Trump Administration plan to erase the trans community is politically-driven bullshyte

Roger Severino, HHS official and one of the parties leading the Trump Administration's effort to erase the trans community.

Unless you are living in a cave, you already know about the Trump Administration's brazen attempt to erase the transgender community. Here is the breakdown in a way we should know and repeat:

Trump’s Religious Right Team Schemes to Legally Erase Trans Identity - PFAW's Right Wing Watch calls it right.

1. Who is behind it:

The push by the Department of Health and Human Services to impose a trans-denying definition of “sex” onto federal civil rights law “would essentially eradicate federal recognition” of an estimated 1.4 million transgender Americans, according to the Times story.

The effort is being led by Roger Severino, who has taken the anti-LGBT agenda of his former employer, the Heritage Foundation, into the Trump administration as director of the civil rights division at HHS. When he was named to that position, a dozen U.S. senators objected, citing Severino’s “long history of making bigoted statements toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and attacking women’s access to health care services and reproductive rights.”

2. The mindset of behind this proposal is politically-driven

One of Severino’s former colleagues at the Heritage Foundation, Ryan Anderson, is at the forefront of the Religious Right’s anti-trans crusade. Anderson’s latest book is “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.” Anderson argues that gender cannot be severed from biological sex, and that “taking our sexual embodiment seriously in public policy is not discriminatory.”

That language is strikingly similar to Anderson’s approach to sexual orientation, suggesting that if Religious Right activists in the Trump administration are successful in wiping out legal recognition based on gender identity, they may be willing to try the same with regard to sexual orientation.

Anderson is not a conservative willing to seek “compromise” in the form of religious exemptions to non-discrimination laws. He says that “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) laws” are “bad public policy” and argues against legal protection for LGBTQ people from discrimination

3. DO NOT THINK they will stop with simply the transgender community. The attack on the transgender community is bad enough, but based on how closely linked the religious right and the Trump Administration are, consider this:

 Religious Right groups like the Family Research Council, which has also placed staff in positions in the Trump administration, deny the very existence of gay identity as well as transgender identity.

The Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg argues that the idea of a gay identity is “empirically false” and urges religious conservatives not to use terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, preferring constructs like “people who engage in homosexual conduct” or “people who identify as homosexual.” This echoes the practice of the Catholic and Mormon hierarchies, which use terms such as “people with same-sex attractions.” Sprigg and FRC similarly argue that transgender identity is “an objective falsehood—which no law should force others to affirm.”

Sprigg was one of the speakers in a session on “gender ideology” at the World Congress of Families global summit held in Moldova in September. His talking points included a denial that discrimination on the basis of gender identity is a form of sex discrimination. The session was moderated by Australian Patrick Byrne, author of a new book, “Transgender: One Shade of Gray.” Byrne said that laws against anti-trans discrimination are “authoritarian” and said the solution is to write the definition of man and woman into law, saying, “if you do that, you block the whole agenda.” That is precisely what Severino seems to be trying to accomplish via executive action.

There are three things we can do to stop this:

1. VOTE in November and VOTE BLUE (it is the Republican Party pushing this mess). That undermines them from the start.

2. RAISE HELL - legally but you would be surprised to know how many things are legal. They want to propose this mess by the end of the year. So much time and so many resources and places to note our extreme disapproval of this madness.

3. SPREAD THE WORD - this is not simply an attack on the transgender community.  This is not a one-time thing. There are too many damn anti-LGBTQ industry people in the Trump Administration for them NOT to be planning some mess in the future which will ensnare the entire LGBTQ community. This seems to be an opening salvo. More than ever before, we need to start calling these groups out, educating people on them, writing letter to the editor and columns, telling our friends and allies. We have to stop with the "if we ignore them and not give them air or a platform, they will go away" bullshit. It's time we realize and let everyone know that there is a deliberate and conscious effort by right-wing groups to undermine LGBTQ equality and safety.  And these groups don't mind attacking us, our families, and our children.