Trump administration’s use of biological definition of gender leaves some upset
LGBT leaders across the U.S. reacted with fury Monday to a report that the Trump administration is considering adoption of a new definition of gender that would effectively deny federal recognition and civil rights protections to transgender Americans. “I feel very threatened, but I am absolutely resolute,” Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Rights, said at a news conference convened by more than a dozen activist leaders. “We will stand up and be resilient, and we will be here long after this administration is in the trash heap.” The activist leaders, speaking amid posters reading “#Won’tBeErased“, later addressed a protest rally outside the White House. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services was circulating a memo proposing that gender be defined as an immutable biological condition determined by a person’s sex organs at birth. The proposal would define sex as either male or female, and any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified through genetic testing, according to the Times’ account of the memo. President Donald Trump addressed the matter briefly as he left the White House for a political trip to Houston, but left unclear how his administration plans to proceed. “We have a lot of different concepts right now,” Trump said. “They have a lot of different things happening with respect to transgender right now — you know that as well as I do — and we’re looking at it very seriously.” Trump added: “I’m protecting everybody.” The Cabinet agency had acknowledged months ago that it was working to rewrite a federal rule that bars discrimination in health care based on “gender identity.” It cited a Texas-based federal judge’s opinion that the original rule went too far in concluding that discrimination based on gender identity is a form of sex discrimination, which is forbidden by civil rights laws. The department said Monday it would not comment on “alleged leaked documents.” It did release a statement from Roger Severino, head of its Office for Civil Rights, saying his agency was reviewing the issue while abiding by the 2016 ruling from the Texas-based federal judge, Reed O’Connor. LGBT activists, who pledged legal challenges if the reported memo leads to official policy, said several other courts had issued rulings contrary to O’Connor’s. “For years, courts across the country have recognized that discriminating against someone because they are transgender is a form of sex discrimination, full stop,” said Diana Flynn, Lambda Legal’s litigation director. “If this administration wants to try and turn back the clock by moving ahead with its own legally frivolous and scientifically unsupportable definition of sex, we will be there to meet that challenge.” Shannon Minter, a transgender attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, called the reported plan a “cynical political ploy to sow discord and energize a right-wing base” before the Nov. 6 election. UCLA legal scholar Jocelyn Samuels, who ran the HHS civil rights office in the Obama administration, said the Trump administration would be going beyond established law if it adopted the policy in the memo. “What they are saying is you do not get to decide your sex; it is the government that will decide your sex,” said Samuels. For LGBT-rights leaders, it’s the administration’s latest attack on transgender Americans. Among the others are an attempt to ban them from military service; a memo from Attorney General Jeff Sessions concluding that civil rights laws don’t protect transgender people from discrimination on the job; and the scrapping of Obama-era guidance encouraging school officials to let transgender students use school bathrooms that matched their gender identities. Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, said the proposed rule change appears to still be undergoing White House review. It would need to be signed off by the departments of Justice, Labor and Education, which are also involved with civil rights enforcement. He said “the purpose of this rule is to erase transgender people from existence, to write them off from federal law, and to institute a definition that is contrary to case law, contrary to medical and scientific understanding, and contrary to the lived experience of transgender people.” While social mores enter into the debate, medical and scientific experts have long recognized a condition called “gender dysphoria” — discomfort or distress caused by a discrepancy between the gender that a person identifies as and the gender at birth. Consequences can include severe depression. Treatment can range from sex-reassignment surgery and hormones to people changing their outward appearance by adopting a different hairstyle or clothing. According to an estimate by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, there are about 1.4 million transgender adults in the United States. Republished with permission from the Associated Press.
Will Lochamy: This bathroom nonsense is nonsense. Stop It.
I like being comfortable. You like being comfortable. All God’s children like being comfortable. Lately, we’re concentrating a lot on that first sentence. Over a million people have signed an American Family Association boycott pledge against Target’s bathroom policy. It’s pretty much everyone’s bathroom policy and always has been, but Target happened to come right out and say it. They decided to clarify that people can and should use the bathroom that coincides with the gender they identify with. Clarity is causing all of this hysteria, yet actual clarity on this issue continues to elude so many. Let me clarify… Gender Dysphoria is a real thing. It’s not a punchline, so stop joking around. This is the formal diagnosis for people (Homo Sapiens just like you) that experience significant distress with the gender they were assigned at birth. Only 0.3% of Americans suffer from this, so it’s understandable that you probably haven’t personally dealt with such a person. I have. My God-fearing parents, to whom I owe (almost) everything, allowed me to leave a struggling collegiate effort and tour the country in a band with a famous homosexual female. Can you believe that? I wouldn’t have either, except I only knew my parents as loving, understanding, accepting people. On the road I earned a full education and then some. Not only did I see 48 of our 50 beautiful states… I met people. Oh, the people I met. Straight people, gay people, young people, old people, and a few transgender people. Two in particular stood out (again, we’re only talking about 0.3% of the total population). Their stories were different (one transitioned from boy to girl, and the other was in the process of girl to boy), but both intrigued me. I asked questions ad nauseam. They answered and I began to understand. This was a real thing and these people weren’t deciding on this path. It was clearly a sad, problematic, and burdensome path they had no choice but to hike. These discriminatory laws do the opposite of what you want. In your fear, you’re now demanding that fully transitioned people that have beards, big muscles, tattoos, and male genitalia must go into the restroom with your daughter. At the same time, you want fully transitioned people with high heels, breast, and female genitalia to go into the restroom with your husband. Remember, you’re insisting they have to use the restroom aligned with the gender listed on their birth certificate. More importantly (since male transgender people look like men), you’re giving a FREE PASS for any man to walk into a women’s restroom. After all, that’s where you insist that transgender men should be going. People are making a mountain where there’s not even a molehill to begin with. Why has this been brought up? Was someone spied on or touched by a transgender person in a public bathroom? Not that I can find. When has this bothered you? Honestly, you know this has been going on since the invention of public restrooms, right? Are you inspecting people in the public bathroom and if so, when have you seen a transgender person that you felt like was about to harm your babies? You haven’t. There is a serious child sexual abuse problem, and this idiotic boycott and time wasting laws are abetting it. 90% of children who are sexually abused know their abuser. To my knowledge, I’ve known one pedophile. He was a white, heterosexual choir teacher that befriended me and all of my other prepubescent friends. He wore slacks and a collared shirt as he went into the restroom with all of us. This nonsense legislation wouldn’t have protected my friends from him. He raped them. It’s these situations we need to be vigilant about, not an irrational fear about transgender people (who, in reality, pose no threat–at least not according to the evidence). American Family Association is the least aptly named association I can think of. I’m a father with a beautiful (in my humble opinion) family. I openly talk to my children about loving and accepting people. We discuss people that are different and try to understand them. It’s the same way I was raised. It literally makes my head hurt thinking that the American Family Association decides to focus on judging, condemning, and persecuting people, rather than helping and accepting them. Is this what we want the “American family” to be? This is no family of mine. Stop. Just stop it. Politicians are the worst and this debate is proving that point. Mike Huckabee jokes he should’ve “felt like a woman” and taken showers with girls in high school, while publicly defending admitted child molester Josh Duggar. Gross on all counts. I understand that things that are different and hard to understand can be scary. Heck, I’ll never understand Florida Georgia Line. But guys, we need to focus on things that are important. This is a political, media-driven issue that does zero good and all kinds of harm. There are real predators where you go to church, where your kids go to school, and sometimes in a trusted family member’s home. Start looking there and stop peeking over the stall. ••• Will Lochamy is co-host of the radio show, “Oh Brother Radio” on Birmingham Mountain Radio (107.3FM).
