Transgenders in Turmoil as Trump Admin Moves for Huge Change to Definition of the Sexes
The best policies are based on reality, common sense and evidence — a notion that even liberals used to agree with.
Take the global warming debate, for instance. One of the main arguments of the left has been that there’s scientific evidence pointing to man-made climate change, and we would be “science deniers” if we ignored it.
It turns out that the global warming proof is more flimsy than they claimed, but at least they wanted leaders to make decisions based on evidence and science, imperfect as it is.
Now, it seems liberals have even thrown science out the window. Rejecting both evidence and common sense in favor of politically motivated pseudoscience, the left has been working overtime to push a different agenda.
No, not in favor of global warming, but rather transgenderism.
This push was especially strong during the last presidency. Even Newsweek recently admitted that President Barack Obama and his administration “worked to loosen the definition of gender,” and adopted an anything-goes approach that encouraged people to self-identify as whatever sex they wanted.
“A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth,” explained The New York Times.
The result? Gender debates became almost comical, with impossible-to-remember abbreviations like “LGBTTTIQ+” and nonsensical gender options such as “pansexual genderfluid nonbinary” being pushed as the new normal.
But the Trump administration may be pushing back.
According to a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services that was obtained by The Times, the administration is seriously considering defining gender in a much more traditional — and common sense — way.
“The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth,” the newspaper reported.
In simple terms, HHS is saying something that conservatives have long insisted: “Transgender” isn’t a definable gender, and you can’t magically switch your sex between male and female, no matter how many pills you take or invasive surgeries you undergo.
One of the big problems with the Obama-era guidelines was that definitions were left vague.
“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 Times noted.
Biology? Objective? Grounded in science? Gasp — how dare they!
“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the HHS memo states, according to The New York Times, which has not made the full memo public.
“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,” the cited memo reportedly says.
In other words, you can’t just change your birth certificate to say whatever you want, or constantly invent new sexual identity terms. Call it common sense.
“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,” wrote The Times.
Unsurprisingly, mainstream media outlets rushed to paint the memo — which is still an unapproved proposal — as ominous and terrible for the estimated 0.6 percent of Americans who identify as “transgender.”
“‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration,” the scary-sounding title of The Times piece declared. Left out of that headline was the fact that the people themselves are fine; it’s the definition that is being looked it.
“Trump mulls narrowing transgender rights,” declared another purposely frightening headline from The Washington Examiner.
Fake news alert: The rest of that article failed to back up the scare-tactic headline. How does clearing up the definition of gender take away transgender rights?
The reality is that it doesn’t.
Even if the memo’s suggestions became policy tomorrow, actual people still have the same rights they’ve always had.
Men have rights; so do women. A person with one of these two genders has the same rights. We call this “equality.”
Further, the ability of a person to personally identify or act a certain way doesn’t disappear. If you go around referring to yourself as “transgender” or “Queen Amidala” or a “trans-species Velociraptor” that’s your own business. You still have rights. Just don’t expect official records — or medical experts — to back you up.
A 20-year-old can go around telling people that he’s 1,000 years old; he just can’t modify his legal birth certificate to say this or use it to go apply for senior citizen benefits. Regardless, he still has the same rights any other 20-year-old has.
The reality is that we don’t need ever-increasing special check boxes to define people if we actually apply legal rights evenhandedly. Your rights as an American citizen and a human being don’t suddenly disappear just because of a memo.
Liberals may be obsessed with special rights, but here’s an idea: Let’s try equal rights instead.
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