The progressive Left’s war on biological reality continues, and frankly, it’s getting kind of weird.
A transgender TikTok influencer named Zaya Perysian just announced a partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the Trump administration after it changed rules around passports and other government documents, no longer allowing people to change their listed sex to whatever they want. Under the Biden-era rules, you could not only put male or female based on whatever you felt, but you could also put an “X” as your sex for “nonbinary.”
For context, Perysian is a transgender woman, in other words, biologically male. Perysian is upset over losing the ability to list “female” incorrectly under passport-designated sex.
“[Trump] does not get to tell me who I am,” Perysian said in a TikTok video announcing the lawsuit. “Only I do.”
“Our clients need to travel for work, school, and family, and forcing them to carry documents that directly contradict what they know about themselves to be true — or withhold those documents altogether — is a blatant effort to violate their privacy and deny them their freedom to be themselves,” ACLU attorney Sruti Swaminathan said about the new case.
In a statement, the ACLU argued, “The State Department’s actions violate transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people’s rights under the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution by unlawfully restricting their freedom of movement, as well as their rights under the Equal Protection Clause by unjustifiably discriminating against them on the basis of their sex.”
It further says Trump’s policy “violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by requiring people to have a sex designation on their passport that conflicts with their identity and potentially outs them to others.”
It’s hard to overstate just how insane all this is.
First, no one’s “freedom of movement” is being restricted. Transgender people can still get a passport and go anywhere they like using it. They just can’t put incorrect or nonsensical information on their documentation anymore.
No matter how people feel about this fact or how they identify, a transgender woman’s biological sex is still male. As evolutionary biologist Colin Wright explained, sex is defined by the orientation of your reproductive system toward the production of sperm or egg, and neither changes to your outward appearance nor how you feel inside literally changes your biological sex.
It would be one thing if activists were asking for an additional marker for “gender identity” to be added to documentation in addition to biological sex. However, they’re demanding to be able to state their sex incorrectly on government forms and somehow claiming that’s a First Amendment right.
This is bizarre and obviously untrue. You have the First Amendment right to make whatever incorrect scientific claims you want about yourself, of course, but there is no constitutional right to have erroneous statements of fact put on to your government identification. For example, a short man cannot demand that the government allow him to list his height as 6’3” simply because of his freedom of speech and identity. That’s not a thing.
These facts are noted in government documents for a reason. They are necessary to identify people correctly, of course, but they’re also necessary so that the government can make distinctions based on biology when that is what’s relevant, for example, in women’s sports or prisons. However, enforcing commonsense distinctions — such as protecting female inmates by keeping biologically male sex offenders out of women’s prisons, for example — becomes basically impossible if people can change their “sex” under the law to whatever they feel like.
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And that’s what’s really so sinister about this silly lawsuit. Even when it eventually gets dismissed, the activist Left’s broader war on biological reality will continue. Almost every Democrat in Congress supports the “Equality Act,” for example, which would erase protections based on biological sex from federal law. This is madness.
Transgender adults, like all Americans, deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and they deserve the freedom to live their lives in whatever way makes them happiest. However, activists cannot demand that we deny basic reality and expect us to go along with it.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.