My mom is a biologist and complains how physicists always come into biology, try to reinvent everything without looking at any prior work, and then fail to execute their (sometimes interesting, sometimes not) method

I would honestly be very surprised if any Republican politicians actually care about sex or gender. I think they’re just evil and those are convenient issues to divide the working class. When you don’t have popular policy in real issues, you need to make up some fake ones to get people to still support you.