Created by The Heritage Foundation, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (famously known as Project 2025) is a book that includes all the policies it wishes to implement in America in hopes that the next Republican President will help enforce these policies for a more conservative administration. One of the policies worth highlighting mentions the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and how sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), including intersex individuals, should be excluded from protections against nondiscrimination based on sex.
Attorney Roger Severino addresses the HHS’ proposed rule for Section 1557, which “prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, age, disability, and sex in covered health programs or activities.” The rule is called “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities,” proposing that “discrimination based on sex includes discrimination based on sex stereotypes; sex characteristics, including intersex traits; pregnancy or related conditions; sexual orientation; and gender identity.” Severino states that “sex is redefined” in this proposed rule.
Contextual Background
The Heritage Foundation’s goal under the Department of Health and Human Services is “Protecting Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity.” This goal mentions how “radical actors” are fostering “harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of ‘gender identity.’” It calls this a “destructive dogma under the guise of ‘equity’” because it “threatens America’s fundamental liberties as well as the health and the well-being of children and adults alike.” From this, one can only suspect that from a conservative perspective, the concept of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) damages the health and welfare of human bodies.
LGBTQ+ Activist Kate Sosin’s article, “The fight to end intersex surgeries at a top hospital took a deep toll on activists,” highlights discrimination and violence experienced by intersex people. In this article, Sosin references multiple cases in which individuals have gone through intersex surgeries without their knowledge. They tell the stories of Sean Saifon Wall and Pidgeon Pagonis, the co-founders of the Intersex Justice Project.
Stories of Intersex Injustice
Wall came from a family that had a genetic intersex condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome, yet he was never aware of this. His mom refused the doctor’s request “to remove [his] undescended testes” and only agreed when the doctor said that it was cancerous. At 14, he had the surgery, yet he never had cancer. It wasn’t until college, while searching online, that he discovered he was intersex.
“I think I felt really suicidal,” he said, referring to people constantly misgendering him. “But I knew that if I took my own life, that no one would ever know what happened to me, and no one would ever know my side of the story.”
(A quote from Sean Saifon Wall in Kate Sosin’s article)
Pagonis had surgeries and exams at six months old and more operations at three or four years of age and ten years of age. They believed they survived ovarian cancer, yet discovered they never had cancer in the first place.
“I didn’t know I had a vaginoplasty, and I didn’t know I was intersex,” Pagonis said. “I did not know I had a castration, and I did not know I had a clitorectomy at that point. I thought I survived cancer.”
(A quote from Pidgeon Pagonis in Kate Sosin’s article)
These series of operations occurred at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, which is where the protests to end intersex surgeries took place. The hospital pledged to end intersex surgeries, a historic milestone for the rights of intersex people. The Intersex Justice Project hopes that other hospitals can do the same.
Looking Forward
The Department of Health and Human Services backs up intersex people in their proposed rule because “discrimination based on anatomical or physiological sex characteristics (such as genitals, gonads, chromosomes, hormone function, and brain development/anatomy) is inherently sex-based.” They add, “If their sex characteristics were different — i.e., traditionally “male” or “female” — the intersex person would be treated differently.” They also support gender identity and sexual orientation in a similar manner, in which all three are “inextricably bound up with sex” and “cannot be stated without referencing sex.” Severino never mentions this in his manifesto. He suggests The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) should restore Trump regulations under Section 1557, clarifying the exclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination based on Congress’s textual approach in the Affordable Care Act.
This policy is one of many that the Heritage Foundation wishes to implement in America with the help of Project 2025.
According to Severino, Project 2025’s agenda is to ensure that policies surrounding Health & Human Services should not confuse “sex with gender identity or sexual orientation” and should “proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care.” If this statement is true, wouldn’t it make sense to include intersex people, along with sexual orientation and gender identity? Individuals expressing these characteristics deserve to be provided with the “life sciences and medical care” along with everyone else.
It appears contradictory for The Heritage Foundation to assert that the Department of Health and Human Services has redefined sex by incorporating a direct quote mentioning intersex individuals and other sex characteristics, especially considering its association with the concept of sex. An administration striving to overturn HHS’s proposed rule and deny these marginalized groups access to essential healthcare jeopardizes the hard-earned rights and freedoms championed by activists such as the Intersex Justice Project.
Sources:
Department of Health and Human Services. “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities.” Federal Register, vol. 87, no. 149, 2022, p. 97.
Severino, Roger. “Department of Health and Human Services.” Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves, Heritage Foundation, 2023, p. 53. Accessed 17 July 2024.
Sosin, Kate. “The fight to end intersex surgeries at a top hospital took a deep toll on activists.” PBS, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-fight-to-end-intersex-surgeries-at-a-top-hospital-took-a-deep-toll-on-activists.