The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives passed the Equality Act this summer, but it stalled in the Senate. Undeterred, progressives have been trying to insert their gender dogma wherever else they can, including the $3.5 trillion tax-and-spend bill and HR 2119, which is the barely noticed Family Violence and Prevention Services Improvement Act.
As its name suggests, the Family Violence and Prevention Services Improvement Act is meant to update a 1984 law designed to help victims of domestic violence and their dependents.
Many of these updates are uncontroversial. But if you read closely, gender activists are trying to legally redefine sex, making it harder to maintain public facilities specifically for female victims of violence.
Redefining Sex
Expanding the definition of sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity has been a progressive hobby horse since at least 2016. That’s when the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights under former President Barack Obama redefined sex under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare—to mean male, female, neither, or any other combination.
Former President Donald Trump set aside this transgender mandate, but President Joe Biden promptly revived it. Fortunately, a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the mandate on Aug. 9.
Gender activists, however, are persistent. The same semantic move pops up again in HR 2119.
In an unassuming section on how money will be granted to states, the proposal redefines bans on sex discrimination to include ‘‘sexual orientation or gender identity.” Democrats mangled the English language by redefining sex to include those terms.
The section they want to amend cites Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in any school program that receives federal funding. The section also cites Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which covers all entities that receive federal funding.
The language is designed to give gender ideology a toehold in education and any place that receives federal money. When anti-discrimination laws were passed in the 1960s and 1970s, they did not include a relativist view of sex—which is of very recent vintage.
On the contrary, sex discrimination laws have always reflected the reality of sex grounded in biology. Even the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision claiming transgender status under Title IX presumed a sex binary.