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After a federal judge ruled that the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Health and Human Services departments must reinstate web pages containing vital information about trans people and other marginalized groups, the Trump administration capitulated — however, officials added a highly misleading disclaimer to them.
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"Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female," the message reads, contradicting global medical standards defining gender and sex. "The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department reject it."
See the statement as it appears on top of the CDC website on LGBTQ+ health disparities here:
The data purge saga began on Jan. 20, the day of President Donald Trump's inauguration, with an Executive Order attacking trans rights and restricting "official agency business, documents, and communications" that even acknowledge trans people's existence. It was coupled with a barrage of policies targeting any federal program or source relating to topics deemed seditious by the White House, such as race, reproductive rights, and the word "equality."
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Then, on Jan. 29, the Office of Personnel Management issued an order censoring materials "that inculcate or promote gender ideology." Using a dragnet approach, public health agencies scrambled to comply — causing what the courts have deemed "irreparable harm." The Trump Administration was forced to reinstate many of the deleted webpages. When they did, they added an unprecedented and outright false pop-up along with it.
This new sidebar on federal websites peddles multiple categorically false claims about gender. There is no absolute, scientific and universal definition for sex, which may often be assigned "male" or "female" at birth based on a doctor's split-second analysis of an infant's external genitals. This brief assessment does not determine or take into account an infant's chromosomal make-up nor internal reproductive organs. Nor does it predict the amount of sex hormones they will produce as they age, which is what drives the development of secondary sex traits such as breast tissue or an Adam's Apple.
It also misleadingly claims that "gender ideology" is something that "harms children" in a way that incorrectly equates transness with so-called "gender ideology." Extremist notions of gender championed by the religious right do in fact cause lasting physical and emotional harm to young people. Acceptance Of trans, intersex and gender nonconforming people is linked to a decrease in suicidality and other mental health problems.
The White House's attack on "gender ideology" is the most recent iteration of a decades-old playbook used to target gender and sexual minorities; it's a fan favorite phrase among anti-trans radicals, who have warped biology, history and science in an attempt to enforce extremist political views of gender onto the general public in spite of the legal and medical framework that would, in theory, hinder this. Human Rights Watch has dubbed the concept of "gender ideology" something of "a Hydra-like global conspiracy myth," evidently originating in the Catholic Church and weaponized worldwide, according to Graeme Reid, the organization's former director of its LGBT Rights Program.
University of Chicago legal scholar Mary Anne Case notes that these "gender theory" crusades also target laws meant to benefit reproductive health, women's rights, and the LGBTQ at-large.
The Trump Administration has repeatedly tried to enshrine such gender disinformation into law. His Jan. 20 order states that a person's legal sex is determined "at conception". But medical experts have pointed out that embryos do not develop sex characteristics until several weeks after conception.
"We refer to conception as fertilization and nobody is male or female at fertilization,” said Dr. Eve Feinberg, a physician at Northwestern University, to NBC. “Everybody has some combination of X and Y chromosomes, but it’s not until nine to 13 weeks that the differentiation of sex organs begins to develop, which is not always a binary ‘male’ or ‘female’ pathway.”
Even Trump's own White House press secretary seemed to contradict the Executive Order establishing a person's sex at conception. During a briefing, she told reporters that the federal government's modus operandi for gendered passports would be based on a person's sex as "decided at birth." Generally, birth actually occurs around nine months after conception.
Perhaps Trump's day one EO had some truth to it after all. "Gender ideology," it declared, "is internally inconsistent."
This article originally appeared on Erin in the Morning.
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