Is Trump defining transgenders out of existence?

So apparently the President has offered a memo that would clarify the definition of "sex" to be limited to the biological chromosomal sex that exists when someone is born. From a pure biological standpoint this generally means (unless you are one of the 0.05% who are born intersex) male or female.

I have heard everything from this being an act of war, to a human rights violation, to a hate crime, and I am sure it won't be too long till someone will find a way to compare it to something done by Hitler.

But what exactly are we talking about here?

Well all of this has to do with the federal enforcement of Title IX of the Civil Right's act.

As we all know by now, Title IX is an important law that bans any discrimination based on the "sex" of a person. Title IX has led to many forms of policies that require equal opportunities for both men and women. The one area that has endured widespread notoriety and much controversy over the years, has been the requirement for schools to offer the same amount of athletic activities for both men and women.

While the law itself does not "define" the sexes as male or female, it does use the term "both sexes" within the law. The language unequivocally implies that the law sees sex as male and female. There can be no question of that.

The bigger problem is that Title IX of the Civil Rights act does not include, and in some cases could not, accommodate the concept of "multiple genders". For instance, by the letter of the law as it is written, schools could no longer offer sports programs to either men or women, unless they also offered the same amount of sports programs to those who would define themselves as transgender or the gender of "X".

So why are we even having this discussion at this time? Because the previous administration offered executive "guidance" that suggested Title IX protected the rights of transgender students to identify with whatever sex that they wanted, and participate in whatever gender specific activity they wanted. The "guidance" also included additional protections from discrimination for those who considered themselves transgender.

Now, we can all differ about whether or not this particular guidance is within the spirit of the law, and whether or not transgender people should be protected under the laws of our land. I certainly have sympathy for what the Obama administration was attempting to accomplish with their guidance. Certainly there was no malicious intentions or anything nefarious going on.

But the reality is that Title IX is not a subjective law about the 2018 fluidity of our genders. In fact, the term gender was never used. This was purely about providing women with the same opportunities provided to men. It was designed to eliminate institutional sexism that favored men over women in many social, school, and work related situations.

What the Obama administration did, may have been a worthy cause, but simple does not exist within the writings of Title IX. As the executive, it's the President's job to follow and execute the laws as they are written. I think we can all see the dangers of allowing Presidents and their executive staff to rewrite laws as they go, in order to conform with the social and political viewpoints that they believe are socially and politically correct today.

In other words, if you allow Obama to simply change laws to fit his views, then you would also have to allow Trump to do the same thing.

So, in essence, what Trump is doing on this particular issue is specifically what Trump has been doing all along. He is undoing executive actions that he feels were outside of the boundaries of what the Presidency should be doing. From a technical standpoint, what either Obama or Trump "feel" about what Title IX should or shouldn't do is not relevant to what their job really is. Their job is to enforce and apply the laws as congress wrote them.

So the solution is simple here. If we would like to protect the fluid nature of "genders" that we have today, then we need to either rewrite Title IX or offer new laws to guarantee those protections. But we should never allow our executive branch to simply override the written laws with their own "guidance".