Trump administration may end legal recognition of transgender Americans, NYT reports
William Cummings, USA TODAY
Published 2:01 p.m. MT Oct. 21, 2018 | Updated 2:31 p.m. MT Oct. 21, 2018
https://www.coloradoan.com/story/new...on/1721621002/
The Trump administration may move to rigidly define gender as a fixed status determined biologically by the genitalia a person is born with, reversing Obama-era policies that granted federal recognition to transgender individuals, according to a
Sunday report from The New York Times.
The paper said it obtained a memo detailing how the
Department of Health and Human Services plans to
create a legal definition of gender. The definition would be
implemented under the Title IX law, which bans discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs, the Times reported.
The HHS memo said that
gender should be defined "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable," the Times said. A person's gender would be
strictly male or female and it would be
unchanging.
"Sex means a person's status as male or female
based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth," the memo said, according to the Times. "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."
According to a 2016 study from the
Williams Institute, a UCLA Law-based think tank focused on sexual orientation research, about 1.4 million American adults identify as transgender.
Former President Barack Obama's administration argued that the 1972 Title IX law bars discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation. When the Department of Education issued a guidance in 2016 requiring schools to allow transgender students to use the restroom or locker room of their chosen gender, it invoked Title IX. That meant schools that did not comply could risk losing federal funds.
That guidance infuriated conservatives, who decried the move as a clear case of federal overreach.
The directive was rescinded one month after President Donald Trump took office in 2017.
Trump's HHS department has argued that the term "sex" was never legally meant to include homosexuality and gender identity, the
Times reported.
Roger Severino, the current director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS, wrote several articles critical of Obama's efforts to extend civil rights protections to transgender Americans. In 2016, Severino called the Education Department's guidance on school bathrooms the
"culmination of a series of unilateral, and frequently lawless, administration attempts to impose a new definition of what it means to be a man or a woman on the entire nation."....