Then They Came For The LGBTQ Community, All Of Whom Were Someone's Children.

     This morning when I looked at the front page of the New York Times and saw this:

...I felt as if I'd had the wind momentarily knocked out of me. 
        I felt worse after reading the article under the headline.
       According to the article the Trump administration, which has already tried to bar transgenders from the military and take away their rights to health care under the Affordable Care Act, is considering "a government-wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under civil rights law."

      This effort is being led by the Department of Health and Human Services and overseen by Roger Severino, the Department's director of - ironically - the Office of Civil Rights, who, before he was appointed by Trump, was a zealous anti-LGBTQ activist and head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the right-wing Heritage Foundation.  

      The Health and Human Services department contends that government agencies need to adopt a uniform definition of gender and must "define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with."
       This definition would initially be applied to Title IX, the civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in federally-funded education programs, but Health and Human Services is calling on The Departments of Education, Justice, and Labor to likewise adopt its definition in order to establish uniformity in government regulations.
           And if the Justice Department rules that everyone must be defined as either male or female based strictly to the genitals they were born with, then this rule can be enforced across all government agencies.
         According to the Times, this new ruling would "eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into."
          In other words, when it to came to protected civil rights and human rights, transgenders would cease to exist and so would their rights. They'd have no laws on their side protecting them from discrimination, sexual harassment or sexual assault. How could they have any laws on their side when legally they don't exist?
         It's likely that I'm more outraged than most Americans with a shred of decency are outraged by this latest act of inhumanity by the Trump Administration; and in truth I'm more frightened than outraged.    
         Because for me this is  not just a matter of conscience, of justice, of doing unto others as I would have them do unto me, of being my brothers' and sisters' keepers;

       For me this is about the ones I love.

      I can't protect or save them alone; please, every American who reads this, please don't let this happen to our country.
        Please don't let this happen to my child.

References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html

https://www.advocate.com/politics/2018/10/22/meet-roger-severino-trump-bigot-working-erase-trans-people