Bullseye on our backs

\EDITOR’S NOTE: Dallas Voice contacted Log Cabin Republican Dallas President Blaine LeBron for his reaction to President Trump’s executive orders. Read his responses in their entirety here.

GEOFF MULVIHILL, AYANNA ALEXANDER
and KIMBERLEE KRUESI | Associated Press

President Donald Trump on Monday, Jan. 20, within hours of being inaugurated to a second term, signed executive orders rolling back protections for transgender people and terminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government in what he described in his inauguration speech as a move to end efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”

Both are major shifts for the federal policy and are in line with Trump’s campaign promises.

One order declares that the federal government would recognize only two immutable sexes, male and female — despite the fact that science describes gender as a spectrum rather than a binary. The definition will be based on whether people are born with eggs or sperm, rather than on their chromosomes.

The change is being pitched as a way to protect women from “gender extremism.”

Under the order, federal prisons and shelters for migrants and rape victims are to be segregated by sex as defined by the order. And federal taxpayer money can not be used to fund “transition services.”

A small number of federal prison inmates have had gender-affirming surgery and more have had treatments such as hormone therapy paid for with federal funds.
Medicaid in some states covers such treatments, but judges put on hold a Biden administration rule that would have extended that nationally.

While the order does not implement a national bathroom ban for trans people, it does lift requirements that at government facilities and at workplaces that transgender people be referred to using the pronouns that align with their gender. Trump’s team says those requirements violate the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and religion.
Civil rights groups were preparing to challenge Trump’s orders.

Trump also revoked protections for transgender military personnel that former President Joe Biden had signed. There are an estimated 9,000 to 14,000 transgender troops.
A separate order aims to halt federal agencies’ DEI programs.

Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson declared, “We are not going anywhere, and we will fight back against these harmful provisions with everything we’ve got.”
While Trump called his orders to end DEI programs a step toward creating “a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” and a step toward making Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream a reality.”

But Maya Wiley, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Trump’s policies are a step backward. “Dr. King had a dream, and this is his nightmare: the rollback of the work of our civil and human rights coalition over the past 75 years,” she said in a statement.

U.S. Rep. Mark Takano, chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said in a statement that Trump and the federal government “should be working to support all Americans — not singling out transgender and LGBTQI+ people for exclusion.” He also condemned “these attacks on our community” as being “part of a larger strategy by Republicans to use anti-LGBTQI+ attacks to distract Americans from the massive tax cuts they want to give to their billionaire buddies — cuts they are going to pay for by cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”

Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings issued a statement Monday saying, “The impact of these executive actions will be devastating — stripping away health care access, weakening workplace protections from abuse, inviting exclusion and harassment of vulnerable school children and giving a green light to discrimination throughout public life.”

He followed by pledging that Lambda Legal will “explore every legal avenue to challenge these unlawful and unconstitutional actions,” because “This is not only about politics and ideology, but also about real people’s lives. … Our community will not be erased, and Lambda Legal will never stop fighting for justice.”

Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, said her organization “strongly condemns the recent executive orders … attempting to undo important progress.”

Frye noted the “dubious legality” of some of the executive orders, calling the “a dangerous overreach of executive power” that “undermine the principles of freedom, democracy, and fairness upon which this nation was built.”

She continued, “Cloaked in a narrative of ‘equality’ while denigrating the value of diversity, the orders effectively roll back discrimination protections, dismiss barriers experienced by different communities and demonstrate a reckless disregard for the well-being of the American people and the rights of women and families, in particular people of color, immigrants and transgender people.”

“Importantly, these orders, if implemented and left unchallenged, could set a dangerous precedent for future administrations to bypass the legislative process and enact policies that undermine — and in some cases seek to eliminate — constitutional protections,” Frye warned.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a transgender author who teaches at Barnard College in New York, said, “This hurts more than any other moment I can remember.” But, she added, “We’ve been knocked down before. We’ll be knocked down again. All we can do is fight.”

And Transgender Law Center Executive Director Shelby Chestnut said that this is “a very precarious time” for those in the trans communities, who have “become the pawn for political groups that don’t understand our communities.”

But, Chestnut declared, “We will get through this, but we have to step up and support each other.”

Dallas Voice Managing Editor Tammye Nash contributed to this report, which also includes comments from an AP story by David Crary.