Defining Transgender
Last Sunday, every transgender person in America woke up to the news that the current officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (under the Trump Administration) are rewriting existing definitions of gender to exclusively define it as either male or female, defined at birth by genitalia and never able to change over the course of a person’s life. This means that they are defining transgender and intersex out of existence federally. The department is trying to make it uniform across the entire federal government by having other departments take up the same definition.
Because it is controlled by the officials at HHS, there is no vote on this measure. There is no way to stop it from happening, only to rectify it after it’s been put in place. Our biggest hope is that after the midterms, elected officials introduce legislation that will protect transgender and intersex people. In the meantime, state governments should start making legislation that protects gender identity and expression, and trans and intersex people.
By now anyone who isn’t directly affected by this news has stopped talking about it. But there are new parts of this story coming up daily that impact how the story will continue to affect the LGBTQ community.
One part of this is that there are three cases in federal courts that ruled that current anti-discrimination laws protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. The Supreme Court will decide in the coming months if they will hear these cases and make a stance (knowing that if they do decide to hear them, it will almost definitely go conservatively based on the current makeup of the court). By federally getting rid of the definition of transgender, the administration also gets rid of any reason to uphold these protections of anti-discrimination.
It seems like the Department of Justice has taken up the new definition of sex and gender. Yesterday they announced to the Supreme Court that it was legal to discriminate against transgender people. This follows the definition change as an additional way to hurt the LGBTQ community and set back LGBTQ rights.
The impact of these decisions is the increased violence transgender people face. At least 22 trans people have been killed so far this year, and every time the government strips protections for trans people the threat of violence increases.