Shortly after taking his presidential oath on January 20 2025 Donald Trump signed an executive order proclaiming that only two genders existed in the USA—female and male.

He then signed another order for the cessation of all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs (DEI) across the US federal government within 60 days. The US Office of Personnel Management acted immediately and took its DEI portal offline.

After I reported this on Facebook, a friend asked what DEI meant. So in my answer that follows, I compared it to Australia’s Equal Opportunity statutes which as a recruiter I’d worked with in my early HR career:

It stands for “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, a policy system adopted to ensure that people who are white or male come last in terms of opportunities for employment and services. An untrained immigrant might rank above a trained American (as often happens). An LGBTQer will rank above a hetero woman. It’s a way of imposing quotas—but not based on merit. Whereas Australia’s “Equal Opportunity” policies used to seek to balance workforces with women capable of merit but missing the opportunity to study or gain the same experience as men due to family responsibilities or even misogyny.

My friend then asked, “But isn’t this a good thing?”

So, let’s look deeper.

When I practised recruitment under Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action in Australia it was illegal to promote anyone’s politics, religious or sexual beliefs.

These statutes aimed at ensuring that blatant job ads for “Girl Fridays” would be gone—that a man named Joe could become a secretary and woman named Josephine could be his manager—all based on the opportunity to flesh out their potential through training and development.

However, DEI in the USA is strongly political and ideological. It is intended to promote Islam over Judaeo-Christianity, transsexuality over traditional gender labels, people of colour over white “men”.

I first came across the term “dead white males” used at universities in the late 1980s. It referred to a radical call to downplay all history written basically since Herodotus (the Ancient Greek Father of History who gave us that word) because the history books we have largely come from white men, long gone.

DEI takes this to an entirely new level. It expands into today’s “anti-colonialism” fetish where universities seek to ban all history mirroring a European view. And to me that’s crazy because you’ll never know who you are until you know where you’ve been. (Don’t get me started on the move to also refer to history as “herstory”.)

Racism and misogyny form a deep, ugly, ongoing, cornerstone of our human story—they permeate Apostolic history to post-Muhammadan Islam, the ravages of the Conquistadors to the Rape of Nanking, Germany’s Nazis to today’s Afghan Taliban, the struggle of women’s suffrage to that of same sex marriage and a woman’s Right to Choose.

Now try to right that wrong at the workplace. That’s what DEI seeks to do.

What we get are qualified white male firefighters denied interviews for firefighting roles in LA at the express instruction of the LA fire chief. [Edit—February 3 2025: A claim promoted by far right sources but denied by the far left in the haze called Californian Democratic politics.] We get a requirement that part of the US armed forces must comprise a quota of transexual troopers. [Edit—February 3 2025: Since publication I have been unable to confirm the official existence of transgender quotas in the US Army but anti-colonialist discrimination has featured favouring “oppressed candidates” over “advantaged oppressors” in the USAF. Further the Biden era, “Army Directive 2021-22 Army Service by Transgender Persons and Persons With Gender Dysphoria”, makes no mention of quotas at all.] We require that jobseekers swear allegiance to an “anti-Zionist” world view. We give permission for transvestite men to identify as “women” and use women’s toilets and prisons.

In fact, that’s where the groundswell for DEI began—with the push to allow men to use women’s toilets. That call quickly merged with Black Lives Matter, a movement that no longer represents its pre-Biden era roots.

Now, don’t get me wrong.

One of my favourite historians Dr. Lynette Nusbacher started her life as Mr. Ariyeh Nusbacher. You’ll see her on History Channel documentaries in both genders as her career panned out.

Working at the prestigious Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the UK, her transition was thoroughly supported to the extent that the academy’s commandant ordered all personnel to treat her with the utmost respect.

The difference between DEI and Lynette though, is that she knows her stuff. She’s no LGBTQ+ poser. Indeed, the same can be said of other trans people in roles today. But DEI is being misused for political gain.

One solution to ensure a merit-based world, may be the approach that Argentina’s new president Javier Milei is about to take with his public service: An IQ test for all current government employees. Those who fail are out. Those who pass will earn a job for the future. A theoretical meritocracy, returns.

That said, my ideal employment world is found in the movie Starship Troopers. Men and women in uniform fighting side-by-side, leading each other, each nail-tough as the other, competitive as hell, yet still capable of mushy romance after hours.

Not a bad movie really. In Trump 2.0 the world is changing.

© 2025 Adam Parker.

UPDATE January 24 2025—Responding to the Claim that DEI Dates Back to the 1960s and is Therefore Essential

Following my original Facebook post reflected in this essay another friend today, a proud Democrat, replied that I didn’t understand DEI because I was obviously parroting “right wing” propaganda. For the record, I’m an unaligned voter though centrist either side, and my opinions are always original.

However, this person claimed that DEI sought to reverse the overrepresentation in American employment of “cis-gendered Christian men”. This person also claimed that DEI began in the 1960s.

Now if Christian refers to “white”, it is indeed true that white men continue to dominate employment and the best pay in most categories. But this debate deserves more nuance.

So, here is my reply to it all—because it is essential that the world keeps talking about what is needed, as I explain below.

“Cisgender” is not something that enters our everyday vernacular, nor should it. In fact I’d wager that most people would have to look it up to see what it means. The fact that you brought it up in the DEI context actually waves a red flag: that DEI comes under a specific political influence—transgenderism.

(“Cisgender” means being happy with the gender showing on your birth certificate.)

Further, DEI is not a 1960’s invention—as nearly all institutions including the discredited Wikipedia trying to cover their backsides, are trying to tell us saying the phrase “DEI takes its roots in the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement”.

No it doesn’t. The term was invented in 2020.

America isn’t the only country with employment and services discrimination and misogyny.

Numerous other countries have built and run anti-discrimination, equal opportunity and affirmative action programs. We have a UN charter of Human Rights and numerous international agreements binding the West by doctrine.

And therein lies the problem for the US.

By the dawn of the 21st Century we’d liberated homosexuality; women were climbing the corporate ladder. “Sex in the City” and “Modern Family” ruled our TVs. The latter championed two married gay men parenting an adopted Asian baby. Crowds thronged to the Freddie Mercury big screen epic. That of Elton John too. We celebrated and laughed at each other with joy. Gay or straight? We didn’t care.

Then with the growth of Islamist extremism in 2001 we were reminded that the evils of misogyny and homophobia had not gone away everywhere. The Fox News sexual assault scandal revealed an evil in the corporate world despite a tsunami of women in executive suites.

Decades of equal opportunity came under attack. And domestic violence remained a scourge. So, then came the twin turning points affecting us today:

  1. A push by left governments for illegal immigrant rights.
  2. And suddenly—with no warning—a debate over the rights of men to pee in women’s bathrooms.

And from the left DEI was born.

That woke the Church. So from the right abortion was banned.

And by 2024 women in America have gone backwards further in rights because now their own washrooms and prisons are in danger.

That’s what DEI has achieved. An assault on women.

DEI’s is now dead because it failed at the most basic level: It fuelled discrimination by fighting discrimination.

It forgot that its ultimate goal should have been to define all people as humans—not a fruit salad of genders.

What we need instead, are programs to stop a crisis in mental health fuelled by the far left’s response to the first Trump presidency.

This is a crisis of narcissism, bullying, conspiracy thinking, unprecedented mass anxiety and hysteria.

It is a fear of not belonging to the group, of breaking from the herd, and an absolute aversion to the concept of a divine power.

Most of all this mental health crisis is an irrational belief that the world cares about you—or the world must be changed for you. Because it does not.

America needs to grow up. For now left wing governments in Australia, Canada, Ireland and UK are toying with the crumbs of DEI. It explains the narcissistic mobs in the streets. So, voters are about to toss them out as well.

© 2025 Adam Parker.