Politics

‘Extreme Rewriting Of Federal Civil Rights Law’: Here’s How The Biden Administration Is Pushing Its Transgender Agenda

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• The Biden administration is promoting its transgender agenda, including sex changes for youths, through government agencies and a reinterpretation of federal civil rights law, legal experts told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
• Numerous agencies are promoting gender-neutral options on official government paperwork and making it easier for individuals to change their sex or gender on forms. 
• Some of these changes threaten the health and opportunities of women, along with religious liberty, a legal expert told TheDCNF.

The Biden administration is rewriting a key civil rights laws and using the power of federal bureaucracies to enforce its transgender agenda, legal experts told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Since President Joe Biden took office, his administration has reinterpreted civil rights and healthcare laws to extend discrimination protections to transgender individuals; the administration has also pushed federal bureaucracies to disregard sex in paperwork and security processes and issued health guidance promoting child sex changes.

In June 2021, the Biden administration announced its intention to interpret Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a landmark civil rights law barring sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools, to apply to gender identity in additon to sex. The administration also announced in May 2021 it would interpret Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to expand its protections against discrimination to include gender identity.

“Because this Administration can’t push its LGBT agenda through elected representatives in Congress, it’s issuing lawless regulations that would require experimental transgender surgeries to be performed and paid for by insurance, including on minor children, in the name of non-discrimination,” Roger Severino, former director of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department’s Office for Civil Rights, told TheDCNF. “President Biden is certainly paying back his radical base, but making a mockery of our civil rights laws and hurting our kids in the process.”

By interpreting the prohibition on sex-based discrimination in Section 1557 of the ACA to include gender identity, the administration has made it so healthcare providers can’t treat patients who identify as transgender differently than other patients. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has used the policy to force employers to pay for sex changes against their religious beliefs and to force healthcare providers to perform those procedures.

The policy creates conflicts for healthcare workers who believe sex change procedures are harmful, because they could face discrimination lawsuits for refusing to perform them, Severino and former Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Ryan Anderson explained when former President Barack Obama initially proposed the gender mandate in 2016. Healthcare workers with religious or conscientious objections to transgender medical treatments face the same litigation threat.

“The Biden administration has imposed an extreme rewriting of federal civil rights law to mandate bans on gender identity discrimination, and these bureaucratic requirements threaten the health and opportunities of women in areas as broad as sports, healthcare, housing and employment,” Matt Bowman, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), told TheDCNF. “The Biden administration has repeatedly refused to protect religious liberty from these infringements.”

District Judge Daniel Traynor rebuked Biden’s use of civil rights law to force healthcare providers to perform sex change procedures in a court order blocking the Biden healthcare mandate.

“HHS Guidance encourages a parent to file a complaint if a medical provider refuses to gender transition their child, of any age, including an infant,” he wrote. “The thought that a newborn child could be surgically altered to change gender is the result of the Biden HHS Notification and HHS Guidance that brands a medical professional’s refusal to do so as discrimination.”

Additionally, the Department of Education (DOE) under Biden is expected to officially expand the definition of sex to include “gender identity” under Title IX. This would require every sex-separated women’s space, including bathrooms and locker rooms, to accommodate males who identify as transgender women, according to Sarah Perry, a senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation.

The DOE also provided expert training on transgenderism to school staff and helped teach schools to strategize and take action to support transgender and nonbinary children, according to a March 31 White House announcement.

Biden has also pushed the transgender agenda through guidance to federal bureaucracies, who have begun disregarding sex in security screenings, making it easier to change one’s sex in official paperwork and allowing individuals to decline to state their gender on official forms.

Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released guidance promoting sex change procedures for children and adolescents March 31 in a document titled “Gender-Affirming Care and Young People.” The guidance promoted puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, sex change surgeries and the practice of socially transitioning children to the opposite sex.

The HHS also created a website announced March 31 targeted towards transgender youths which links to LGBT resources including HHS guidance promoting irreversible medical interventions for children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria.

Biden voiced unwavering support for “gender affirming care” for children, meaning social transitions and radical biomedical interventions rather than counseling to help children accept their bodies, in a March 31 statement.

Federal agencies made it easier to change one’s gender identification and in some cases offered “X” gender options in official paperwork under Biden, according to the March 31 White House announcement. Such options were made available on social security paperwork, in federal financial aid for students and for White House visits and the White House proposed the 2023 budget include $10 million in funding to research how best to ask questions about gender identity and sexual orientation in the census.

The TSA and the Department of Homeland Security announced March 31 that they would stop considering gender in their security processes and update their advanced imaging technology (AIT) at airport checkpoints with the help of $18.6 million from Congress. The TSA said it would work with airline carriers to promote “X” and “U” (undisclosed) gender options in reservation systems.

The DOE, HHS and White House did not respond to TheDCNF’s requests for comment.