Man or woman.
Male or female.
Boy or girl.
It’s a pretty easy concept that anyone sane understands.
The Obama Administration of course did not.
They broadened the definition of sex-based discrimination protections to include transgender persons, which changed how the federal government defined sex.
Now all that ridiculousness is thrown out thanks to Trump!
CBS reports on the Trump Administration’s announcement:
Just two weeks into Pride Month — and on the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting — the Trump administration announced that it is rolling back Obama-era health care protections for people who are transgender. The rule, announced Friday, will impact transgender patients’ ability to fight against discrimination by doctors, medical facilities and health insurance providers.
Former president Barack Obama’s administration changed federal health care guidelines in 2016 to expand sex-based protections based to include protections based on gender identity, “which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.” His administration also pushed for discrimination protections for those who have had abortions.
But the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a statement on Friday saying the final rule is based on “the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.”
“All of these are essentially legislative changes that the Department lacked the authority to make,” the administration said of the 2016 changes in the final rule. “They purported to impose additional legal requirements on covered entities that cannot be justified by the text of Title IX, and in fact are in conflict with express exemptions in Title IX.”
In the summary of the final rule, HHS responded to several comments that criticized the lack of protection for people who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. In one response to the comments, HHS compared gender identity to political affiliation.
“For example, in the unlikely event that a healthcare provider were to deny services to someone based solely on his or her political affiliation, the Department would not be able to address such denial of care under Section 1557,” HHS said. “Unlike other bases of discrimination, the categories of gender identity and sexual orientation (as well as political affiliation) are not set forth in those statutes.”
The rule summary also argued that health care based on sex assigned at birth, rather than gender identity, is necessary for health care, and insinuated that transgender health care may be confusing for providers.
Check out the latest on Twitter over the matter:
The Family Research Council previously posted an informative piece on the subject that really gets to the bottom of why “sex” should be biologically based:
“The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth,” the New York Times reported recently.
That means the Times only made it eight words into this sensationalized article before making its first factual error. The Times simply assumed precisely what the administration rejects — namely, that the word “gender” is synonymous with “sex.”
What they should have said is that the Trump administration is considering additional policy changes to standardize the meaning of the word “sex” in federal law and regulations. The policy reportedly under consideration would define the word “sex,” particularly as a protected category in various nondiscrimination laws and policies, exclusively on the basis of biological characteristics evident at birth.
This would be a reversal of policies adopted by the Obama administration, which interpreted the word “sex” to encompass “gender identity.” Under this view, laws and policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex were interpreted as also protecting persons who identify as transgender against discrimination on the basis of their self-identified, psychological gender identity.
But members of Congress who prohibited discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ in employment and public accommodations in 1964, and in education in 1972, did not have transgender identities in mind when they did so. It should be perfectly clear that the original legislative intent, based on the plain meaning of the word sex as understood at the time, was to protect people against discrimination because they are women or because they are men. The reported Trump administration policy is merely a recognition of this fact.
If transgender activists want gender identity to be a protected category in the law, they need to persuade Congress to pass such a law.
In the past, Congress has voted to prohibit hate crimes motivated by the victim’s gender identity. It has also included gender identity in the nondiscrimination provisions of the Violence Against Women Act to make clear that transgender people who are victims of domestic violence may access certain services. However, Congress has repeatedly rejected proposals to add gender identity as a protected category in laws barring discrimination in employment or public accommodations (such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964), or to add it to laws against discrimination in education (particularly Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972).
It is within the power of Congress to adopt laws treating gender identity as a privileged or special category. The Family Research Council believes it would be unwise to do so, for it is a false compassion that would reaffirm someone's gender confusion. A biological definition of sex is also consistent with that used by the American Psychiatric Association: Biological indication of male and female (understood in the context of reproductive capacity), such as sex chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia.
But either way, it is not within the legitimate power of either the executive or judicial branch of government to change the plain meaning of ordinary English words, merely to achieve a policy outcome they have not won through the democratic process. Yet this is what the Obama administration and a handful of federal courts (but not the Supreme Court) have attempted to do.
Just another example of why Trump deserves another four years!
He’s cleaning up the mess left behind by Obama and making the country a better place.
Liberals of course are having a meltdown over the administration’s new rule.
Watch the reaction on MSNBC below:
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