a nun, also rejected God as an adolescent. What the two invented together with their dazzling words and misguided thinking was a reduced understanding of the human person as merely a self-created, self-defined individualist focused almost entirely on sex with no serious obligations to others.  

In his four-volume series Socrates’ Children: The 100 Greatest Philosophers, philosopher Peter Kreeft describes Sartre as “a totally ‘spoiled’ only child. His father died when he was one, and his mother doted on him. … He read 300 books a year [and] wrote millions of words. His conversations were uninterrupted and uninterruptible. If you left the room in the middle of one, he did not notice, and went on talking.”  

Kreeft describes Sartre as “short (5’2”), frog-faced, ugly, and with a grotesque-looking crooked eye. He was habitually dirty and seldom bathed. He wrote that he became a seducer [of women] ‘to get rid of the burden of my ugliness.’”  

In his most famous book, Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre laid out his “philosophy of despair,” in which he reduced a woman to an “object of desire,” comparing her to an automobile or a slice of bread! When teaching school, he seduced many of his underage female students. What few of Sartre’s most passionate admirers knew was that his hopeless philosophy was often written when he was high on amphetamines by day and drugged-out on sleeping pills by night.  

Far from being what modern feminists would call a “strong, liberated woman” Beauvoir allowed herself in Kreeft’s words “to be the object of Sartre’s lifelong emotional abuse, infidelities, lies, deceptions and insults.” Displaying what St. Catherine of Siena called “the ice of selfish love,” Sartre bragged to Beauvoir about his sexual conquests, secretly proposed marriage to other women, and legally adopted one of his mistresses, leaving all his money to her and not to Beauvoir. 

But instead of leaving Sartre, as any self-respecting woman would, Beauvoir chose to admire and imitate him! She not only had sexual affairs with married and unmarried men but sexually abused her underage female students. When one teenage girl’s mother angrily protested the abuse, Beauvoir was fired from her teaching job.  

Some of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s sexual victims were so deeply scarred they became jealous, angry and even suicidal. One of their shared mistresses, a cocaine addict named Wanda, made a voodoo doll of Beauvoir and stuck pins in it. 

Beauvoir hated marriage and motherhood, advocated abortion, and viewed pregnancy as just one more evil visited upon women.  

“Ensnared by nature,” she wrote, “the pregnant woman is plant and animal … an incubator, an egg; she scares children … and makes young people titter contemptuously because she is a human being, a conscious and free individual, who has become life’s passive instrument.” Women who want and have many children were for Beauvoir “not so much mothers as fertile organisms, like fowls with high egg production.”  

Instrumental in legalizing abortion in France, Beauvoir referred to the unborn baby as “quivering jelly” and a “slimy embryo” from which a man turns shuddering away in disgust.  

Now we come to the transgender piece of the puzzle. Along with her violent diatribes against motherhood and babies, Beauvoir wrote her most famous line: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”  

“That statement is the mustard seed of gender theory,” author Abigail Favale points out in The Genesis of Gender.

“For Beauvoir, there is no such thing as human nature. … There is no intrinsic meaning in the world or to our lives. Meaning must be made. … It is up to us to justify our existence, to give it purpose. We are not created [by God]; rather we create ourselves.”  

At least in the beginning, Beauvoir’s hostile views toward gender and motherhood had little influence on American feminists. Betty Friedan, who launched second-wave feminism in America with her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, reported that when she read Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex, she found it so “depressing” that “it made me just want to go to bed for a week.”  

When she later personally met Beauvoir in France, Friedan recalled, “The comforts of the family, the decoration of one’s own home, fashion, marriage, motherhood — all these things are women’s enemy [Beauvoir] said. It is not even a question of giving women a choice — anything that encourages them to want to be mothers or gives them that choice is wrong. The family must be abolished she said with absolute authority. … Am I supposed to take this seriously?”  

But when Sexual Politics author and bisexual feminist Kate Millett, one of Beauvoir’s intellectual groupies, came to dominate America’s political conversation about women’s rights in 1970, Friedan’s justifiable skepticism was silenced. Beauvoir’s bitter hatred of masculinity, motherhood and the family became the loudest and most powerful feminist narrative in academia, politics and the secular media.  

Today, through massive amounts of “gender-affirming” propaganda and advertising campaigns by pharmaceutical companies, Beauvoir’s notion that “one is not born but becomes a woman” has entered our educational, medical, media and political institutions — to the point that some American intellectuals and politicians sincerely believe even children should be able to “create themselves” without parental consent and become the “gender of their choice” by taking transgender drugs and receiving surgeries that will damage their physical health and psychological well-being for the rest of their lives.  

Following Beauvoir’s thinking, even some adults now believe they must “define their own gender” in order to become “happy.” But enslaved as she was to Sartre’s abusive behavior, Beauvoir never claimed she was searching for happiness. She only claimed she was searching for freedom, although she never claimed to have found it. On the contrary, at the end of the third volume of her autobiography, despite all her worldly fame, she nostalgically looked back at her lost youth and bitterly complained, “I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.”  

May all Beauvoir’s intellectual groupies wake up and see the bogus path they’ve been duped into following. May they embrace the freedom, peace and joy of knowing the only true God, who has created them in love to be either male or female.