Whenever people/Russian trolls make the argument that we shouldn’t impeach Donald Trump because “Mike Pence is just as bad,” I tend to roll my eyes. Pence is horrible, of course. He’s a homophobe and a bigot and he agrees with Trump 99% of the time. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Impeachment Train needs to leave the g–damn station. Here’s the thing though: every so often, we do see Pence’s fingerprints on something horrible coming out of this administration. There are some “culture wars” that I honestly believe Trump doesn’t give a sh-t about. This is one of them. Apparently, the Trump administration – or mostly Pence and Jeff Sessions – want to legally maneuver transgender people out of existence.

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 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.

[From The New York Times]

Well done, Caitlyn Jenner. I’m so glad she felt so strongly about voting for Republicans when all they want to do is deadname her and refuse to recognize her gender identity. This kind of move is just the kind of petty cruelty and Nazism that the Evangelicals love. This was this trade-off, this was one of their “gets” in their transactional power play: they are political whores who look the other way about a serial sexual assailant and adulterer in the White House, and they’ll actively campaign for a sexual assailant on the Supreme Court, all so they can “get” these kinds of things. In their minds, women have no reproductive rights and transgender people have no rights to exist. The ends justify the means, even as they’ve all sold their souls to the point of depravity and multiple human rights crises.

After the NYT reported this, the Human Rights Campaign and other organizations are pushing even more voter drives and campaigns. #WontBeErased is where trans people can tell their stories.

Trans people #WontBeErased
Trans people #WontBeErased
Trans people #WontBeErased
Trans people #WontBeErased
Trans people #WontBeErased
Trans people #WontBeErased
Trans people #WontBeErased
Trans people #WontBeErased
Trans people #WontBeErased
Trans people #WontBeErased

— GLAAD (@glaad) October 21, 2018

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.