L.A.’s LGBTQ advocates decry Trump’s plan

White House looks into defining gender as fixed at birth.

Community leaders say transgender people will be undermined by the government’s proposal to define a person’s gender solely on sex assigned at birth.

When President Obama used the word “transgender” in his State of the Union address in 2015 — the first time a sitting president had ever done so — Mariana Marroquin experienced a sense of affirmation that the U.S. government had rarely afforded her community.

“It was something I could point to and say, ‘Look, we exist, we matter to someone at the very top,’ ” said Marroquin, a transgender woman and director of the Trans Wellness Center in Los Angeles.

Three years later, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is reportedly considering a narrow federal definition of gender that hinges solely on sex assigned at birth, a move that would in effect strip transgender and intersex Americans of their civil rights and render their chosen identities invisible in the eyes of the federal government.

L.A.’s LGBTQ leaders see the potential policy change as an effort to systematically undermine a national recognition of transgender people ushered in by the Obama White House. And while they aren’t surprised by the Trump administration’s effort to establish a strict legal definition of sex, they say they are still alarmed.

Advocates fear the sweeping change would breed an increase in hate and violence toward transgender people, lead to new barriers in obtaining adequate healthcare and education, and induce a greater