Perhaps eyeing its new more conservative line-up, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court of the United States to take up a proposed ban on transgender troops, one that has so far been shot down by the federal court system.
The Washington Post reports: ‘Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco asked the justices to consolidate the challenges to the ban — which so far have been successful in lower courts — and rule on the issue in its current term. The challenges are to the administration’s order that would prohibit transgender men and women from enlisting, possibly subject current service members to discharge and deny certain medical care. The order reverses an Obama administration policy allowing transgender men and women to serve openly and to receive funding for sex-reassignment surgery.’
The move is Trump’s latest attempt to deny transgender rights.
The administration’s request comes in the wake of an October memo detailing a proposal to legally erase transgender people by creating a federal legal definition of gender, first published in a report in the New York Times.
The NYT: “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.”
According to the memo seen by the NYT, the Department of Health and Human Services is proposing that “Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth. 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.”
READ THIS: Trump Plans to Legally Abolish Transgender People, Define Gender by Genitalia at Birth: Memo
Trump spoke to reporters last week about the memo: “We’re looking at it. We have a lot of different concepts right now. They have a lot of different things happening with respect to transgender right now. You know that as well as I do, and we’re looking at it very seriously. I’m protecting everybody. You know what I’m doing? I’m protecting everybody. I want to protect our country.”
On the heels of the memo the Justice Department filed a brief arguing that businesses can discriminate against workers because they are transgender. The Trump administration is also reportedly moving to have the word “gender” removed from United Nations documents and replaced with the word “woman”.
All this follows a series of efforts the Trump administration has been making to remove and restrict the rights of transgender individuals in multiple areas, including military service, federal prison rights, health care, schools, the CDC, and the judiciary.
