NYT Report: Trump Administration Looks to Officially Define Gender by Birth Certificates
PoliticsAging rich white men in public office continue dreaming up new cruel, but not unusual, devices to further ensure oppressed people are barred from income, physical safety, human dignity and autonomy over their own bodies. This time, the New York Times has obtained a memo indicating that the Trump administration will once and for all decide whether to recognize that transgender people–at least 1.4 million adults in the U.S.–exist. According to the Times, the memo distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services has ordered government agencies to revert to a binary version of gender based “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” That’s going to be pretty fucking tricky since they’ve already banned the CDC from using the words “transgender” and “science-based” in their upcoming budget documents.
The Times reports that the Department of Health and Human Services will present their official definition of gender identity to the Department of Justice at the end of the year, which will then choose whether or not to adopt it, and if it does (read: if Jeff Sessions lives and breathes through December), then they double down on the agenda to definitively cut trans people from protections against discrimination under “sex” as provided by Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Last year Sessions specifically wrote a memo declaring that “‘Sex’ is ordinarily defined to mean biologically male or female,” making it pretty clear that he’s already made up his phobia-ridden genitalia-obsessed mind.