A vicious gender policy

This editorial ran in the Albany Times Union Oct. 23, 2018

If you happen to find yourself in a restroom with another person, the odds are that neither of you is transgender. Chances are there wouldn't be a transgender person in the average American classroom of 23 kids, either. Or in, say, a small congregation of 100 people.

There are so few transgender people in this country, for that matter, that it isn't likely you would come across one until you pulled together a crowd of about 167 people. You might find three in the average U.S. school.

Yet with everything else going on in the nation and the world right now, from voter suppression in multiple states to the federal government holding thousands of children in custody on the southern border to a bitter trade war with China to the scrapping of nuclear arms pacts with Iran and Russia to soaring federal debt, President Donald Trump is fixated on genitalia.

At issue is a developing policy to apply a uniform standard across all federal agencies for what defines a person's sex. In this case, according to a draft obtained by The New York Times, it would be limited to "a person's status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth." That status is normally based on the person's genitalia and assigned on their birth certificate. Any disputes would be resolved by genetic testing.

The administration says the government needs a single, scientific standard on which to base federal policies like Title IX, a civil rights statute that bans sex discrimination in government-funded education programs.

What passes for "scientific" in the Trump White House, in certain circles of Congress and among elements of the president's fundamentalist religious base doesn't pass muster in the medical community, which has increasingly recognized that gender identity and physical characteristics do not always align for the complex creatures that human beings are.

This isn't the administration's first ignorant foray into this issue; it has also been trying to bar transgender people from the military and expel those now in uniform, regardless of their loyalty and service, regardless of the military's assessment that the estimated 2,150 to 15,500 transgender troops on active duty and in the reserves have not harmed cohesion, discipline or morale.

Yet somehow, a group estimated to make up a mere 0.6 of 1 percent of the U.S. population has become an outsized hot-button issue, so much so that President Trump is looking to regulate them out of existence.

These are not, as fear-mongering politicians and others paint them, people who have made some "lifestyle choice" or just figured that posing as a transgender person would be a great way to get into women's bathrooms.

Those who think so should take a moment to wonder: Who on Earth would, on a whim, subject themselves to the vicious discrimination this administration now wants to make the official policy of the United States?

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