Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
Less than a week after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the agency rolled out a webpage promoting the Trump administration’s anti-trans executive orders and issued a public guidance asserting that a person’s sex is “unchangeable.”
The webpage, which went live Feb. 19, for HHS’s Office on Women’s Health highlights President Donald Trump’s executive actions defining sex in a manner that excludes transgender, nonbinary and intersex populations, prohibiting trans women and girls from participating in competitive sports, and restricting people younger than 19 from accessing medically necessary gender affirming health care interventions.
“This administration is bringing back common sense and restoring biological truth to the federal government,” Kennedy said in a statement announcing the guidance and the new HHS page. “The prior administration’s policy of trying to engineer gender ideology into every aspect of public life is over.”
The webpage is headlined by a video featuring Riley Gaines, the former NCAA swimmer-turned-right-wing, anti-trans activist. “The executive order keeping men out of women’s sports ensures the next generation of girls has the fair opportunity to compete with the safety, privacy, and equal opportunity they’re entitled to,” she said in the clip.
The Trump-Vance administration’s narrow definition of sex and position that gender affirming care for minors constitutes “child abuse” is disputed not just by the health officials serving under the Biden-Harris administration, but also by the mainstream scientific and medical community.
Multiple federal judges have also weighed in. During a hearing Feb. 18 challenging Trump’s efforts to bar trans people from serving in the military, Judge Ana Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the White House’s assertion that gender is an immutable trait determined only by birth sex was not “biologically correct.”
“There are anywhere near 30 intersex examples,” she said. “Anyone who doesn’t have XX or XY chromosomes is not just male or female, they’re intersex.”
Additionally, last week, two federal judges issued orders temporarily blocking the enforcement of Trump’s executive order restricting medical interventions for transgender youth.
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