What’s a girl?
It’s a query Kamala Harris will ghost except requested at Tuesday’s presidential debate.
And if queried, will she dodge it as Supreme Court docket Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did in her 2022 Senate affirmation listening to, saying, “I’m not a biologist”?
There’s rather more at stake than semantics.
Harris has a commanding lead over Donald Trump amongst feminine voters in every single place, together with the crucial swing states. Her reply would point out if her administration would intestine Title IX protections for ladies’s sports activities and green-light gender ideologues who need kids and adolescents to have simpler entry to medical interventions whereas erecting authorized boundaries between mother and father and youngsters.
Harris, as with many main points, has not expressly addressed gender identification. She’s by no means been placed on the spot to say if she considers biology outdated and an individual’s gender is no matter she or he declares it to be.
That doesn’t imply her place is a secret to her supporters. In her failed 2020 presidential run, she backed a radical program: taxpayer funding for transgender surgical procedures for jail inmates and unlawful immigrants.
Advocates for Trans Equality enthusiastically endorsed her in July. A Slate article concluded that “on trans points, her file is surprisingly constant, particularly in comparison with different politicians” — “she’s been very progressive on this difficulty for 20 years.” The nation’s oldest and largest LGBT publication, The Advocate, declared final month that Harris has “a protracted and robust file of help for LGBTQ+ equality” and would “probably be essentially the most pro-LGBTQ+ president.”
The Biden-Harris administration has proven its help for LGBT+ points by insurance policies permitting gender to trump organic intercourse. On its first day, it issued a landmark government order mandating all federal businesses implement antidiscrimination insurance policies based mostly on “gender id or sexual orientation.”
The Equal Employment Alternative Fee adopted up by issuing expanded pointers for sexual-harassment complaints that included deliberately calling an worker by the improper title or pronoun or denying entry to bogs or different single-sex services to an worker who identifies as a unique gender.
The Biden administration additionally injected gender identification into the landmark 1972 Title IX guidelines banning intercourse discrimination in training. Title IX opened up alternatives for women and girls in athletic competitors. Permitting boys and males who establish as feminine to take part can be the efficient finish of ladies’s sports activities.
And the White Home, conscious of the potential political fallout, has delayed last dedication on the way it will deal with transgender athletes till after the election. However it’s not exhausting to learn the tea leaves for a Harris administration. Home Republicans narrowly superior a measure to dam the Biden gender modifications to Title IX in July, 210-205, with each Democrat voting towards.
In Harris’ native California, the place she served as San Francisco district lawyer and state lawyer normal, authorized protections for gender self-identification have successfully ended the rights of ladies to have protected single-sex areas. Since 2021, male convicts, together with intercourse offenders who establish as ladies, can switch to ladies’s prisons. Would Harris help the appropriate of males who establish as ladies to get housing at shelters for battered ladies?
The vice chairman’s response to “What’s a girl?” would reply different questions too. May a President Harris promote Rachel Levine, America’s first transgender admiral, from assistant well being secretary to Well being and Human Providers chief — making historical past and burnishing her progressive credentials with the primary transgender cupboard officer.
Levine, a member in good standing of the partisan World Skilled Affiliation for Transgender Well being, advocates “gender-affirming care” for minors. WPATH emails made public in litigation in June revealed it was Levine who efficiently lobbied the group to drop its minimal age limits for treating kids with hormones and surgical procedures.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a invoice in July making the Golden State the primary within the nation to bar colleges from notifying mother and father if their kids need to change their pronouns or categorical curiosity in a unique gender. Blocking mother and father from understanding if their kids are enamored with the transgender contagion and concurrently eradicating age limits for medicalizing that curiosity appears a very harmful mixture.
“What’s a girl?” is a straightforward sufficient query. Getting a solution from Harris will present the perfect clue as as to whether she intends to be a president who protects ladies’s rights and people of youngsters and fogeys or as a substitute additional dilute the hard-won rights of organic ladies and encourage gender-affirming take care of minors by embracing a left-wing ideology that somebody’s gender is a matter of ever-changing private choice.
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