I’m 5′-8″. That puts me within one standard deviation of average height for an adult American male but definitely on the low side of average. That fact causes certain limitations on me. For instance, no NBA team would consider me for a position on their roster. Indeed, even if I claimed to be transgendered, I’m still too short to make the cut on a good women’s team. OTOH, there are women’s sports where a man my size could dominate, and we’re beginning to see such men (who probably couldn’t be top-level competitors on a fair playing field) push women out of the winner’s circle. A man just won the NCAA women’s track championship.
Meanwhile, the LGBT activists are up in arms because the Trump Administration has released an updated version of an HHS regulation that recognizes the term “sex” as having a biologically defined meaning. The previous version of the regulation had been changed during the Obama administration to include “gender identity” within the mean of “sex.” This required health insurance companies to pay for transgender-specific services that had previously been considered elective or cosmetic. According to an HHS spokesman, the regulation was revised back to the old wording because “the regulation’s coverage of gender identity and termination of pregnancy was contrary to law and exceeded statutory authority, and that the rule’s harm was felt by health care providers in states across the country.”
The LGBT media is trying to spin that change as allowing hospitals to deny emergency room care and other normal medical services to transgender people. That’s nonsense. In fact, unidentified gender dysphoria can put patients at risk. According to the AP, a hospital’s treatment of a person who presented in the emergency room as an obese male as if “he” were a man resulted in a death. The “man” was pregnant, and the stomach pains were labor pains. Because proper intervention was delayed, the baby died.
People are entitled to live their lives as they wish so long as they don’t adversely impact others. If I wanted to self-identify as a 6′-3″ female basketball center, the world should let me so long as my rejection of Reality doesn’t cause a problem for someone else. But world should not be compelled to humor my fantasy. And the taxpayers certainly shouldn’t subsidize it.
LBGT people should be treated fairly and with the personal dignity all humans deserve. However, the mutual tolerance we should have for one another doesn’t change the stubborn facts of biology. I have a Y-chromosome. I’m male, and barring genetic abnormalities, so is everyone else with a Y-chromosome.
