Judging from the breathless headline in the New York Times, President Trump’s administration is going all out to obliterate transgenderism.
“Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence,” said the Sunday headline.
“The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law,” said the story’s lead.
The piece goes on to say that a series of decisions by the administration of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, “loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs,” which led to “fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept.”
So, in an attempt to clarify the law — and to ease the “fights” — the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking to define sex under Title IX, which is the federal civil rights law that outlaws gender discrimination in education programs.
“The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined ‘on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.’ The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing,” writes the Times.
In its memo, HHS said, “Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth. The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”
HHS is expected to present the proposed guidance to the Justice Department by the end of this year.