Former President Donald Trump touched upon gender-related issues as he addressed supporters at Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida on Saturday evening.
He said that Republicans “believe in two genders”, adding “there are men, and there are women”.
In an apparent reference to the Biden administration, he also said that “you can’t teach the Bible but you can teach children that […] men can get pregnant.”
The remarks followed United States Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine being slammed over “deeply disturbing” calls to “empower” kids to get sex reassignment surgery.
“Trans youth are vulnerable. We really want to base our treatment and to affirm and to support and empower these youth, not to limit their participation in activities such as sports, and even limit their ability to gender affirmation treatment in their state,” Levine, who is transgender ‘herself’, and has lived till 2011 as a biological male, told MSNBC.
This was preceded by the US State Department announcing in late October 2021 that the government would be issuing new passports with an “X” gender designation for those who identify as non-binary, intersex and gender nonconforming. 63-year-old Dana Zzyym, a disabled Navy veteran and intersex activist from Fort Collins, Colorado, became the first to receive such a passport.
In 2018, the New York Times cited a leaked memo by the US Department of Health and Human Services as saying that the government needs to adopt a uniformed definition of gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”
Under the memo, the legal definition of sex would be determined as male or female based on the genitals a person was born with as listed on the person's birth certificate.
“The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence,” the memo reportedly underlined.