This article was originally published in Evie Magazine.
For all the talk about women’s empowerment and breaking glass ceilings, there has historically been one area where women get the short end of the stick, and it has been this way for decades, too: healthcare.
We’ve been excluded from medical research, prescribed drugs primarily studied on men, and then told that our very real symptoms were probably just anxiety or something. Go to the OB/GYN expressing hormonal imbalance struggles, and you’ll likely get offered birth control before receiving a thorough investigation into what’s going on in your body. And for conditions that only affect women, like endometriosis, or disproportionately affect women, like autoimmune diseases and certain chronic pain disorders… well, the research sadly has a lot of catching up to do.
Sorry to play the “current year” game, but how is it that in 2026, with all the scientific advancements at our fingertips, women are still fighting to have our biology properly understood? Tides may be turning.
On October 19th, President Donald Trump signed an executive order (EO) establishing a new Women’s Health Division with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Melania Trump spoke about the White House Women’s Health Task Force she’ll be championing. This initiative plans to address longstanding research gaps, improve diagnoses, advance the development of treatments, and bring scientific breakthroughs into clinical practice, they explained.
“This is a transformative moment for women in America,” Melania Trump said during the announcement. “Beginning today, we will change the reality of women’s health.”
It’s an ambitious undertaking, but it’s about time. But when you think about it, perhaps the most interesting part of the announcement isn’t the task force or the new NIH division… It’s the emphasis on something that should be stupidly uncontroversial: biological sex. Because if we’re serious about improving women’s health, we have to be willing to acknowledge that women aren’t just small versions of men. We’ve got our own unique challenges and advantages, and we’re doing a disservice to both women and men if we don’t keep biological reality at the core of the very institutions intended to serve us––from government agencies to research universities to doctors’ offices to pharmacies and more.
The Medical Establishment Has Been Failing Women For Decades
I’ve written extensively about this issue, and the history is pretty damning. For much of modern medical history, the male body has been the default in research. Female subjects were frequently excluded from clinical trials, and while this was often due to concerns surrounding pregnancy and fertility, it also happened because hormonal fluctuations were considered by researchers to be an inconvenient variable.
Okay, cool, thank you for not wanting to threaten unborn babies or a woman’s future ability to safely conceive, but this kind of backfired, resulting in generations of medical research that didn’t adequately account for how women’s bodies uniquely respond to diseases, medications, and other treatments or interventions.
Then, 1993 rolls around, and federal law required the inclusion of women in NIH-funded clinical research, subject to certain exceptions. And in 2016, the NIH implemented “Sex” as a Biological Variable policy, which required researchers to account for sex in the design, analysis, and reporting for relevant studies.
Noodle on that a bit. For decades, researchers had been developing treatments intended for the entire population without consistently asking whether those treatments would affect half the population differently.
Exhibit A: Cardiovascular disease. Women might experience heart attacks differently from men, and yet a great deal of our knowledge on cardiovascular health developed around male patients. Exhibit B: Autoimmune disease. Women make up approximately 80% of all autoimmune disease diagnoses, but, again, medical research historically treats male bodies as the guinea pigs. And then there are conditions like PCOS or endometriosis, which only affect women, can take years to properly diagnose, and so they’re woefully under-researched for how common they appear to be.
The medical community has long touted that sex influences a person’s risk of certain diseases, how their body will metabolize certain drugs, how hormonal regulation and fluctuations change, and countless other physiological processes. And yet, actually weaving those differences into routine medical care has been a miserably slow process.
You Can’t Improve Women’s Health Without Acknowledging What Makes Women Different
Politics should never have been at play when it comes to our ability to thrive or even survive, but it may have derailed progress for some time. Over the past several years and particularly under the Biden administration, we watched the definition of womanhood become an increasingly hot-button issue. Medical institutions like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) adopted illogical terminology like “birthing people” or “people who menstruate” to accommodate transgender-identifying patients.
Proponents argued language like that makes healthcare more inclusive. Critics worry, however, that efforts to make reproductive healthcare gender-neutral risk blurring the very real biological distinctions that necessitate women’s health research. And this isn’t just some abstract debate a few pundits fire away at one another on social media. It’s fun to laugh about people seriously thinking that “bodies with vaginas” is a respectful way to categorize a person, but this cultural brain worm wiggles its way into social consciousness, and there have been some serious repercussions.
Through my work with Independent Women, I’ve spent years reporting on the consequences of policies that fail to distinguish between biological sex––a concrete reality––and gender identity, which is simply made up. Our organization has been at the forefront of efforts to codify definitions of basic sex-based terms, such as “woman,” “man,” “female,” and “male,” through our Women’s Bill of Rights and Stand with Women legislative initiatives.
The goal has been to ensure that laws intended to protect women actually recognize that women are a distinct biological sex, just as men are, too. Much of our work has focused on girls and women’s sports, prisons, domestic violence shelters, and other spaces where biological differences can have very real consequences for girls and women’s privacy, safety, and opportunities. Payton McNabb wouldn’t have ended up with a traumatic brain injury if her rights as a young woman had been prioritized instead of the male athlete who identified as transgender and spiked a volleyball into her head. Danielle Laurenti, a survivor of sexual assault, wouldn’t have had to strip-search trans-identified male inmates in her job as a correctional officer if Massachusetts––like plenty of other states––didn’t pass legislation allowing trans-identified inmates to be housed based on “gender identity” rather than biological reality.
And I’d argue that the same underlying principle deserves way more attention in healthcare.
If we want researchers to understand why women experience certain diseases differently, respond differently to medications, or face unique fertility and reproductive health challenges… well, we need to be precise about who the population is we’re studying. Furthermore, if we’re going to collect any meaningful data about women’s health, biological sex needs to remain clearly defined and a consistently measured variable.
That’s why one particular provision in Trump’s new executive order stands out. Section 2 directs the new NIH Women’s Health Division to improve research methodologies for understanding sex-specific health outcomes and strengthen accountability for researchers receiving federal grants to follow NIH’s existing sex-as-a-biological-variable policy.
To put it plainly, the order goes beyond calling for more women’s health research by directing federal agencies to take biological differences seriously when designing and evaluating that research. This follows Trump’s January 2025 EO establishing sex-based definitions for federal agencies––which defined women as adult human females.
Of course, researchers can recognize biological sex while also studying the ways that a person’s “gender identity” could affect their health. After all, transgenderism used to be considered a psychiatric illness or mental disorder. Still, the broader question stands… why should acknowledging the biological differences between men and women be controversial in the first place?
Here’s What Trump’s EO Actually Changes
The Trump administration’s initiative goes way further than a symbolic acknowledgment that women’s health deserves attention. The EO directs the NIH to establish a Women’s Health Division within 90 days, working alongside its existing Office of Research on Women’s Health.
This division will be responsible for coordinating research on understudied conditions, improving women’s participation in clinical trials, encouraging personalized––not one-size-fits-all––medicine, and helping translate scientific discoveries into clinical practice. The initiative identified a broad range of health concerns to tackle, including infertility, endometriosis, fibroids, menopause, osteoporosis, autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and mental health.
One major win that can’t be understated is that they’re not limiting women’s healthcare to reproductive years. The initiative explicitly recognizes that women’s medical needs evolve from childhood through adolescence, pregnancy, menopause, and old age.
The White House task force will be co-chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and recently breast cancer-free White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who will coordinate federal efforts and explore reforms to improve prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.
And Melania Trump is taking part, too. In a release about the landmark program, she outlined five priorities for the initiative: directing research toward diseases affecting women, using artificial intelligence to accelerate discoveries, bringing new therapies to patients faster, improving affordability, and encouraging more open conversations about women’s health.
That last point deserves a lot of attention, to be frank. Because studying a disease is one thing, but making sure a woman can actually find a doctor who hears her concerns, recognizes the issue, diagnoses it, and actually offers effective treatment is another.
Women Deserve More Than Another Prescription And A Wave Goodbye
Here’s something ironic. While the Biden administration once announced initiatives to improve women’s health, it also rewrote federal healthcare rules to interpret sex discrimination as including discrimination based on gender identity.
Its 2024 HHS rule under the Affordable Care Act was one example of this, where the administration argued that the change would protect patients from discrimination. But in reality, it blurred legal distinctions between sex and gender identity. This was the same political era where “birthing people,” “pregnant persons,” and “chestfeeding” became fixtures within institutional language. Ew.
There’s something rather absurd about the federal government investing in women’s health research while simultaneously gutting the meaning of sex in federal policy. Sure, the Biden administration launched a women’s health research initiative, but that doesn’t erase the contradiction between those efforts and the administration’s broader gender identity agenda.
Trump’s new EO revokes Biden’s previous women’s health directives and places a renewed emphasis on sex-specific research.
So what will this restructuring accomplish? There’s no specific new research funding commitment attached to the order, and some are concerned about federal research funding and NIH staffing cuts. Creating another office in D.C. won’t automatically produce new treatments or make medical care more affordable, but the initiative does identify a problem that too many women know firsthand. Even if medical knowledge exists, the healthcare system doesn’t always pay enough attention to it.
Take reproductive healthcare as an example. How many women who experience irregular periods, painful cycles, or other symptoms indicating hormonal dysfunction are offered hormonal contraceptives without first, I don’t know, getting something as basic as bloodwork to check estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, LH, FSH, and thyroid levels done? How many women get comprehensive explanations of their condition before they’re sent away with a birth control pill prescription?
Hormonal birth control can be used to treat certain conditions, but managing symptoms is not at all the same thing as identifying an underlying cause. Far from it––masking issues can sometimes make things worse. So for women who want to preserve their fertility, understand their body’s natural rhythms, or investigate persistent hormonal abnormalities, that’s an important distinction.
I’ve experienced firsthand how frustrating it can be to navigate a healthcare system that doesn’t always offer––or even seem to have in the first place––straightforward answers about female reproductive health. Over my near decade of unexplainable issues, there have really only been a handful of medical professionals who seem to actually care enough to ask: “Wait, what’s going on here?” It’s one of the reasons I’ve become so interested in physicians who prioritize individualized care, spend more time communicating with patients, and genuinely want to hunt for the root cause of symptoms.
Women deserve access to medical professionals who take their concerns seriously, not a system that makes them feel like they’re asking too many questions and, tick-tock, your 40 seconds with your doctor is up; they’ve got to move on to the next confused patient. If this initiative can help close the gap between scientific research and the care women actually receive, I’d applaud that as meaningful progress.
The Next Frontier of Women’s Rights Is Better Healthcare
A few years ago, I argued that the next frontier of feminism ought to be women’s medical care. I still believe that.
We’ve spent decades debating what women’s empowerment looks like in politics, the workplace, the gym, you name it. Meanwhile, women are left confused about their own hormones and then struggle to get the right diagnosis to access the right treatment reflecting their unique physiology.
There’s just something so exceedingly frustrating about a culture that celebrates women’s empowerment while leaving so many women feeling powerless in the doctor’s office. Women’s health shouldn’t have ever been a partisan issue, and neither should the scientific reality that male and female bodies have meaningful physiological differences.
But the current debate over sex and gender often has me wondering whether our institutions could consistently acknowledge those differences, even when doing so could threaten your relationships, job, or livelihood in general. The Trump administration’s new initiative will ultimately have to face judgment based on its results, so here’s hoping it sparks better research, earlier diagnoses, more effective treatments, and improved health outcomes for all.
Miss me with a government task force that produces impressive press releases but little tangible progress––it’s time women get medical care that actually understands their bodies. And that starts with recognizing that women’s biology is worth studying on its own terms.
