Doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers launch petition to define gender by biology in the law
Physicians, psychiatrists, and attorneys are applauding a recently proposed Trump administration memo to define gender in the law based on biology, effectively scrapping "gender identity," and are asking federal agencies to follow through with it.
Their petition, which was launched last week and has already garnered over 7,000 signatures, asks the secretaries of the departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services to preserve the legal definition of "sex" because doing otherwise is destructive, they say, particularly to women and girls.
In 2017 the Trump administration notably reversed course on governmental actions taken in the final year of former president Obama's term that enshrined aspects transgender ideology into federal policy.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
"Sex is not a spectrum; congenital disorders are not additional sexes. The final result of sex development in humans is unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time," the petition asserts.
"'Intersex' is a term that encompasses a variety of congenital disorders of sex development that result in sex ambiguity and/or a mismatch between sex chromosomes and appearance. These disorders occur in less than 0.02 percent of all births. A spectrum is defined as 'a continuous distribution' or a distribution in which 'no specific outcome is more likely than others.' Clearly, the existence of rare disorders of sex development do not constitute a sex spectrum."
What is known as "gender identity" is not a trait found anywhere in the body, brain, or DNA, the petition stresses, but "an awareness of, and comfort level with, one's physical body."
"Gender identity may be factually correct or factually incorrect, and, unlike sex, may change. Children with gender dysphoria, for example, will come to identify with their biological sex in 61-98 percent of cases by adulthood. There is also a rise in the number of adults who seek surgery to reverse their past sex reassignment surgeries."
Dr. Andre Van Mol, a board-certified physician based in Redding, California was the lead author of the petition and told The Christian Post in a Monday interview that the move was initiated by a fellow colleague on a task force he serves on who is a male to female transitioner and regrets doing what he did to his body.
"People across the political spectrum are increasingly understanding that it is impossible to protect women’s rights when it becomes forbidden to define what a woman is," Van Mol explained.
"Look at what is happening with women’s sports, women’s shelters, and even women’s incarceration centers. Now, any biological male who claims trans ideation can engage any of those contexts. It doesn’t take that much effort to find a biological male who will be stronger, faster, and more aggressive than a given female in any given sport," he added, mentioning a number of championships in girls and women sports where males have won the titles.
Signers of the petition include, Michael Farris, president, CEO, and general counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom; Dr. Michelle Cretella, executive director of American College of Pediatricians; and Dr. Paul McHugh, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, among others.
The petition also highlights the dangers and increased likelihood of assault when men are permitted to enter spaces reserved for females.
"We have also seen reports of biological male rapists placed in women’s detention centers and proceed to rape the women. The same has happened in women shelters. Imagine the horror for a woman who is in a woman’s shelter quite usually to avoid violence from a man only to be assaulted by biological male in that same shelter," Van Mol said.
"Trans ideation is a serious problem. It requires our compassion and proper treatment, but compassion is not enablement or codependency, and compassion does not occur by making door mats out of women and girls."
