New York Times freaks because Trump Administration says you can't change your gender

You can’t, of course, but never let science get in the way of the way people feel, or “identify” as the case may be.

What makes something the lead story on the front page of the New York Times? Massive plane crash? Gigantic bribery scandal? Statue of Liberty sold back to France?

No, sillies. What the Timesmen consider earth-shaking news is that men are men and women are women, and the White House knows it:

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

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Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

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.

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“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “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.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

Um, not exactly. It wouldn’t stop the government from recognizing that these people exist or that they have the same rights as American citizens as everyone else.

But it would end the federal government’s indulgence of the psychological disorder that makes you think basic physiological facts about you are overridden by how you feel.

Democrats always claim to be the party that respects science, whereas those of us on the right are ignoramuses who believe in superstitions and fake news. Fine. Let’s talk about science with respect to gender.

What makes you male or female is the presence or absence of the Y chromosome. That’s what determines whether you have a uterus and a menstrual cycle – whether you ovulate – or whether you produce sperm. The presence or absence of a penis is an indicator of what’s going on inside, but it’s not the defining characteristic.

You can feel like a woman. You can even take estrogen injections to make you grow breasts. But you can’t get rid of your Y chromosome no matter what you do, so you can’t be surgically turned from a man into a woman. No “gender reassignment” surgery is going to implant a uterus into you. You’re never going to have a baby. I guess the good news is that you’ll never have to go through menopause either.

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But you are what your physiology says you are, whether that lines up with how you feel about it or not.

As silly as all this is, of course, don’t get the idea that there are no serious policy implications to the administration’s position. There are tons of them.

The original Obama Administration “guidance” on this issue required everyone who receives federal funds of any kind to go along with the transgender bathroom nonsense or risk the loss of their funds. This is one of the reasons you’d be wise not to depend on federal funds for any reason whatsoever. The executive branch has wide latitude to order you to do just about anything it wants on threat of cutting off your money.

People tend to comply.

The Trump Administration reversal will relieve lots of public institutions and nonprofits from the obligation to comply with this mandate. It will also free up lots of federal resources that would have been spent enforcing the “guidance.”

Trump isn’t doing this just to be mean to people who don’t know what gender they are. He’s doing it because the Obama policy was a massive compliance headache for people all across the country, and there was absolutely no reason to send all these people jumping through hoops over an issue like this.

And yet, to the New York Times, it’s a massive scandal that the White House is confirming men are men and women are women. We live in a weird time. Donald Trump being president isn’t even near the top of the weirdness list. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that all the weirdness probably helped elect him.