As hard as the social justice movement tries to erase the meaning of words as we all know them, we’re not quite there yet and the Trump administration’s reversal of an Obama-era rule on healthcare demonstrated that on Friday.
A new rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services undoes a previous one by the Obama administration, which essentially said that the terms “sex” and “gender” are interchangeable, even as liberals have pressed to make a distinction between the two for years.
When Obamacare was passed, it prohibited the discrimination of medical care “on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability.” The Obama administration then said that discrimination on “sex” included “gender,” and therefore any man or woman claiming to identify as the opposite gender was entitled to the same protection. Facilities that performed sex-based procedures, then, could not deny those same services to a transgender person, who, for example, might elect to have her uterus removed as part of transitioning to “male.”
Now the Department of Health and Human Services has decided that, no, anti-discrimination law does not require this.
There will, of course, be legal action to stop the Trump administration’s reversal, but science is not on the social justice crowd’s side and medicine is a science-based field.
Sex is by every measure determined by a person’s biological physical makeup. Reproductive organs determine an individual’s sex, not his or her beliefs, feelings, or dysphoria.
In an ideal, free country, anyone can determine how they want to live, how they want to dress, and what gender pronouns they prefer for themselves. What do you know? We already live in that country!
But it’s entirely something else to demand that science-based professions disregard the exact meaning of words (like “male” and “female”) in order to conduct human experiments deemed unnecessary, perhaps unsafe, and nonetheless, a little shudder-inducing.
That’s what the new rule reversal aims to prevent. When the legal system kicks in, we’ll find out if words still have meaning.
