Limbaugh: Trump instincts on 'transgender rights' right on

President Donald Trump (video screenshot)

Progressives are in an uproar because of a leaked report that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is considering dropping Barack Obama's executive order stipulating gender is not determined by biology at birth.

The Obama administration's definition, which cast gender as a matter a person's choice, had significant implication for public facilities such as rest rooms and showers.

The New York Times said the proposed change would establish gender as "biological."

That would overturn an Obama guideline for public schools to allow boys who identify as girls to use the girls' facilities.

The military also has been impacted by the Obama order.

A federal court in Texas halted Obama's order when 24 states challenged it with various lawsuits.

Obama's administration contended that the Title IX references to "sex" include gender identity.

But U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor said Obama didn't have the authority to redefine the word.

"It cannot be disputed," wrote O'Connor, that Congress in the 1960s referenced "sex" to mean "the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined by their birth."

Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh poked fun at the Times' claims that "doctors and scientists abandoned long ago" determining a person's gender by their physical characteristics.

"The idea that you can't determine gender by genitalia is absurd!" he exclaimed.

"Are you kidding me? Determining whether somebody's male or female as determined by a person's genitals is no longer applicable and needs to abandoned because it has been abandoned long ago by sensible scientists?" he scoffed.

"So this is the party of science, the Democrat Party: Science, consensus of scientists and so forth, climate change," he said.

Then he cut to the chase: "You're asking, 'What's going on?' Let me very simply and yet very controversially explain what's going on here. This is all politics. Pure and simple, total politics, disguised as something else. The Democrat Party has embraced all of these various psychological disorders and abnormalities, and is in the process of trying to normalize them all by enshrining them as policy planks or issues in the Democrat Party platform.

"And I really do believe that there are many psychological disorders out there that have been adopted by the Democrat Party as political issues that are then used to join the list of demands on government," he said.

"So it's part and parcel of the left (encapsulated by the Democrat Party) to force what is, by definition, by simple numbers, abnormal, to force that on the rest of society and confer normalcy upon it. And it is primarily to upset and to throw out of kilter what is considered normal or decent as has been popularly understood by people through the ages. It is an attack that is focused on the values that were present at the founding of the country and have survived since that continue to define America’s exceptionalism and greatness."

He said President Trump’s "instincts in this transgender thing are right on the money."

"Why should transgenderism become a major political issue? We're talking about such an infinitesimally small percentage of the American population, and yet it has its own ideology, which was planted and established by the Obama administration way back in 2016."

He continued: "This has been blown up now, and what I mean is you get enough. ... I'm telling you, you get enough unstable groups of people and properly motivate them and convince them that you're gonna get the government to fix this and get even with the people who are mistreating 'em, and you can create — if you think of it this way — a group large enough to join the rest of your coalition that they’ll go out and help you win elections. There’s no doubt what this is, and Trump’s instincts on this are right on the money."

The Daily Signal reported the Trump administration wasn't talking about the allegedly leaked document.

But a spokeswoman at HHS pointed out that the federal judge blocked Obama's definition of "sex."

Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies with the Family Research Council, said members of Congress who prohibited discrimination "on the basis of sex" in employment and public accommodations in 1964, and in education in 1972, did not have transgender identities in mind when they did so.

"It should be perfectly clear that the original legislative intent, based on the plain meaning of the word 'sex' as understood at the time, was to protect people against discrimination because they are biologically female or biologically male," he said.

Sprigg said Congress has the power to change such laws but has not.