Now that the Republicans have passed a bill to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, they’ve got to start the hard work of putting together an Unaffordable Care Act, better known as Trumpcare – and they’ve found just the right men for the job. “Men” being the operative word: 13 men and zero women were initially chosen for the Senate healthcare group.

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This caused enough outrage that the White House has now apparently told a couple of female senators that they can drop in on a meeting from time to time. “You’ll see those optics addressed,” a White Official told CNN. Because, yes, it was optics that was the problem.

It’s odd that the White House should be worrying about optics now. An all-male working group is hardly an aberration for the Trump administration, which has made it clear that they believe women’s bodies should be in male hands.

There’s this picture from January, for example, of six smug white men gathered around Trump as he signed an order to reinstate the so-called global gag rule to withhold federal funds from organizations that even discuss abortion with patients. Not a woman in sight. And in March, Mike Pence tweeted a photo from a meeting between Trump’s team and the House Freedom Caucus to discuss defunding maternity care. The photo showed 26 white guys and no women.

As Jill Filipovic has argued, the “all-male photo op” doesn’t seem to be a gaffe but rather a strategy for the Trump administration. A picture says a thousand words, after all, and these sorts of photos clearly articulate that Trump isn’t going to pander to the malignant political correctness ruining America. They speak directly to Trump’s base.

The right has also repeatedly excused its lack of gender and racial diversity by saying that these things aren’t really important – it’s diversity of opinions that’s the real issue! As a Republican aide told CNN when asked about the all-male group on Tuesday: “We have no interest in playing the games of identity politics, that’s not what this is about; it’s about getting a job done.”

Further, he added: “To reduce this to gender, race or geography misses the more important point of the diverse segments … the group represents on policy.” You know, some of the members in the working group probably believe the world is flat while a few believe it’s round. Diversity of opinions is important!

The spread of the sophistical argument that a “diversity of opinions” is the same as “diversity” is worrying. We should absolutely have a diversity of opinions, that’s what the first amendment is for, but we should not give all these opinions equal weight and pretend they are equally as valid. Today “diversity of opinions” has now become a thinly veiled camouflage for bigotry and a way to bulldoze over criticism of a lack of gender and racial diversity.

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What’s more, we’re seeing the diversity of opinions doctrine so beloved by the Trump administration spread outside the White House into the supposedly liberal media. Last month, for example, the New York Times ran a controversial column arguing that climate change might not be real. The justification for running this article was that, while science is important, so is a diversity of opinions!

This week the Times ran an anti-abortion op-ed by Lori Szala: The Problem With Linking Abortion and Economics. Szala works for Human Coalition, an organization whose website states it is trying “to remove the stain of abortion from America”. While pro-choice arguments should certainly be given a platform, Szala’s op-ed was arguably more like propaganda from an extremist group.

She compares a woman who wants an abortion to “an animal, caught in a trap, [who] wants to gnaw off its own leg” and bases her argument on a personal anecdote. No doubt in next week’s edition of the Times the KKK will pen an op-ed about reverse racism.

Giving a platform to harmful ideas because we’re worried about a “diversity of opinions” gives Trump ammunition to put these harmful ideas into practice. And Trump really doesn’t need any more help doing this – in just over 100 days he has managed to seriously undermine laws protecting women.

Trump’s first budget proposal, for example, cut more than $400m from health profession and nurse training programs, jobs that are disproportionately held by women. It also slashed $200m from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which aims to influence lifetime nutrition in high-risk populations.

And while Ivanka Trump is flogging her book, Women Who Work, her father is doing his best to take away as many rights from working women as possible. In February, Trump delayed implementation of the Obama administration’s overtime rule (a first step to killing it) which would have increased the overtime salary threshold. More than 3.2 million women would have benefitted from this change – and single mothers and women of colour would have benefitted most.

Then, in March, Trump signed an executive order to revoke the 2014 Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order. This ended the requirement that companies with federal contracts adhere to various civil rights laws, including equal pay for women and fair processes for workplace sexual harassment allegations.

Still, I guess we can all breathe easy about women’s healthcare now that the White House has decided to “address the optics” of the Trumpcare working group. If we’re really lucky maybe they’ll even get Ivanka Trump involved. We all know how passionate she is about helping women.