As the anti-Trump resistance movement finds its feet after a dizzying first 11 days, it’s hard not to notice how well women are playing offence. I can think of no more perfect distillation of Trump’s presidency than German chancellor Angela Merkel explaining the Geneva convention to him over the phone after he attempted to alpha-male his way past it. Of course, the world’s most extravagantly unqualified man – who was only able to defeat his peerlessly qualified female opponent through a combination of voter suppression, weaponised misogyny, Russian propaganda and a constitutional technicality, and still managed to lose by 3m votes – had to receive on-the-job training, pro bono, from a female world leader.

A statement from Merkel’s spokesman explained, with bone-dry reserve: “The … refugee convention requires the international community to take in war refugees on humanitarian grounds. All signatory states are obligated to do [so]. The German government explained this policy in their call yesterday.” It’s a markedly female kind of jab – as many of my gender have learned by now, it’s sometimes more effective (and safer) to disguise your contempt as a helping hand.

Speaking of helping hands, Theresa May gifted us the only reason to laugh this week (aside from the Clickhole headline “A new intimidation tactic: Sean Spicer is wearing a suit three sizes too small and drinking water from a thimble to make the press think he is growing”). A photograph of Trump clutching May’s hand while descending a small ramp during the pair’s meeting this week inspired the unproven but compelling suggestion that the US president might be afraid to walk down slopes and stairs, like a cow. According to a “senior government source” who spoke to the Daily Mail, Trump “hates heights where you can see the ground or sharp inclines”. May’s office wrote off the handholding as a “chivalrous gesture”, but remained suspiciously silent on whether or not Trump’s knees bend the wrong way.

But rumours, humiliation and stairs are the least of Trump’s woman problems right now. Federal judge Ann Donnelly, United States district court judge Allison Burroughs and US magistrate judge Gail Dein all signed orders to temporarily block Trump’s unconstitutional anti-Muslim travel ban. Sally Yates, as acting attorney general, refused to defend Trump’s ban in court and was subsequently fired for “betrayal”, establishing her as a national hero and Trump as openly hostile to the constitution. Sharp-eyed wonks quickly circulated a video from Yates’s 2015 confirmation hearing in which none other than Senator Jeff Sessions – Trump’s attorney general pick – lectured her on the importance of saying “no” to the president if he attempts to execute something “improper” or “unlawful”.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was the only member of the senate to fight all but one of Trump’s cabinet nominees (Nikki Haley), sparking some frisson about a potential 2020 presidential run. Representative Maxine Waters, who began calling for Trump’s impeachment before he was even inaugurated, said this week: “The people are not going to take this new president who thinks he’s a dictator.” At a rally in Boston, Senator Elizabeth Warren declared: “Little girls who flee murderers are not a threat to the US.” Republican senator Susan Collins said that “religious tests … run contrary to our American values”. This list is not even close to exhaustive.

Behind it all loomed the spectre of the global, record-smashing Women’s March, which clearly still torments Trump – partly because his inauguration was a wake by comparison, and partly because the march’s energy and momentum don’t appear to have waned in the slightest. The airport protests that sprang up this weekend were spontaneous, potent and, in their way, joyous – people, even those new to protesting, were ready to move at a moment’s notice to protect their neighbours from tyranny.

Of course, there’s been blistering dissent from men too, and robust leadership is blooming in every marginalised group that the president has announced plans to brutalise. But there’s something poetically satisfying about the first judicial and legislative blows to Trump’s regime coming from a group whose power he so plainly underestimates. The president’s disdain for women feels faintly more personal than some of his more perfunctory bigotries (though no more destructive): he has clearly spent his entire life treating us as furniture, sex holes, trophies or trash. He doesn’t just want to restrict our constitutional rights; he wants to put his hand on our genitals and squeeze. He didn’t realise we had the power to squeeze back, and that oversight will hurt him.

Hope is thin on the ground for those of us who care not to trade democracy for white-supremacist kleptocracy, but three ideas have been keeping me upright: we are all still here, there are more of us and we are not going back. The Trumpists will attempt to drag us backwards legislatively, but socially it’s not so easy. You cannot force millions of gay and trans people back in the closet.

You cannot make women forget what it feels like to have careers, to thrive and excel, to earn money and choose our own futures. You cannot turn us back into incubators once we have almost been the president. That doesn’t mean we can’t lose – but it does mean we won’t quit.