Trump Was Asked to Define a Woman. It Went as Well as You’d Expect
Donald Trump stumbled over the popular right-wing question.

In honor of Women’s History Month, Donald Trump weighed in Friday on an extremely inane question that plagues conservatives.
During a press conference in the Oval Office, one reporter tried to lob Trump a softball question, asking, “What is a woman, and why is it important that we understand the difference between men and women?”
“Well it’s sort of easy to answer for me because a woman is someone who can have a baby under certain circumstances,” Trump replied.
“A woman is a person who is much smarter than a man, I’ve always had … a woman is a person that doesn’t give a man even a chance of success,” Trump said, to some laughter.
“A woman is a person that in many cases has been treated very badly,” Trump added, referring to women who sometimes had transgender women on their sports teams. Trump banned trans women from playing women’s sports in an executive order.
REPORTER: What is a woman?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2025
TRUMP: Well it's sort of easy to answer for me because a woman is someone who can have a baby under certain circumstances ... a woman is a person that in many cases has been treated very badly pic.twitter.com/VoSGhOTgyN
When it comes to treating women “very badly,” Trump is clearly speaking from experience.
Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, battery, and defamation of author E. Jean Carroll in 2023. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan even went so far as to specifically clarify that the president did indeed “rape” Carroll based on the common definition of the word. In December, a federal appeals court shut down Trump’s request for a new trial.
At least 27 other women have accused the president of sexual misconduct, according to Axios. Suddenly, his comment about the “certain circumstances” surrounding pregnancy reads as far more sinister than folksy.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order establishing the definition of “women” as adult human females and the definition of females as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.”
It is widely acknowledged that women can possess a range of reproductive organs and sex characteristics that don’t fit neatly into a binary, and that a person’s gender is not contingent on their sex.
Despite Trump’s insistence that he was protecting women and children with his repeated attacks on transgender athletes, the issue he purports to address doesn’t actually exist. His administration is simply targeting the transgender community to score culture-war points, and provide a useful scapegoat from the criticism mounting against it.
Meanwhile, Trump’s emphasis on transgender women has only made life less safe for all women by empowering violent transphobes intent on infringing on women’s right to privacy.