Stop backward steps on transgender identity recognition

We didn’t know it 10 years ago, some of us. But thanks to the education of an impassioned movement, we know it now: Anatomy does not define gender.

Recognition that some people know in their bones from birth that they are different, that they are somewhere in between, that binary assignments of male or female don’t make any sense at all for some is not a matter of politics. Now that our culture has given the matter some consideration — hard as old shibboleths are to shake — it is universally understood that gender identity can be very fluid for transgender Americans, and that they have simple civil rights to accept the way they are.

That fluidity is of course not an American thing. It’s been there in every culture on Earth, if repressed in most places. But the “third gender” designation is common from Thailand to Japan in Asia. Ancient Egypt recognized three — female, male, somewhere in between.

Even in the wake of progress for gay people, which has been considerable, trans people have not had an easy fight for recognition and respect. But their work has come a long way. Look at the difference between the cross-dressing silliness (if fun) of a Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag in 1959’s “Some Like it Hot” to a TV show of today like “Transparent,” which deals with the issue seriously (and with fun).

And many of us have come to know people whose lives have been changed so much for the better by not having to live what feels to them a gender mistake.

So it’s hard to understand recent reports that the Trump administration, after all this progress, is looking at tightly considering gender as what The New York Times in first revealing the story calls “a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth.” A memo obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services pushes a new party line: “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.”

We’re not talking a tiny group of people under attack by the government, here. Federal recognition would be eradicated for about 1.4 million Americans who recognize themselves — with surgery or not — as a gender other than the one they were born with. “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 created the transgender policies that would be so cruelly undone. The administration’s proposed policy unnecessarily threatens legal protections of those 1.4 million, and risks reignites a culture battle the country doesn’t need.

Whatever one personally believes about transgender identities, it is important to recognize that in a free society individuals should be free to make their own decisions.

For transgender individuals who do not identify with their biological sex, and/or the social and cultural outgrowths of it, the prospect of being denied the freedom to identify in a manner consistent with their lived experience is untenable and a deprivation of freedom by government. And for what purpose? No one’s liberty is deprived by the transgender identification of another person.

In light of the progress made to date on this issue, we urge the administration to take a hands-off approach to this issue.