HHS Memo on Restoring Definition of Sex Enrages Left

The completely unhinged lamentations coming from the Left following a leaked Trump administration memo¹ regarding the federal definition of “sex” for legal purposes exposes just how detached from reality the Left has become.

At issue is an internal memo revealing that President Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is considering rescinding a 2014 Obama administration memo that attempted to redefine sex as “gender identity.” In other words, HHS is considering restoring the definition of sex used by all sane people since the beginning of time from the radical redefinition issued by Barack Obama.

The Obama “memo” was not a law² (it was never passed by Congress), and it was not a regulatory rule (it was never submitted for a public discussion period). It was just a memo from the Obama HHS expanding Title IX definitions regarding discrimination to include “gender identity,” followed by letters issued to schools and colleges warning them that failure to implement the Obama redefinition would put federal funding at risk.

“Gee, that’s a nice school you got there — shame if anything happened to it…”

The practical impact of the Obama memo was that schools were coerced into opening their restrooms, shower facilities, and locker rooms to members of both sexes based on “gender identity” (the sex a person “feels” they identify with) rather than on biological sex. In other words, biological boys were able to share restrooms and showers with biological girls so long as they claimed to identify as a member of that sex.

Girls seeing the male anatomy at a college party: sexual assault. Girls seeing the male anatomy in a third-grade girls restroom: equality. That’s leftist “logic.”

The Trump administration’s leaked memo proposed simply that HHS would define gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable. … Sex means a person’s status as male or female, based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.”

The New York Times, which leaked the memo, wrote an article so hilariously, hyperbolically comical³ that one would assume it is satire. Unfortunately, the paper is serious.

With much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, the NYT mourned, “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 government wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.”

Drastic move? The “new definition” is the same as the old definition before Obama unilaterally changed it with his infamous pen just a few years ago.

The Times headline warned that transgendered people were at risk of being “defined out of existence.” Of course, any rational person understands that a return to the standard definition of sex does not “eradicate federal recognition of” anyone, including transgendered. Don’t believe us? Let a transgendered person stop paying his taxes and see if the IRS suddenly stopped recognizing his existence.

To bolster its case, the Times quotes medical “professionals” and LGBT advocates who don’t even seem to grasp the contradictory nature of their own claims. The Times article said the change would “eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into,” seemingly oblivious of the fact that their own words acknowledge a child is born as one gender or another, and a “transition” to the opposite gender requires surgical mutilation.

Another expert cited by the Times, Dr. Joshua D. Safer, executive director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery⁴, stated, “As far as we in the mainstream biological-medical community understand it in 2018, it is hard-wired, it is biological, it is not entirely hormonal, and we do not have identified genes, so we cannot specifically say it is genetic.”

You know, other than the XX and XY chromosomes and the clearly different genitalia.

Undergirding the claims of non-biologically determined gender identity is transgenderism (medically known as “gender dysphoria⁵,” a psychological disorder) itself, and repeated references to those born as intersex (born with both male and female characteristics). However, even with intersex births, those children almost always manifest as one sex or the other.

According to the Intersex Society of North America, the frequency of births where the child presents “so noticeably atypical in terms of genitalia that a specialist in sex differentiation is called in,” that number is 1 in 1,500 or less.

In other words, the Obama administration used the 0.6% of Americans who identify as transgender and the 0.067% born demonstrably intersex to completely upend society’s ordering of much of our lives under gender differences. That is evidence the decision was driven not by science or compassion but by radical ideology.

That we are born male and female is a truth so obvious and immutable⁶ as to be shocking to see otherwise intelligent human beings debating. And rejecting that truth only sows confusion and sorrow, as evidenced by the 40% of transgenders who attempt suicide — even after surgery — and the growing number of post-surgery transgenders now seeking to reverse their surgeries⁷.

Regardless of confusion over sexual identity, all human beings have dignity as creations of God, and all are deserving of kindness, compassion, and respect. God created male and female, in His image, and the more we stray from that truth, the more we dehumanize.

Accommodating and indulging obvious falsehoods⁸, whether under the guise of compassion or political correctness, is no justification for subverting and destroying truth for ideological ends.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/59059-hhs-memo-on-restoring-definition-of-sex-enrages-left