President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has dropped a 2016 pro-transgender lawsuit against the state of North Carolina, marking another success for mainstream advocates who wish to preserve normal single-sex facilities and institutions.
The lawsuit was filed in May 2016 by deputies working for President Barack Obama, who was ideologically opposed to any civic or legal recognition that men and women are biologically different as well as legally equal.
That pro-transgender hostility towards biological heterosexuality is deeply unpopular among Americans, who prefer that civic society help women and men cooperate to ensure the next generation is birthed and educated. For example, most Americans recognize that women and men have a civil right to prefer their single-sex institutions, including bathrooms, changing rooms and sports leagues.
The decision to quit the pro-transgender lawsuit was denounced by groups who are trying to impose a nationwide “genderless society” which would suppress any civic or legal recognition of the differences between the two sexes. For example, Chase Strangio, a pro-transgender activist at the ACLU complained that the decision by Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions means “there is no civil rights division” at the agency.
The May 2016 lawsuit was filed then by Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and it demanded that the state’s residents give up their civil right to have single-sex public bathrooms and locker rooms for both biological sexes.
The lawsuit was reinforced by Obama’s directions to the nation’s K-12 schools, which told administrators to accept and support any child’s claim they are transgender, to hide children’s sexual claims from their parents, and to punish other children who decline to use pronouns favored by a “transgender” child — such as “him” or her” – even in science class.
In the lawsuit against North Carolina, Obama’s lawyers claimed single-sex facilities discriminate against men or women who want to live as members of the opposite sex. They insisted that 1970s civil rights laws actually require that a person’s feeling about their maleness or femaleness, dubbed “Gender Identity,” be treated as more important than their actual male or female heterosexual biology. “Transgender men are men — they live, work and study as men. Transgender women are women — they live, work and study as women,” declared Vanita Gupta, the acting assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s civic regulation division, in a May press conference.
Gupta was forced out of the agency after Americans choose Trump as their new president in November. Since then, Obama has twice admitted that his focus on transgender ideology helped Trump win the election.
On Friday, Gupta denounced the Justice Department’s decision.
Despite pressure from business, the establishment and the sports industry, North Carolina’s voters and legislators decided that the state officials will decide who is treated as a legal male or a legal female in the state. They passed HB2 in 2016, and then defeated a business boycott of the state by passing H142 in March 2017.
Both laws were bitterly opposed by transgender activists because they reinforce the existing rules that treat men and women as equal, different and complementary in a heterosexual society, while also allowing people to flip their legal sex once they undergo a medical procedure.
Transgender activists vowed to continue their lawsuit against the state, and their political campaign against the “gender binary.” The state’s HB142 law is being defended in court by a Democratic Attorney General.
It is unclear if the Justice Department will fully switch sides and help defend the state’s pro-heterosexuality HB142 law.
The transgender hostility to heterosexual differences is deeply unpopular among Americans, and only about one-quarter of Americans support the idea that people should be allowed to easily change their legal sex.
The number of transgender Americans is very low. Advocates claim that a third of one percent of Americans are at least somewhat transgender. But a study of the 2010 census showed that only about 1-in-2,400 adults had changed their name from one sex to the other.