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Christian BIGOTS will no doubt be applauding…

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« on: October 22, 2018, 02:29:40 pm »


from The New York Times…

‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence
Under Trump Administration


The Trump administration is considering a legal definition of gender as immutable
and fixed at birth, the most drastic in a series of moves against transgender people.


By ERICA L. GREEN, KATIE BENNER and ROBERT PEAR | Sunday, October 21, 2018

Protesting the Trump administration's policies toward gender in New York last year. — Photograph: Yana Paskova/for The New York Times.
Protesting the Trump administration's policies toward gender in New York last year. — Photograph: Yana Paskova/for The New York Times.

WASHINGTON D.C. — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual's choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York 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 N.Y. 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.

“This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone.

The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration's more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation's health care law.

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from a 2020 census survey and a national survey of elderly citizens.

For the last year, the Department of Health and Human Services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the department, declined to answer detailed questions about the memo or his role in interagency discussions about how to revise the definition of sex under Title IX.

But officials at the department confirmed that their push to limit the definition of sex for the purpose of federal civil rights laws resulted from their own reading of the laws and from a court decision.


Roger Severino, now at the Department of Health and Human Services, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration's expansion of sex to include gender identity. — Photograph: Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images.
Roger Severino, now at the Department of Health and Human Services, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama
administration's expansion of sex to include gender identity. — Photograph: Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images.


Mr. Severino, while serving as the head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration's expansion of sex to include gender identity, which he called “radical gender ideology.”

In one commentary piece, he called the policies a “culmination of a series of unilateral, and frequently lawless, administration attempts to impose a new definition of what it means to be a man or a woman on the entire nation.”

“Transgender people are frightened,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, which presses for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “At every step where the administration has had the choice, they've opted to turn their back on transgender people.” After this article was published, transgender people took to social media to post photographs of themselves with the hashtag #WontBeErased.

The Department of Health and Human Services has called on the “Big Four” agencies that enforce some part of Title IX — the Departments of Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, and Labor — to adopt its definition in regulations that will establish uniformity in the government and increase the likelihood that courts will accept it.

The definition is integral to two proposed rules currently under review at the White House: One from the Education Department deals with complaints of sex discrimination at schools and colleges receiving federal financial assistance; the other, from health and human services, deals with health programs and activities that receive federal funds or subsidies. Both regulations are expected to be released this fall, and would then be open for public comment, typically for 60 days. The agencies would consider the comments before issuing final rules with the force of law — both of which could include the new gender definition.

Civil rights groups have been meeting with federal officials in recent weeks to argue against the proposed definition, which has divided career and political appointees across the administration. Some officials hope that health and human services will at least rein in the most extreme parts, such as the call for genetic testing to determine sex.

After more than a year of discussions, health and human services is preparing to formally present the new definition to the Justice Department before the end of the year, Trump administration officials say. If the Justice Department decides that the change is legal, the new definition can be approved and enforced in Title IX statutes, and across government agencies.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the draft health and human services proposal. The Justice Department has not yet been asked to render a formal legal opinion, according to an official there who was not authorized to speak about the process.

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions's previous decisions on transgender protections have given civil rights advocates little hope that the department will prevent the new definition from being enforced. The proposal appears consistent with the position he took in an October 2017 memo sent to agencies clarifying that the civil rights law that prohibits job discrimination does not cover “gender identity, per se.”

Harper Jean Tobin, the policy director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group, called the maneuvering “an extremely aggressive legal position that is inconsistent with dozens of federal court decisions.”

Health and human services officials said they were only abiding by court orders, referring to the rulings of Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth, Texas, a George W. Bush appointee who has held that “Congress did not understand ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity’.”

A 2016 ruling by Judge O’Connor concerned a rule that was adopted to carry out a civil rights statute embedded in the Affordable Care Act. The provision prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in “any health program or activity” that receives federal financial assistance.


A transgender flag outside a bar in Brooklyn. 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. — Photograph: Annie Tritt/for The New York Times.
A transgender flag outside a bar in Brooklyn. 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. — Photograph: Annie Tritt/for The New York Times.


But in recent discussions with the administration, civil rights groups, including Lambda Legal, have pointed to other court cases. In a legal memo presented to the administration, a coalition of civil rights groups wrote, “The overwhelming majority of courts to address the question since the most relevant Supreme Court precedent in 1998 have held that antitransgender bias constitutes sex discrimination under federal laws like Title IX.”

Indeed, the health and human services proposal was prompted, in part, by pro-transgender court decisions in the last year that upheld the Obama administration's position.

In their memo, health and human services officials wrote that “courts and plaintiffs are racing to get decisions” ahead of any rule-making, because of the lack of a stand-alone definition.

“Courts and the previous administration took advantage of this circumstance to include gender identity and sexual orientation in a multitude of agencies, and under a multitude of laws,” the memo states. Doing so “led to confusion and negative policy consequences in health care, education and other federal contexts.”

The narrower definition would be acutely felt in schools and their most visible battlegrounds: locker rooms and bathrooms.

One of the Trump administration's first decisive policy acts was the rescission by the Education and Justice Departments of Obama-era guidelines that protected transgender students who wanted to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

Since the guidance was rescinded, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has halted and dismissed discrimination cases filed by transgender students over access to school facilities. A restrictive government-wide definition would cement the Education Department’s current approach.

But it would also raise new questions.

The department would have to decide what documentation schools would be required to collect to determine or codify gender. Title IX applies to a number of educational experiences, such as sports and single-sex classes or programs where gender identity has come into play. The department has said it will continue to open cases where transgender students face discrimination, bullying and harassment, and investigate gender-based harassment as “unwelcome conduct based on a student's sex” or “harassing conduct based on a student's failure to conform to sex stereotypes.”

The Education Department did not respond to an inquiry about the health and human services proposal.

Ms. Lhamon of the Obama Education Department said the proposed definition “quite simply negates the humanity of people.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Erica L. Green is a correspondent in the Washington D.C. Bureau of The New York Times covering education and education policy. Before joining The N.Y. Times, Ms. Green covered education for The Baltimore Sun, including investigations of rampant financial mismanagement in Baltimore schools, the school system's failure to serve its most vulnerable students and the physical and financial toll of violence against teachers. Her work included a year-long project about the mistreatment of children in Maryland's juvenile justice system and a series on segregation in the state’s public schools. Ms. Green was a part of The Sun team named a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for breaking news coverage of the death of Freddie Gray. She has also won dozens of state awards for local government and education reporting, as well as the 2015 investigative prize from the Education Writers Association.

Katie Benner covers the Justice Department for The New York Times. ​She has worked in The N.Y. Times' San Francisco Bureau covering Apple, venture capital and startups. She helped steer the paper's coverage of the encryption fight between Apple and the FBI and investigated how tech employees chasing the Silicon Valley dream are short-changed by executives and investors. Most recently she's written about sexual harassment in the tech industry and the legal contracts used to keep that behavior a secret​. Before coming to The N.Y. Times, Katie was a tech columnist at Bloomberg. She also spent nearly a decade at Fortune, where she covered financial markets, private equity and hedge funds. Her work includes profiles of Hank Paulson, Robert Schiller and Reid Hoffman as well as features on the 2008 financial crisis and financial fraud investigations.

Robert L. Pear has been a domestic correspondent at The New York Times Washington D.C. bureau since joining the paper in 1979. His coverage has included the Justice Department, social policy, health care, civil rights, immigration and foreign policy. He is currently covering domestic policy, budget, health care and Social Security. Previously, Mr. Pear was a reporter for more than five years at The Washington Star. Born in Washington in 1949, Mr. Pear received a Bachelor of Arts in English history and literature, magna cum laude, from Harvard College in 1971. He attended Harvard on a National Merit Scholarship and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Mr. Pear won a Henry Prize Fellowship for study in England, which is awarded annually to one graduate of Harvard or Yale. He spent 1971 to 1973 at Balliol College, Oxford University, which conferred upon him a Master of Philosophy degree. When he returned to the United States, Mr. Pear entered the Columbia University School of Journalism, which awarded him a Master of Science degree in 1974. He also won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship from Columbia as well as its Henry Woodward Sackett Prize for outstanding work in the Law of Journalism courses. Mr. Pear lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

• A version of this article appears in The New York Times on Monday, October 22, 2018, on Page A5 of the New York print edition with the headline: “Trump May Limit How Government Defines One's Sex”.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Military Transgender Ban to Begin Within 6 Months, Memo Says

 • 5 Transgender Service Members Sue Trump Over Military Ban

 • Trump Says Transgender People Will Not Be Allowed in the Military

 • Transgender Students Turn to Courts as Government Support Erodes


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #1 on: October 25, 2018, 12:33:10 pm »


from The Seattle Times....

Trump administration erasing transgender identity

Trump administration moves toward erasing transgender identity.

By DAVID HORSEY | 4:33PM PDT — Wednesday, October 24, 2018



SHIFTING AWAY from modern scientific research, the Department of Health and Human Services is considering a return to a strict definition of gender as determined purely by a person's genitalia at birth. There is abundant evidence that the workings of the human brain are the compelling force in gender identity, not physical characteristics and the experience of millions of transgender people bears that out. Nevertheless, the Trump administration appears ready to negate the research and deny the complexity of human nature when it comes to enforcing the laws of the land.

__________________________________________________________________________

• See more of David Horsey's cartoons at The Seattle Times HERE.

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/trump-administration-erasing-transgender-identity
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2018, 11:34:13 am »


The perfect birthday (or christmas) present for American christian bigots and Donald J. Trump…




(click on the picture to learn more about it)



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« Reply #3 on: October 27, 2018, 03:26:12 pm »

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Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

If you want to know what's going on in the real world...
And the many things that will personally effect you.
Go to
http://www.infowars.com/

AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP

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