In his first few days as Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued new health guidance that defines sex as “unchangeable” in the Trump administration’s latest attack against transgender Americans.
The department released guidance and a new webpage called “Protecting Women and Children” to support President Donald Trump’s executive orders recognizing only two sexes and prohibiting federal funds from going toward gender-affirming care for minors.
“A person's sex is unchangeable and determined by objective biology,” the webpage on the HHS’s Office of Women’s Health site states, adding that surgical interventions and hormones don’t “change a person’s sex because such actions do not change the type of gamete that the person’s reproductive system has the biological function to produce.”
The new guidance defined “sex” as a “person’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
“Female” is defined as “person of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs” while “male” is defined as “a person of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing sperm.”
Recognizing that sex is unchangeable “is essential to ensure the protection of women's health, safety, private spaces, sports, and opportunities,” the webpage states.
The new webpage also features a video by Riley Gaines, a 24-year-old conservative political activist and former University of Kentucky all-American swimmer, who has argued that she lost unfairly in a race because she competed against a transgender woman.
The HHS said its guidance also hopes to support Trump’s executive order aimed at “keeping men out of sports.”
“This administration is bringing back common sense and restoring biological truth to the federal government,” Kennedy said in a statement. “The prior administration’s policy of trying to engineer gender ideology into every aspect of public life is over.”
In response to the new guidance, Matthew Rose, a senior public policy advocate at Human Rights Campaign, told the Washington Post: “It’s deeply concerning that, at a time when thousands of federal health employees are being abruptly laid off without explanation and multiple public health crises break out across the country, HHS is instead focusing its time and taxpayer dollars on anti-science, anti-health PR campaigns.”
Rose added: “This approach is not only ignorant; it’s deliberately harmful.”
The Trump administration’s attempts to roll back transgender protections have already been scrutinized or temporarily blocked by a number of federal courts. A judge last week temporarily blocked Trump’s executive order restricting gender transition care for people under 19.
Trump’s order “seems to deny that this population even exists, or deserves to exist,” the judge wrote. In a separate case concerning Trump’s executive order effectively banning transgender troops from serving in the military, a judge Wednesday asked: “If you were in a foxhole, would you care about these individuals’ gender identity?” The government’s attorney replied that it “would not be a primary concern of mine.”
