Joe Biden Era Puts Transgender Rights Atop Newsroom Agendas—Specifically Religion News

Joe Biden, the second Catholic President of the United States. Creative Commons Image.

Religion Unplugged believes in a diversity of well-reasoned and well-researched opinions. This piece reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily represent those of Religion Unplugged, its staff and contributors.

(OPINION) Among American "social issues," freedom of abortion is long-settled as a matter of law, so foes largely nibble at the edges. Courtroom victories for gays and lesbians have put dissenters on the defensive seeking to protect conscience claims.

Meanwhile, in the Biden-Harris era the transgender debate – emotion-laden, multi-faceted and religiously weighty – is moving to the top of the news agenda. {I admit at the start he brings no psychological insight to this complex terrain and has personal knowledge of only two such situations.}

Democrats' zeal is the major new factor. President Joe Biden has said that he believes "transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise." Last year, Donald Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch made the case for "gender identity" rights in the Supreme Court's Bostock ruling, but this covered only secular employment. During his first hours in office, President Biden issued an executive order that extends this outlook across the board.

The president declared, for instance, that school kids shouldn't have to worry about their "access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports," nor should adults be mistreated "because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes." He directed each government agency to spend the next 100 days reframing all gender policies accordingly.

Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, elected leader of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, immediately responded that on this and other matters like abortion, America's second Catholic president "would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity." Chicago's Cardinal Blasé Cupich assailed Gomez's Inauguration Day statement as "ill-considered." (Click here for GetReligion post and podcast on this topic.)

Then New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan and four other chairmen of bishops' committees jointly declared that by reaching beyond the Supreme Court ruling Biden "needlessly ignored the integrity of God's creation of the two complementary sexes, male and female," and threatened religious freedom. This protest echoed the 2019 Vatican pronouncement "Male and Female He Created Them (.pdf here).”

A second Biden executive order Feb. 4 defined the new "LGBTQI+" approach in U.S. foreign policy. He directed 15 Cabinet departments and agencies to press other countries to comply with America's new stance, using diplomacy and, as needed, financial sanctions or visa restrictions. The State Department is to report annually on problem nations.

Those commitments combine with heavy support among Democrats (who control both chambers of Congress and the executive branch) for the proposed "Equality Act" and similar "Do No Harm Act." These bills would bar dissenters from relying on the Bill Clinton era law (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) that says the Constitution's "free exercise" of religion guarantee can only be restricted when it’s the "least restrictive means" to further "a compelling governmental interest."

Three "cancel culture" flaps offer further evidence of newsworthiness.

Robert A.J. Gagnon of Houston Baptist University, whose "The Bible and Homosexual Practice" is conservatives' major scholarly work on that question, was temporarily blocked by Facebook for criticizing Facebook's ban against a transgender skeptic. Twitter banished evangelical Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine for referring to "a man who believes he is a woman."

An American Civil Liberties Union official, Target stores and Amazon.com joined efforts to limit U.S. sales of "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" by journalist Abigail Shrier. This work, lauded by The Economist and the London Times, does not oppose adult transitions but expresses alarm at the 1,000% increase in teen girls seeking identity change through hormones, surgery or breast-binding.

Thus, the GetReligion question: Is this a religion beat story?

Ryan Anderson, president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of "When Harry Became Sally," argues that the issue "is not primarily about religious liberty, or religion at all." Rather, he asserts, all citizens are affected by violations of "the bodily integrity of children" and of "private female spaces," challenges to "fair competition" in athletics and attempts to redefine "basic truths of human nature."

As Anderson indicates, the current debate has at least five facets, Biden's removal of President Trump's military service limitation, competition by female-identifying athletes aided by male bodies, privacy and safety when biological males use female locker rooms and rest rooms, physicians worried about the ethics of the treatments Shrier decries and then the less-discussed philosophical factor. That involves the longstanding scripture-based culture of Judaism, followed by Christianity, followed by Islam, followed by much of the world, which is resolutely "binary," built upon the two sexes.

Pope Francis, often regarded as liberal in media reports, summarized the problem in a 2017 address. "The recent proposal to advance the dignity of a person by radically eliminating sexual difference and, as a result, our understanding of man and woman, is not right. … The utopia of the 'neuter' eliminates both human dignity in sexual distinctiveness and the personal nature of the generation of new life."

Added practical note for journalism: Transgender advocates want the media to always say that unwanted gender was "assigned" at birth, not the result of DNA. Except for rare cases, newborns' gender is not a decision by parents, or physicians, or society, but imposed by nature through genetics and morphology.

Partisan terminology to promote one side of a contested issue is always problematic for the news media, which means that this debate will continue.

Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for the Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.