“The agency tasked with advancing America’s energy security, developing its nuclear arsenal, and handling environmental challenges is now shaping the landscape of interscholastic sports in the United States.
The Energy Department recently released two direct final rules to modify existing Title IX protections. One of the rules would strike regulations requiring schools that receive federal funds to allow students to try out for opposite-sex noncontact sports teams if schools do not offer the sport to their sex. This change would impact sports such as tennis and swimming.
The Energy Department says “such athletics rules ignore differences between the sexes which are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality while also imposing a burden on local governments and small businesses who are in the best position to determine the needs of their community and constituents.” The rule was issued in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which directed the Education Department to bring Title IX enforcement actions against educational institutions receiving federal funding “that deny female students an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletic events by requiring them, in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.”
The second rule issued by the Energy Department would strike a provision that allows students to “take affirmative action” to “overcome the effects of conditions that resulted in limited participation” if a federal agency determines that they have not faced discrimination based on sex in an “education program or activity.” The rule also strikes a requirement mandating schools to conduct self-evaluations on how their programs and practices comply with Title IX. Reporting under this provision ended in 2002.
While Title IX enforcement has traditionally been led by the Education Department, the Energy Department has “long used the law to close the gap between men and women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields,” reports Politico. Still, the method by which the agency is proposing to reform Title IX is worrying several civil rights groups.
The agency is using a direct final rule process, which has been reserved for “noncontroversial rules” that are “unlikely to receive significant adverse comments,” notes Politico. Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center, told Politico that direct final rules can’t be used for Title IX.
“Technically, it just takes one significant adverse comment for them to have to withdraw the rule or to go through the notice of proposed rulemaking,” said Patel. “However, we’re dealing with an administration that has made very clear that they are not about complying with the law.””
“Recent figures from the Defense Department reported 4,240 — or 0.2 percent — of about 2 million service members have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Data from previous years by advocacy groups has calculated the number to be much higher, at around 15,000.
…
Trump unveiled the plan in an executive order on inauguration day. The basis for the order, which Trump also enacted during his first term, is the argument that gender dysphoria is incompatible with military service.”
Twenty-six U.S. states have banned certain medical interventions for children with gender dysphoria. In a free country, the barrier for straight up banning a medical intervention needs to be very high. The evidence needs to be overwhelming that such interventions are bad—that they do far more harm than good. That is not the case for puberty suppressing drugs, hormone replacement therapy, or even surgery. Such bans are an insult to liberty and should be removed.
If a doctor, parent, and child, all agree that a particular medical intervention is the best solution for their problem, then who the Hell is the government to stop them? Who the Hell are you to stop them? It doesn’t matter how you feel about transgenders, unless such interventions are clearly net bad for patients to the point where no reasonable person would perform them, they should not be banned.
There are lots of studies on transgender interventions, and there is some evidence that puberty suppression, hormones, and/or surgery help children and adolescents with their gender dysphoria, their quality of life, depression, and even lessens their chance of suicide. Unfortunately, that evidence is mixed and the studies are far from conclusive. Researchers on both sides seem biased and exaggerate the quality of evidence for their positions while undervaluing the evidence in favor of other positions.
The evidence is mixed enough that doctors and parents need to approach such decisions with a heavy dose of caution. The burden of evidence for stopping, and especially changing, a child’s natural puberty needs to fall on the intervention. If doctors are negligently transitioning kids who should not be transitioned, then those doctors should be charged and sued under normal medical malpractice or negligence laws. We don’t need to ban procedures to enforce basic medical law.
I strongly encourage parents and medical professionals to be careful about transitioning children, and for parents to get second opinions from different-thinking doctors. The evidence in favor of such interventions is quite modest, and it’s hard to tell which children are more likely to benefit from them. Nevertheless, such decisions should be in the hands of the parents, doctors, and the children, not the government. We are not truly a free country if medical interventions can be banned on such weak justifications.
What the Science on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Kids Really Shows Heather Boerner. 2022 5 12. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-the-science-on-gender-affirming-care-for-transgender-kids-really-shows Mastectomy John Hopkins Medicine. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/breast-cancer/mastectomy#:~:text=A%20mastectomy%20is%20surgery%20to,a%20high%20risk%20for%20it. Correction: Access to gender-affirming hormones during adolescence and mental health outcomes among transgender adults Jack L. Turban et
“A second federal judge has barred Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth from enforcing a ban on transgender troops serving in the military.
U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle said the ban, ordered by President Donald Trump, was blatantly discriminatory, relied on a distortion of outdated data and ignored more recent evidence about transgender service members.”
“In an effort to “defend women’s rights” against “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex,” the order—titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—seeks with the force of federal law to establish men and women as distinct and immutable categories.
“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” which “are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” the order states. It defines “sex” as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” and notes that the term is “not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity,'” which the order says “does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”
Perhaps ironically, supporters of transgender equality might agree with parts of this characterization. “Sex is a label—male or female—that you’re assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you’re born with and the chromosomes you have. It goes on your birth certificate,” according to Planned Parenthood. Gender identity, on the other hand, “is how you feel inside and how you express your gender through clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It’s a feeling that begins very early in life.”
The executive order defines “female” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and “male” as the opposite—”a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” In other words, anyone with an XX chromosome is a female, and anyone with an XY chromosome is male, with no exceptions. The order tautologically defines “sex” in terms of “male” and “female,” which are then defined in terms of “sex.”
But by ruling so starkly, the order completely writes intersex people out of existence.
“People who are intersex have genitals, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don’t fit into a male/female sex binary,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. “Some people who are intersex consider their gender to be intersex. Others identify as female, male, nonbinary or a different gender.” In this case, a person’s professed gender may change from the one assigned at birth because they literally have biological markers of both. The clinic further notes that one in 100 Americans is estimated to be intersex.
The executive order criticizes “gender ideology,” which it says “replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity” and “diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.” But intersex people literally are born in the wrong sexed body, at least as defined by the executive order, which says everyone is either all male or all female.”
“Just hours into his presidency, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to roll back trans rights in nearly every facet of life. The order describes trans women as men and directs federal agencies to keep them out of “intimate spaces” designed for women. It targets trans people’s identity documents and health care, and it narrowly defines sex in a way that aims to erase the very concept of trans and nonbinary people.
In the week since, the administration has halted transgender people’s passport applications, transferred incarcerated trans women to solitary confinement and moved to bar transgender troops from serving in the military – an effort that was met with an immediate legal challenge. On Wednesday, the Office of Personnel Management ordered federal programs promoting “gender ideology” to be shut down and their employees put on leave. A day earlier, Trump directed federal agencies to begin crafting policies that could cut off young people’s access to transition care nationwide. And he has done so in orders that describe trans people as dishonorable and “mutilated,” lacking “humility and selflessness.””