Who we are and what we convey to the outside world is largely dependent on our identity. Our qualities, beliefs, physical, and sometimes metaphysical traits represent how we identify ourselves and how others recognize us. Identities are beautiful. They are fluid and personal. When others fail to recognize what we know to be true, we look to our identities for reassurance. A person’s gender identity is one’s personal sense of their own gender.
The keyword phrase here is “one’s personal sense of their own…”
The gender to which we associate ourselves defines which restroom we use, which dorm we stay in during college, what locker room we change in for sports, unfortunately, correlates to how we are viewed in society.
In the era of the Obama administration, legal policies were less strict for gender definitions as they related to enrollment in federally-sponsored programs, including education and health care, and gender was considered to be a choice left to the individual.
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services was circulating a memo suggesting that gender is defined as a biological condition determined by an individual’s reproductive organs at the time of birth. The purpose of the alleged memo is to establish a legal definition of one’s sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in all publicly-funded/state-supported programming.
In the memo, the department argued that government agencies needed to adopt and adhere to an “explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable,” according to The New York Times. The proposed definition, if passed as a law, would define sex as a binary of either male or female, solely dependent on the genitalia the individual was born with.
“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth…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.”
–US Department of Health and Human Services Memo
The Times reports that adoption of the new definition would remove federal recognition and protections from roughly 1.4 million Americans who identify — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than that which was assigned to them at birth.
In response to this memo, some of the nation’s more prominent LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer) rights groups are immensely distraught. The Human Rights Campaign, one of these groups, is calling on the Trump administration not to go forward with this legislation.
“Setting a destructive precedent, the Trump-Pence administration intends to erase LGBTQ people from federal civil rights protections and eviscerate enforcement of non-discrimination laws.”
–Chad Griffin President Human Rights Campaign
The legislative move, if made and put into effect with other federal entities, would mark a paradigm shift for transgender rights under the law in the United States. Some activists argue that the proposal should be reviewed due to a common understanding among transgender rights groups that differences exist between ‘sex’ and ‘gender.’ Whereas an individual’s sex is pegged to the sex organs they are born with, a person’s gender identity is as fluid as any other trait that a person claims as part of who they are.
President Donald Trump responded to national concerns based on the Dept. of Health’s polarizing memo but was unclear as to how his administration will proceed.
“We have a lot of different concepts right now. 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…I’m protecting everybody.”
–President Donald Trump
As a person’s gender identity potentially becomes a decision left for the federal government, a medical condition called “gender dysphoria” comes to mind. This condition, well-recognized by medical experts in the field is caused by “discomfort or distress felt by a discrepancy between the gender that a person identifies as and the gender at birth.” Medical professionals say those suffering from the condition may feel severely depressed.
Any form of legislation that causes 1.4 million people, American or not, to suffer from depression because of fear of acceptance is disconcerting.
