Report: Trump administration wants a new legal definition of gender

The Department of Health and Human Services is considering establishing under Title IX a legal definition of gender as a biological condition determined by a person's genitalia at birth, The New York Times reports.

Title IX protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive financial assistance from the federal government. The Times obtained a memo, written in the spring, that calls on several government agencies to adopt a single definition of gender "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective, and administrable." In the memo, the department said 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 Obama administration had loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, and if this legal definition proposed by the Trump administration is approved, an estimated 1.4 million Americans who identify as a gender other than the one they were born into may lose federal recognition.

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Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, would not answer questions from the Times about the memo. During the Obama administration, he was head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, and was upset by the administration's expansion of sex to include gender identity, the Times reports.