
As of Friday, January 31, the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced in an emergency message sent internally within their department that they will no longer accept changes to sex markers, according to Chris Geidner of the legal website Law Dork.
The SSA keeps track of a person’s sex through a computer database system known as NUMIDENT, the Numerical Identification System. With NUMIDENT, the SSA can keep track of a person’s full name, date of birth, gender, and other data points and assign it to an SSN.
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LGBTQ+ advocates said the Trump administration is “obsessed with controlling every aspect of people’s lives.”
Geidner shared a screen capture of the memo from the Office of Retirement and Disability Policy that states that they will only accept (M) for males and (F) for females as the only applicable markers in the sex data field for NUMIDENT and that any changes from M to F or F to M must not be accepted.
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The memo doesn’t say what to do about people with gender markers labeled X for nonbinary/gender nonconforming people.
The SSA states that these procedures are in response to the executive order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” in which Donald Trump declared that the government will only recognize two sexes, male and female, defined by the reproductive cells a person produces at “conception.”
The U.S. Office of Personal Management released a memorandum a couple of days before the SSA released this message within its departments, ordering all government agencies to comply with the executive order by January 31, that same day the SSA sent out their emergency message.
Before OPM’s order, however, many agencies were complying in advance. Just days after Trump signed the executive order, the SSA removed a section on its website that instructed visitors on how to change their sex identification.
Had it not been for the grace of proactive internet users who began archiving government websites out of anticipation of foreseen censorship, this information would have been lost. The SSA has also removed any mention of sexual orientation and gender identity from its Civil Rights and Compliance page.
Executive orders are not self-executing, and many of Trump’s executive orders could be found unconstitutional or in violation of previously passed laws, as many of them are currently being challenged in court. Many lawmakers and government officials warn that compliance in advance could violate federal law.
One such official is New York Attorney General Letitia James, who wrote to NYU Langone, urging them to continue providing puberty blockers and treatment to transgender youth, as refusing to do so violates anti-discrimination laws in New York.
This came after the leading hospital began turning patients away out of fear of losing funding due to an executive order that threatened to withhold federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming treatments.
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