Is the Transgender Person My Neighbor?

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
Luke 10:29-32

In what we call “The Parable of the Good Samaritan,” Jesus defines what it means to be a neighbor. And along the way he defines what we mean by “privilege.”

Privilege is the ability to pass by on the other side.

Yesterday the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is planning to adopt a rigid definition of gender as a biologically determined status that is fixed at birth by the genitalia with which a person is born. The effect of this change in terms of government policy would be to define transgender Americans out of existence.

According to a memo obtained by the Times, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Health and Human Services is arguing that government agencies must adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

Sex would be defined as either male or female and fixed at birth:

The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition of gender would be the most consequential in a series of actions taken by the Trump administration to exclude transgender people from civil rights protections and rescind recent governmental policies designed to extend them. The Times reports that the Trump administration “has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.”

Catherine E. Lhannon, who served as head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under President Obama said, “This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees.”

Roger Severino, who now heads the Civil Rights Office of HHS has been critical of the efforts made by President Obama to increase protections for transgender Americans. Mr. Severino previously led the Devos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation and had opposed the expansion of protections under Title IX to include gender identity, calling it a “radical gender ideology.” 

Severino described the steps taken by the Obama administration as the “culmination of a series of unilateral, and frequently lawless, administration attempts to impose a new definition of what it means to be a man or a woman on the entire nation.”

“Transgender people are frightened,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign. “At every step where the administration has had the choice, they’ve opted to turn their back on transgender people.” 

After the New York Times article was published online, transgender people posted pictures of themselves on social media with the hashtag #WontBeErased

There are approximately 1.4 million Americans who identify as transgender. In a nation of 330 million that’s barely 4 tenths of a percent. 

The rest of us can just cross the road and pass by on the other side.

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