On Sunday, The New York Times published a heinously misleading breathless report that President Donald Trump is on the verge of defining “transgender” out of existence. This fake news inspired a flurry of protests with Democrats and transgender people declaring they “#WontBeErased.” Trump’s proposed rules would not “erase” transgender people, but they would have a positive impact on American culture, science, and law.
Nevertheless, Democrats and activists jumped on the #WontBeErased bandwagon based on The New York Times‘s fake news.
“The Trump administration’s effort to erase the identity of transgender Americans is a direct assault on their human rights,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) tweeted. “To my transgender friends: know that I see you, I’m with you, and I will fight for you. #WontBeErased”
The Trump administration’s effort to erase the identity of transgender Americans is a direct assault on their human rights. To my transgender friends: know that I see you, I’m with you, and I will fight for you. #WontBeErased
https://t.co/0JmEUgqeEs— Kamala Harris (@SenKamalaHarris) October 22, 2018
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) chimed in, tweeting, “[Donald Trump] is trying to roll back major civil rights protections for transgender people. As hard as he tries to stir up hate and divide us, we’ll fight back 10 times harder. 1.4 million transgender Americans #WontBeErased.”
.@realDonaldTrump is trying to roll back major civil rights protections for transgender people. As hard as he tries to stir up hate and divide us, we’ll fight back 10 times harder. 1.4 million transgender Americans #WontBeErased. https://t.co/bNr0JUFiV2
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 22, 2018
The Democrats’ official Twitter page joined in, as did celebrities like Emma Watson. Liberal organizations like Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, and others also joined the charge. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a Left-wing smear factory, used this event as an excuse to spread its “hate group” smear against Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal nonprofit that has won 9 Supreme Court cases in 7 years.
Trump responded to these attacks by insisting that his new rules would involve “protecting everybody.”
Contrary to the Democrats and the SPLC, Trump’s move is healthy and should be welcomed for four key reasons.
1. The rule of law.
The New York Times presented Trump as a radical, reversing “protections” established by Obama. In reality, Obama was the radical, redefining “sex” to mean “gender identity” in federal civil rights law.
“No one is ‘defining transgenders out of existence.’ What President Trump is doing is following the law — which, after eight years of Barack Obama’s overreach, is suddenly a shocking concept,” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (FRC), told PJ Media.
“Under the last administration, liberals were so used to the president twisting the rules to suit the Left’s agenda that it’s news when Donald Trump decides to operate within the plain text of the law,” Perkins explained. “As far as The New York Times is concerned, the most ‘drastic’ thing any president could do is bring America back in line with legal statues.”
Indeed, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they did not establish civil rights protections for Americans on the basis of gender identity — they protected people on the basis of biological sex.
As Perkins noted, The New York Times reporters argued that “the Trump administration is disenfranchising people” by defining sex as a “biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth.” The Times confused the issue by equating the terms “sex” and “gender.” In federal law, the word is “sex,” and Trump is defining it in the same way “the law has always been understood both before and since 1964.”
“As FRC and others argued, sexual orientation wasn’t on the minds of legislators 54 years ago when it was trying to weed out prejudice — and more importantly, it wasn’t in the text of the law it passed!” Perkins argued. He also cited Judge Reed O’Connor’s 2016 ruling that “Congress did not understand ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity.'”
The Trump administration has been rolling back Obama’s “lawless gender policies,” Perkins noted, “first in schools, then in homeless shelters, prisons, and now in Health and Human Services contracts. Now, almost two years later, The New York Times still thinks it’s breaking news that this administration is systematically returning America to the status quo.”
“The Times‘s agenda is obvious — painting Trump as the extremist, when the real radicalism was ignoring the law in the first place,” Perkins declared.
When Obama changed the meaning of “sex” after the fact, he rewrote the law Congress passed in 1964. Trump’s reversal of this change reaffirms the rule of law, the idea that the American people should only be ruled by the laws duly passed by their representatives. Presidents cannot unilaterally alter the meaning of a law passed by Congress.
If Americans want to legislate protections for transgender people, they should pass new laws to do so, not alter laws after the fact.
2. Defending science.
When Obama rewrote civil rights law, he did not just override the rule of law. He did so pushing the idea that men and women can change their gender, and ultimately their biological sex. Men who identify as women may change their names, increase their estrogen, and even remove their sex organs, but their DNA still carries an X and a Y chromosome.
“It is high time that governmental agencies at the national and local levels return to valid science which reveals that there are two biologic sexes, and only two: male and female,” Quentin Van Meter, president of the American College of Pediatricians, told PJ Media. “Gender identity is a social construct, not a biologic one, and gender-specific rights have no place in regulation or law.”
Michelle Cretella, a pediatrician with the college, explained the science on the issue.
“Let’s be perfectly clear, ‘transgender people’ exist only in the sense that ‘anorexic people’ exist,” Cretella argued. “People who self-identify as trans are people with a condition or a belief; they are not a separate category of human being. Every transgender-identified person is, in fact, either a biological male or a biological female. In this sense, they cannot be ‘written out of existence.'”
“My hope is that the HHS proposal will explicitly state that gender and gender identity do not fall under the definition of ‘sex,’ but rather, that sex pertains solely to the biologically-determined innate and immutable trait that it is,” Cretella added. “There are at least 6500 genetic differences, and numerous well-established medical differences, between men and women.”
Kristen Waggoner, senior Vice President of advocacy and communications at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), argued that “the Trump administration would be correct to issue a proposed rule that is consistent with federal law and the scientific facts of human biology.”
“You can’t fight for the rights of women and girls if you can’t define that category directly,” Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) lawyer and spokeswoman Kara Dansky told PJ Media. “Women have been oppressed and discriminated against for thousands of years on the basis of our biology,” not their gender identity, Dansky added. “Everybody knew what a woman was when they wouldn’t let us vote.”
“I simply am not able to understand how it has come to be that we do not ‘know the difference between SEX (which is biological) and GENDER which is an artificial construct of a society which deals with the behaviors of that society — based on the SEX of the members of that society,” Miriam Ben-Shalom, the first open lesbian to be reinstated to the U.S. Army after being dismissed for her sexuality, told PJ Media.
It is important for American law to echo the basic facts of science, that human beings are either male or female, rather than conforming to transgender ideology which teaches that men can become women and women can become men, regardless of their DNA.
3. Protecting women and girls.
The pediatricians insisted that American law should follow science because women and girls need protection, just as they did in 1964.
“Physical differences place females at a disadvantage in sports and also in potential assault settings,” Cretella told PJ Media. “Therefore, it is critical for the protection of girls and women that Title IX and Title VII retain a scientifically accurate definition of sex that explicitly excludes the sociopolitical terms gender and gender identity.”
In direct opposition to The New York Times narrative, Cretella argued that women, not transgender people, are “erased” due to transgender ideology.
“Women are written out of existence when self-declared gender identity replaces sex in law,” the pediatrician declared. “For example, in Georgia, a 5-year-old girl in kindergarten was sexually assaulted in the girls’ room by a male classmate who identifies as trans. Similar stories of assault against women have occurred in homeless shelters and women’s prisons for the same reason.”
“Women are also already being erased in the world of sports — most recently in the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships in Los Angeles,” Cretella added, noting that “for the last two years, the girls’ state high school track title has gone to biological males who identify as trans.”
Danksy, the WoLF spokeswoman, argued that transgender ideology erases lesbians in particular. “Women who don’t conform to gender-based stereotypes because of their sexual orientation are being told that they are actually male,” she noted. This has led some lesbians to denounce transgender ideology as a form of “conversion therapy.”
Furthermore, lesbians “are being told that if they don’t engage in romantic or sexual relationships with ‘men who identify as lesbians,’ then they are transphobic,” Dansky added. “Lesbians specifically are people who do not wish to have romantic or sexual relationships with people with male genitalia.” For this reason, transgender ideology has been condemned as a form of “rape culture.”
“The implementation of gender identity ideology across society has far-reaching implications that we have not yet begun to consider,” Dansky warned. “We need to take a hard look at how this ideology is impacting women and girls.”
ADF’s Waggoner agreed. “Replacing the clear concept of sex with subjective gender perception has far-reaching consequences, including for women’s sports, school locker rooms, and abused women’s shelters. Reinforcing the long-standing definition of sex as grounded in human biology ensures that women continue to have equal opportunities and protects all Americans’ privacy, safety, and dignity,” she said.
Ben-Shalom, the lesbian veteran, told PJ Media, “It is angering to see the human rights of women and children, the most basic of which is privacy, being shunted aside by cocks in frocks.”
4. Protecting children.
Finally, Trump’s legal change can start the cultural shift away from the “social contagion” of transgenderism that is driving more and more children and teens to identify with the gender opposite their biological sex.
Ben-Shalom, the first lesbian to be reinstated to the U.S. Army after being dismissed over her sexuality, found this aspect of transgender ideology particularly aggravating.
“Do not get me started about how transgender-identifying humans and their allies are going after CHILDREN,” Ben-Shalom told PJ Media. “I find it dangerous at the very least, that a psychological/psychiatric condition is dictating to all of society which words are to be used, which medical treatments and surgeries that must be considered ‘appropriate.'”
“Transgender ‘identity is the ONLY such condition where ‘self-identification’ is accepted and is based on ‘feelings alone!” she warned. “It is the ONLY condition where surgically removing body parts is considered a treatment or ‘cure.’ There is no other condition.”
Furthermore, hormone therapy and the more drastic transgender surgery have left people scarred, as they later rejected their cross-sex identity. Max Robinson, a 21-year-old woman who once identified as a man, regrets having taken male hormones and removing her breasts, calling such “treatments” “not a cure at all.”
Cross-sex hormones for those who have already gone through puberty carry serious health risks. While the longterm medical and psychological effects remain unknown, estrogen in biological males brings a clinically significant risk of deep-vein thrombosis and testosterone in biological females increases the chance of developing ovarian cysts later in life.
Some hormone effects are irreversible. Testosterone in biological females will cause irreversible deepening of the voice and augmentation of the clitoris, while estrogen in biological males will cause irreversible enlargement of breasts.
Walt Heyer, a man who once identified as a woman, told PJ Media he has helped “thousands” of people receive counseling and advice as they sought to de-transition. Psychiatrists have warned that transgender identity is a growing “craze,” with almost 40 children per week being referred to gender clinics in Britain.
As more and more children embrace transgender identity, take puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and even have irreversible surgery, the medical harm of these practices will grow increasingly clear and become impossible to deny. In 20 years, when children who are being told they are transgender today try to have children of their own, they will find themselves infertile, scarred, or worse.
The less the government encourages transgender ideology, the better life will be for the kids who learn that it is okay to question the transgender movement.
In light of all this, the Democrats’ rush to endorse transgenderism and to twist the truth to make Trump seem like a radical for supporting biological reality is utterly disgusting. Americans need to condemn this radical denial of biology and women’s rights, and support the common sense and rule of law that Trump is restoring after years of Obama’s gender activism.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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