The Trump Administration's War on Trans People Is Pointless and Cruel
In his rhetoric, Donald Trump rarely attacks LGBT people. Because of this stupidly low bar for a Republican presidential candidate, he was quickly labelled "gay-friendly" during his campaign. But long before he won the election, he made it clear through his appointments that he was as anti-LGBT as his running mate, Mike Pence. And his administration is looking for more and more aggressive ways to roll back rights and protections.
On Sunday, the New York Times, in an article unambiguously titled "'Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration," reported on a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services that proposes establishing a legal definition of sex that would deny transgender people protections under Title IX. It's basically a sweeping federal version of the idiotic "bathroom laws". Per the Times:
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 agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.
“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “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 new definition would essentially 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.
Reaction to the policy has been swift. Protesters mobilized in New York with more planned for Monday in Washington, D.C.
The Times has also drawn criticism for its coverage in breaking the story. Chase Strangio of the ACLU, for example, in an article for Out about how to support trans people and organizations, took issue with the characterization of the Obama administration's policy on trans rights:
Today’s New York Times article was written by cis people and quotes almost entirely cis people. It also says that the Obama administration “loosened” the concept of gender, which is false: The Obama administration realized that sex as it was defined under the law actually encompassed and protected trans people. By stating the Obama administration “loosened” the definition of gender, the Times actually plays into the hands of the GOP, who are now clinging to a “biological” definition of legal sex versus the “idea” of gender identity. Legal sex includes trans people, and a trans reporter would’ve caught that.
Back in 2016, even Chris Wallace at Fox News called the mania around keeping transgender people out of bathrooms "a solution looking for a problem," and it's hard to see what problem this new proposed change would solve. No one is safer because of this. It's not a policy designed to protect anyone from anything, simply a vehicle to deny protections to an already demonized group. Trump is always looking for distractions since he's constantly hounded by embarrassing scandals. But it seems much more in line with Atlantic writer Adam Serwer's summary of the Trump administration: "The cruelty is the point." For a swath of Trump supporters, he's appealing precisely because he goes out of his way to "trigger the libs" and cause pain to minorities. It's even the entire basis for Trump's immigration policy.
Identity politics—white, angry, bigoted identity—has paid off handsomely for Republicans for a generation now and it's delivered every one of Trump's major victories since the election. There's no incentive for either him or his party to abandon it now.
