The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, under the director of new Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., issued guidance today (Wednesday, Feb. 19) in support of the Trump administration’s executive order to redefine sex, drawing a quick response from transgender rights advocates.
Olivia Hunt, director of federal policy for Advocates for Trans Equality, said in a written statement that since Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, his administration “has been on a mission to undermine well-established civil rights protections for people across the nation, to turn their values of hate, violence, and segregation into the official policies of the United States.”
Hunt continued, “Let me be clear: Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and their conservative think-tank cronies don’t get to tell anyone who they are. Trans people, nonbinary people and intersex people exist. We exist, and there is nothing these extremists can do to erase us.”
Pointing to Kennedy’s claims that the Trump administration “wants to bring back common sense,” Hunt said, “There is no sense more common than knowing how to mind your business.
“The government should not be interfering in our healthcare or our identities,” she added. “We are watchful for further threats to our most basic values of privacy and control over our own bodies.
“Guidance from HHS, just like Donald Trump’s executive order, is not law — nor is it based in reality,” Hunt said. “We remind anyone considering preemptively complying with blatantly discriminatory and unconstitutional policy discriminating against trans and intersex people that they could be inviting potential legal action. Trans and intersex people represent the natural diversity of human beings, and even a basic understanding of biology would be sufficient to debunk the specious and discriminatory claims made in HHS’s guidance.”
— Tammye Nash