Kerby Anderson

Last month, the Trump administration announced that it was rescinding the Obama administration “gender identity” policy. Ryan Anderson says that the administration “is doing the right thing in correcting Obama’s unlawful overreach, which imposed a one-sided solution on all 50 states.”

A little history is in order. The Obama administration redefined the term in the Title IX law prohibiting sex discrimination to include “gender identity.” On May 13, the Justice Department and the Education Department sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to our nation’s schools informing them of their new interpretation that must be implemented in these federally funded schools. On August 21, a U.S. district judge ruled that the attempt to redefine sex as gender identity was unlawful and blocked the decree from going into effect. Last month, the new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions withdrew from the lawsuit and cancelled oral arguments.

One question we need to resolve is whether transgender rights are civil rights. Jim Dennison rightly states that if they are the same, then they should be enforced over the objections of state and local school districts. But he also points out that “unlike previous civil rights legislation, transgender civil rights significantly impact the civil rights of all people.”

Ryan Anderson talked about a recent panel of women (including a rape survivor, a lesbian, and a feminist activist) at the Heritage Foundation that talked about the value of “women-only spaces.” He concluded that: “While we must be sensitive to the dignity, privacy, and safety concerns of people who identify as transgender, that is not a reason to ignore the dignity, privacy, and safety concerns of everyone else.”

One solution is for Congress to reintroduce and debate the Civil Rights Uniformity Act that clarifies the term “sex” so that our representatives, rather than judges and bureaucrats, develop future transgender policy.