(LifeSiteNews) — After alerting the public last week to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) newly issued transgender pronoun mandate, Roger Severino, the former director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights during the Trump administration, has published the document online after HHS failed to make it public, refusing even to disclose the policy to Congress.
The “Gender Identity Non-Discrimination and Inclusion Policy for Employees and Applicants” requires HHS’ 80,000 employees to affirm transgender and non-binary coworkers’ self-proclaimed “identity,” no matter what his or her conscience might dictate.
Severino summarized the policy on X (formerly Twitter):
Although I broke the story on HHS’s unlawful transgender employee pronoun mandate last week, it still refuses to disclose the policy to Congress, so here it is. To summarize, HHS requires facilities with showers and changing rooms be open to people of the opposite sex based on their say so, and women who “feel uncomfortable” are the ones who have to leave the facilities.
Employees who repeatedly decline to use a person’s preferred pronouns, regardless of their actual sex, can be deemed to have contributed to an unlawful, hostile, and discriminatory environment. Which means resisters will be fired.
It makes no mention of 1st Amendment rights against compelled speech or of free religious exercise, RFRA, or religious accommodation.
The policy covers “visitors,” which means anyone who steps foot into an HHS facility or program now has to comply. WiIl you?
Although I broke the story on HHS’s unlawful transgender employee pronoun mandate last week, it still refuses to disclose the policy to Congress, so here it is. To summarize, HHS requires facilities with showers and changing rooms be open to people of the opposite sex based on… pic.twitter.com/R4FPZhnzVP
— Roger Severino (@RogerSeverino_) October 19, 2023
HHS employees will be made to accept recently coined woke terms
The bewildering science, nature, and reality-challenged document claims that “For some individuals, sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation are not static and can change,” before providing a glossary of recently coined woke terms — or redefined old ones — including:
- Cisgender: a term used to describe a person whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.
- Gender: a social construct of identities, norms, behaviors, and roles that vary between societies and over time.
- Gender Expression: how a person acts, dresses, speaks, and behaves (i.e., feminine, masculine, androgynous). Gender expression does not necessarily correspond to assigned sex at birth, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
- Gender Identity: an individual’s internal sense of self and gender, whether that is man, woman, neither, both, or something else. Unlike gender expression, gender identity is not always outwardly visible to others. For some people, gender identity aligns with one’s sex assigned at birth (i.e., cisgender); for others, it does not (e.g., transgender, gender non-conforming, agender, and gender fluid). Gender identity differs in varying degrees from the sex assigned at birth.
- Gender Transition: the process of changing the gender presentation, representation, or sex characteristics to accord with an internal sense of gender identity.
- Gender Non-conforming: denoting or relating to a person whose behavior or appearance does not conform to prevailing cultural and social expectations on what is appropriate to the gender. Other terms that may be used are genderqueer or non-binary.
- Genderqueer: a person who does not subscribe to conventional gender distinctions but identifies with neither, both, a combination of male and female genders, or something else.
- Gender Transition: the process a transgender person chooses to undergo to align with their gender identity. Transitioning can include any, none, or all the following: telling friends, family, and co-workers; changing their name and pronouns; updating legal documents; medical interventions such as hormone therapy; or surgical intervention, often called gender-affirming surgery.
- LGBTQI+: an acronym often used as an umbrella term referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.
- Non-binary: a term used to describe people who do not describe themselves or their genders as fitting into the binary categories of man or woman.
- Transgender: a term that describes a person whose gender identity or expression differs from the sex assigned at birth and societal and cultural expectations around sex. The term “transgender woman” or “trans woman” typically refers to someone assigned male at birth but identifies as female. Likewise, the term “transgender man” or “trans man” typically refers to someone who was assigned female at birth but who identifies as male. A person does not need to undergo a medical procedure to be considered transgender. Furthermore, not all individuals whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth use the term transgender to describe themselves.
- Sex Assigned at Birth: the sex (male, female, intersex) assigned to a child at birth, most often based on the child’s external anatomy.
Accepting these terms requires HHS’s tens of thousands of employees to suppress what their eyes see and their intellect tells them about the small minority of “trans” individuals employed at the agency.
Using the ‘wrong pronouns’ is ‘unlawful discrimination, harassment’
HHS managers and supervisors are now charged with ensuring “employees are aware of what kinds of behavior are considered unlawful discrimination or harassment” and to make clear that “employees are aware of the consequences of unlawful behavior.”
This is an unveiled threat to employees who chose not to genuflect to the HHS pronoun mandate that they will lose their jobs.
Unsurprisingly, there is no mention at all of protections from harassment for “detransitioning” HHS employees, an increasingly common choice for many individuals who experience sex-change regret.
From Day One, the Biden administration has sought to ride roughshod over the morals of American citizens, demanding to the greatest extent possible that citizens, whether adults or children, suppress their consciences and use nonsensical pronouns to describe individuals suffering from gender dysphoria.
The HHS defies science
According to modern biology, sex is rooted in an individual’s chromosomes and reflected by hundreds of genetic characteristics.
While the terms “sexual identity” and “transgender” are so commonly used that they go unquestioned and are perceived to have been derived from biological or medical science, they are not. These terms are merely expressions of desire, behavior and self-acquired/expressed identity, all of which can be fluid and may change over time.
The only thing that science actually tells us is that we are born either male or female: undeniable, irrefutable biological and psychological truth. We are either men or women.
In addition to denying scientific reality, coercing individuals to recognize an individual’s gender dysphoria as “gender identity” coerces Christians and Jews to contradict Genesis 1:27, which teaches that God created both sexes in His image.