[Read more about the L.G.B.T. community’s reaction to the proposal.]

The Department of Health and Human Services has called on the “Big Four” agencies that enforce some part of Title IX — the Departments of Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, and Labor — to adopt its definition in regulations that will establish uniformity in the government and increase the likelihood that courts will accept it.

The definition is integral to two proposed rules currently under review at the White House: One from the Education Department deals with complaints of sex discrimination at schools and colleges receiving federal financial assistance; the other, from health and human services, deals with health programs and activities that receive federal funds or subsidies. Both regulations are expected to be released this fall, and would then be open for public comment, typically for 60 days. The agencies would consider the comments before issuing final rules with the force of law — both of which could include the new gender definition.

Civil rights groups have been meeting with federal officials in recent weeks to argue against the proposed definition, which has divided career and political appointees across the administration. Some officials hope that health and human services will at least rein in the most extreme parts, such as the call for genetic testing to determine sex.

After more than a year of discussions, health and human services is preparing to formally present the new definition to the Justice Department before the end of the year, Trump administration officials say. If the Justice Department decides that the change is legal, the new definition can be approved and enforced in Title IX statutes, and across government agencies.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the draft health and human services proposal. The Justice Department has not yet been asked to render a formal legal opinion, according to an official there who was not authorized to speak about the process.

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s previous decisions on transgender protections have given civil rights advocates little hope that the department will prevent the new definition from being enforced. The proposal appears consistent with the position he took in an October 2017 memo sent to agencies clarifying that the civil rights law that prohibits job discrimination does not cover “gender identity, per se.”</s>Trans People Say They #WontBeErased As Trump Administration Mulls Defining 'Sex'

Enlarge this image toggle caption Tasos Katopodis/Bloomberg via Getty Images Tasos Katopodis/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Updated at 5:15 pm ET

A memo that has reportedly been circulating at the Department of Health and Human Services aims to narrow the federal government's definition of "sex" under Title IX â a change that could leave transgender people without a number of the legal protections that have become standard in recent years.

The memo reported on by The New York Times has not been released publicly. NPR has not seen it, and HHS says it does not comment on "alleged leaked documents."

But the potential impact of the policies described in the memo, and the headline under which The Times ran its story â 'Transgender' Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration â inspired grave fears and fervent protest.

People gathered in New York City's Washington Square Park on Sunday evening to rally for trans rights, and protesters on Monday rallied in front of the White House holding signs that declared, "We will not be erased."

Many trans people began posting photos of themselves to social media, using the hashtag #WontBeErased.

"We're here. We're loud. We're not going anywhere. #WontBeErased," tweeted the National Center for Transgender Equality.

The Times reports that the document was written in the spring and proposes that different government agencies adopt a unified definition of sex â specifically one that defines it as determined "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable."

"The agency's proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with," The Times reports, based on the draft seen by its reporters. "Any dispute about one's sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing."

Title IX is the federal law passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex "under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." The term "sex" refers to gender, which has since been expanded under the law to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

It's not clear who drafted the memo, but The Times reports that it is part of an effort by the HHS to establish a uniform definition accepted by the four agencies that enforce Title IX: the departments of education, justice, HHS and labor.

At the White House on Monday, President Trump was asked about his earlier promise to protect transgender Americans and others in the LGBTQ community.

"We're looking at it," Trump replied. "We have a lot of different concepts right now. They have a lot of different things happening with respect to transgender right now."

"I'm protecting everybody," he added. "I want to protect our country."

"I am a #transgender person. I am livid but clear-headed. I am threatened but absolutely resolute. @transequality will always fight," wrote Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

"I know folks are scared and hurt. So am I. We are working to stop this and we will never give up. The courts are scary. The administration is scary. This world is scary. We still have tools. I am here. I see your beautiful humanity. And I love you," tweeted Chase Strangio, an attorney with the ACLU's LGBT and AIDS Project.

The Trump administration already has taken steps to try to disqualify most transgender people from serving in the military.

Earlier this month, the State Department implemented a policy denying visas to same-sex partners of foreign diplomats and the staff of U.S.-based international organizations if they are not legally married. Many of the affected couples are from countries where same-sex marriage is illegal.

NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak contributed to this report.</s>In a move that stands to substantially roll back transgender rights, the Trump administration may narrow its definition of gender. According to a new report from The New York Times, Trump's Department of Health and Human Services has proposed narrowing government agencies' definition of gender to a fixed biological state determined by the genitalia an individual has at birth.

In a draft memo obtained by The Times, the Department of Health and Human Services pushed to add a legal definition of the word sex to Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities receiving federal funding. According to The Times, they proposed that government agencies uniformly define an individual's sex "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable."

Under the administration's proposed definition of gender, sex would be defined as unchangeable and either male or female as determined by birth. What's more, disputes over an individual's gender could, under the agency's proposed definition, only be settled via genetic testing.

"Sex means a person's status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth," The Times reported the memo said. "The sex listed on a person's birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person's sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence."

In defining a person's sex as unchangeable and determined at birth, the Trump administration stands to not only roll back protections for those who identify as transgender but also, as The Times pointed out, "eradicate federal recognition" of an already marginalized population. In 2016, a study from The Williams Institute found that an estimated 1.4 million adults in the United States are transgender.

This isn't the first time the Trump administration has moved to roll back Obama-era protections for transgender people. In May, the Justice Department announced it would drop an Obama-era rule designed to protect transgender inmates. Under Obama, the Bureau of Prisons had a policy of recommending housing assignments based on gender identity when appropriate. Under Trump, the bureau adopted a policy of assigning housing and bathrooms based on an inmate's "biological sex" and considering gender identity "only in rare cases."

And in March, the Trump administration largely barred transgender people from serving in the military. A White House memorandum announced that Secretary of Defense James Mattis had established a policy stating "transgender persons with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria — individuals who the policies state may require substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery — are disqualified from military service except under certain limited circumstances."

But LGBTQ advocacy organizations are expected to push back against the Trump administration's latest proposal. "This administration is willing to disregard the established medical and legal view of our rights and ourselves to solidify an archaic, dogmatic, and frightening view of the world," Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in a statement Sunday. "This transparent political attack will not succeed administratively, legally, or morally."

Keisling characterized the proposed policy as an attempt to effectively abandon transgender people's right to equal health care, housing, education, and fair treatment under the law. "Transgender people have fought rules like this one in federal and state court and won. We have stood toe-to-toe with administrators, legislatures, and executives who would agree with this rule and yet we won," Keisling said. "We know how to defeat this, and we will do everything we can until every transgender person feels secure in their rights under the law."</s>The Trump administration may be considering redefining gender as an unchangable condition determined solely by a person's biology, according to a leaked memo draft obtained by The New York Times.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services argued in the drafted memo, which has not been seen by NBC News, that the government needs to adopt a uniformed definition of gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable,” the Times reported.

The memo has allegedly been circulating since last spring, according to the Times, and would be subject to change.

If enacted as written in the memo, the legal definition of sex under Title IX, which prevents gender discrimination, would be determined as male or female based on the genitals a person was born with as listed on the person's birth certificate. Disputes would have to be settled using genetic testing, according to the Times.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth. The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence,” the Times reported the memo as saying.

In response to the Times' story, a Health and Human Services spokesperson said, “We do not comment on alleged leaked documents.”

During the Obama administration, the legal concept of gender was less stringent in federal programs and allowed individuals for the most part to choose how they identified, rather than a person's sex being determined by what they were assigned at birth.

If the memo were to become a policy, protections and federal recognition for the approximately 1.4 million people in America who recognize themselves as a gender other than what they were assigned at birth would be eliminated, according to the Times.

Activists in the LGBTQ community and those who identify as transgender posted on social media about the fears the memo triggered. Many began using the hashtag "#WontBeErased" in condemning the drafted memo.

"Make no mistake, trans people are under direct attack from the Trump administration — but we #WontBeErased. We're here. You can't define us out of existence," wrote the National Center for Transgender Equality, which said it planned to rally in front of the White House on Monday.

Lambda Legal, a national legal organization advocating for LGBTQ rights, wrote, "Transgender folks: You are valid. You matter. You are loved. We will not stop fighting for your rights and you #WontBeErased by this heartless administration. #TransRightsAreHumanRights."

Chase Strangio, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote on Twitter, "I know folks are scared and hurt. So am I. We are working to stop this and we will never give up. The courts are scary. The administration is scary. This world is scary. We still have tools. I am here. I see your beautiful humanity. And I love you."

This not the first time the Trump administration has challenged protections for transgender and non-binary Americans.

On March 23, President Donald Trump said he would endorse a plan by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to restrict the military service of transgender people. The policy replaced an outright ban on transgender service members that Trump announced last year on Twitter, citing concern over military focus and medical costs.

A U.S. court later ruled the administration could not enforce the updated policy. A court had already ruled that Trump could not enforce his initial proposal of an outright ban, and that decision was appealed to a higher court.

The Trump administration also scrapped a policy instated by the Obama administration that sided with transgender students in their choice of school bathrooms.</s>Over the course of the Obama administration, several government policies or legal interpretations were put into place that resulted in explicit civil rights protections for transgender individuals. For example, on 13 May 2016 the Department of Education’s Civil Rights office released a “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students” stipulating that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (which prohibits sex discrimination at institutions of higher education that receive federal financial aid) also applied to discrimination based on gender identity:

Along with similar rules articulated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with respect to Obamacare, such recognition represented the final stage in the evolution of how the federal government recognized transgender civil rights during the Obama administration. In a broad sense, the Obama-era stance was that Title IX (and also Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) applied to gender identity, not necessarily only biologically-defined sex. But the Trump administration rescinded the Dear Colleague letter in February 2017.

In May 2016, prior to Donald Trump’s presidency, Roger Severino — then the “director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation” — argued in a Daily Signal piece that the Obama-era changes represented a “radical gender ideology.” Now, as part of Trump’s administration, Severino is head of the Health and Human Services Civil Rights Office overseeing how the Federal government interprets those same policies.

In a 21 October 2018 article, the New York Times described HHS as “spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX.” According to a memo described (but not published) by the Times, the HSS (in coordination with other departments) effectively planned to reverse Obama-era moves by explicitly defining gender as binary and determined at birth:

This memo, the Times reported, came in advance of two proposed rules, one from HHS and one from the Department of Education, that the federal government planned on releasing for public comment in the fall of 2018.

The memo’s contents were met with immediate condemnation by many LGBTQ and human rights groups, who feared that the aim of a strict definition of gender was to define transgender individuals out of existence. Widespread protests followed the Times reporting, and the hashtag “#WontBeErased” began trending on Twitter as demonstrations took place around the U.S.

Such a rule could limit the ability of transgender individuals to claim discrimination based on gender identity, and could exclude them from civil rights protections they had been afforded under President Obama:

This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone. The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.

Recent estimates suggest that between 1 million and 1.4 million people identify as transgender in the United States, and several critics have noted the scientific untenability of the ideas floated in the memo with regard to genetic testing to determine gender. Such testing does not always produce accurate results and cannot account for certain cases of intersex individuals whose chromosomally-determined gender does not match their physical manifestations of gender. A commentary piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association articulated these issues in the context of testing athletes for gender in 2000:

In other words, the science that the federal government has floated as a way to enforce binary gender determinations is not actually rooted in a good faith understanding of that science, and it still cannot account for the biological reality that gender is at times ambiguous even when using the scientific tests they advocate for.

In terms of its potential effect on the civil rights claims of trans individuals, the HHS memo was similar to a 4 October 2017 Department of Justice memo from Attorney General Jeff Sessions titled “Revised Treatment of Transgender Employment Discrimination Claims Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” In that latter memo, Sessions made explicit that his Department of Justice did not consider gender identity to be protected as a basis for employment discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights act:

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had released a Justice Department memo in 2014 directing all offices “that the protection of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extends to claims of discrimination based on an individual’s gender identity, including transgender status.” Title VII of the Civil Rights act prohibits employment discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” “age”, and disability status. Sessions’ memo reversed the Obama-era interpretation of “sex”.

Human Rights Watch has called on Congress to pass legislation that makes explicit the civil rights of trans people assumed under the Obama administration:

The new rules from HHS and the Department of Education, yet to be released officially, will likely be challenged in court if they are implemented.</s>The Trump administration is poised to revoke the rights and protections guaranteed to some 1.4 million Americans who identify as transgender by redefining the legal definition of gender under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans discrimination in education on the basis of gender. This is according to the New York Times, which obtained a memo being circulated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that reportedly urges key government agencies, including the departments of Education, Justice and Labor, to follow their lead by seeking to define gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

According to the Times, DHHS plans to present the new definition to the Justice Department before the end of the year. If adopted, the change would effectively roll back policies enacted by the Obama administration which updated the legal concept of sex in federal programs, including Title IX, to reflect an inclusive understanding of gender identity as determined by an individual’s choice, not biological attributes at birth. If enacted, the change wouldn’t impact state laws or services, like, for example, New York City’s recently approved third gender option on birth certificates for trans adults, a change which makes it easier to amend other official documents and forms of ID.

“Their little scheme as laid out in that memo seems to indicate that they really have a childlike, 1940s view of sex and gender,” Mara Keisling, the executive director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, tells Rolling Stone. “They really seem to think everybody has very typical genitalia, everybody has a very typical chromosomal markers. And that isn’t the case. There’s a whole range of people who don’t fit into that and they seem to just be disregarding them. They wanted to find a definition that was administrational and this is clearly not. Their whole thing about genetic testing? That stuff just isn’t possible.”

While HHS officials declined to explicitly comment on the memo to the Times, they did cite a 2016 federal court ruling on a civil rights statute in the Affordable Care Act as the basis for their position. In that case, Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth, Texas, ruled that “Congress did not understand ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity.’”

“The court order remains in full force and effect today and HHS is abiding by it as we continue to review the issue,” Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the DHHS, said in a statement.

However, as a coalition of civil rights groups pointed out in a recent memo presented to the administration, the “overwhelming majority of courts” have validated the Obama administration’s understanding “that anti transgender bias constitutes sex discrimination under federal laws like Title IX.” Regardless of how “sex” is defined, transgender advocates say the federal law still offers them the same protections.

“They think they’ve figured out how to define sex without transgender people,” Keisling tells Rolling Stone. “The flaw in that comes because you cannot define transgender people without sex. If I’m fired from my job because I’m transgender, or if an eighth grader is thrown out of school because they are transgender, or somebody is denied health care because they’re transgender, it is because of their sex. It is because you think I’m the wrong kind of woman, or not a woman, or you think I’m a man, or too much of a man — whatever it is you think, it is still about ‘man and woman.’ They’re trying to define sex as just ‘man and woman,’ but we’re still included in the that.”

While advocates believe they have science, the medical community and as legal precedent on their side, they say the administration’s message is being heard loud and clear.

“We no longer have a federal government that will enforce federal civil rights laws,” Keisling continues. “People are genuinely very scared. They they see what the administration has done to other communities and they know that there are no limits to how low they will go. … What this is, is the administration saying, ‘We not only don’t care about trans people, we don’t like them and we are going to hurt them.’ It’s a way of trying to make [the definition] uniform throughout the federal government in what they hope their base will see as a reasonable, unified way. And it’s not, and we’re going to fight them every step of the way.”</s>The Trump administration may move to rigidly define gender as a fixed status determined biologically by the genitalia a person is born with, reversing Obama-era policies that granted federal recognition to transgender individuals, according to a Sunday report from The New York Times.

The paper said it obtained a memo detailing how the Department of Health and Human Services plans to create a legal definition of gender. The definition would be implemented under the Title IX law, which bans discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs, the Times reported.

The HHS memo said that gender should be defined "on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable," the Times said. A person's gender would be strictly male or female and it would be unchanging.

"Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth," the memo said, according to the Times. "The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence."

According to a 2016 study from the Williams Institute, a UCLA Law-based think tank focused on sexual orientation research, about 1.4 million American adults identify as transgender.

Former President Barack Obama's administration argued that the 1972 Title IX law bars discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation. When the Department of Education issued a guidance in 2016 requiring schools to allow transgender students to use the restroom or locker room of their chosen gender, it invoked Title IX. That meant schools that did not comply could risk losing federal funds.

That guidance infuriated conservatives, who decried the move as a clear case of federal overreach. The directive was rescinded one month after President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Trump's HHS department has argued that the term "sex" was never legally meant to include homosexuality and gender identity, the Times reported.

Roger Severino, the current director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS, wrote several articles critical of Obama's efforts to extend civil rights protections to transgender Americans. In 2016, Severino called the Education Department's guidance on school bathrooms the "culmination of a series of unilateral, and frequently lawless, administration attempts to impose a new definition of what it means to be a man or a woman on the entire nation."

Trump has also sought to bar transgender troops from serving in the military.

According to the Times, HHS officials plan to present the proposed change to the Department of Justice by the end of the year to assess the legality of the new definition.

The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ civil rights organization, condemned the plan as the administration's latest effort "to undermine the rights and welfare of LGBTQ people."

"Defining 'sex' in this narrow language tailored to the talking points of anti-equality extremists is part of a deliberate strategy to eliminate federal protections for LGBTQ people," HRC President Chad Griffin said in a statement. "This is a direct attack on the fundamental equality of LGBTQ people and, if this administration refuses to reverse course, Congress must immediately take action by advancing the Equality Act to ensure that LGBTQ people are explicitly protected by our nation’s civil rights laws.”

The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization aimed at helping LGBTQ youth, called the potential change "reckless and dangerous."

"When a young person hears that their existence and gender identity will not be recognized by their government, they hear that they are not worthy to be a part of that nation. Transgender youth seeing this report should know that they are not alone and that their identity is valid – nothing the government does can change that," Amit Paley, CEO and Executive Director of The Trevor Project, said in a statement. "These policy decisions have real-world consequences."</s>The Department of Health and Human Services's proposed new definition of gender would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who recognize themselves as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.

Activists in the LGBT community mobilized a fast and fierce campaign Sunday to say transgender people cannot be expunged from society, in response to an unreleased Trump administration memo that proposes a strict definition of gender based on a person’s genitalia at birth.

The existence of the memo, the administration’s latest effort to roll back the recognition and protection of transgender people under federal civil rights law, was reported by The New York Times on Sunday morning.

Within hours, the hashtag #WontBeErased circulated on social media. By Sunday evening, a rally for transgender rights took place in New York; another was planned for Monday in Washington.

“You saw such a massive response because this attack on the trans community is essentially trying to erase the trans community from the face of this country and we’re not going to stand for that,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of GLAAD, an advocacy group for LGBT people.

The Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government funding, according to the memo obtained by The Times. The new definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable and determined by the genitals a person is born with. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the department, had declined to answer detailed questions about the memo.

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who recognize themselves as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said, “This is a really intrusive policy that doesn’t make any sense scientifically.”

She said she and her staff woke up Sunday to the news of the memo and quickly planned a response. The hashtag #WontBeErased felt appropriate to them.

“What this feels like to transgender people is trying to make us invisible, trying to say that we don’t exist, trying to say that we are nothing,” she said.

The hashtag took off on social media, as people posted photos of themselves or family members to show the faces of transgender people — who, they noted, would continue to exist regardless of the government’s definition of gender.

On Sunday evening, supporters said, a few hundred people gathered at Washington Square Park in New York City to endorse transgender rights. The crowd included high-profile advocates such as Sara Ramirez, known for her role in “Grey’s Anatomy,” and Indya Moore, who is transgender and plays a transgender woman on the FX show “Pose.”

Another rally was scheduled to take place outside the White House on Monday.

The policy that was proposed in the memo would be among the most significant efforts to reverse the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged their civil rights protections embedded in the health care law.

Experts said the policy would apply to issues of sex discrimination, such as students who are denied access to the school bathroom that aligns with their gender identity or a transgender woman who is refused a female room assignment at a hospital.

Under the proposed policy, such discrimination would not be protected in the view of the federal government, said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a senior attorney with Lambda Legal, which works for LGBT rights and helped organize Sunday’s rally.

But in practice, he said, transgender people would still have legal protection because the courts have ruled that they are covered under the umbrella of sex discrimination.

“It just means the struggle will be that much harder,” he said, adding that the government may decide not to tell institutions how to follow the law and may not enforce the law when discrimination occurs.

Ellis, the president of GLAAD, said she saw a swift response from the LGBT community Sunday but hoped to also engage with other communities, including the medical industry and Hollywood.

“This brings the civil rights fight to a whole new level when you are trying to completely erase a group of people,” she said. “But we are ready to fight this.”</s>Activists in the LGBT community mobilized a fast and fierce campaign to say transgender people cannot be expunged from society, in response to an unreleased Trump administration memo that proposes a strict definition of gender based on a person’s genitalia at birth.

The existence of the memo, the administration’s latest effort to roll back the recognition and protection of transgender people under federal civil rights law, was reported by the New York Times on Sunday. Within hours, the hashtag #WontBeErased circulated on social media.

“You saw such a massive response because this attack on the trans community is essentially trying to erase the trans community from the face of this country and we’re not going to stand for that,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, president and chief executive of GLAAD, an advocacy group for LGBT people.

The Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government funding, according to the memo obtained by the Times. The new definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable and determined by the genitals a person is born with. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the department, had declined to answer questions about the memo.

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who recognize themselves as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.

“This is a really intrusive policy that doesn’t make any sense scientifically,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “What this feels like to transgender people is trying to make us invisible, trying to say that we don’t exist, trying to say that we are nothing.”

The hashtag took off on social media, as people posted photos of themselves or family members to show the faces of transgender people.

The policy that was proposed in the memo would be among the most significant efforts to reverse the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged their civil rights protections embedded in the health care law.

Experts said the policy would apply to issues of sex discrimination, such as students who are denied access to the school bathroom that aligns with their gender identity.

Ellis, president of GLAAD, said she saw a swift response from the LGBT community Sunday but hoped to also engage with other communities, including the medical industry and Hollywood.

“This brings the civil rights fight to a whole new level when you are trying to completely erase a group of people,” she said. “But we are ready to fight this.”</s>The Trump administration may be considering redefining gender as an unchangeable condition determined solely by a person's biology, according to a leaked memo draft obtained by The New York Times.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services argued in the drafted memo, which has not been seen by NBC News, that the government needs to adopt a uniformed definition of gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable,” the Times reported.

If enacted as written in the memo, the legal definition of sex under Title IX, which prevents gender discrimination, would be determined as male or female based on the genitals a person was born with as listed on the person's birth certificate. Disputes would have to be settled using genetic testing, according to the Times.

Lambda Legal, a national legal organization advocating for LGBTQ rights, wrote, "Transgender folks: You are valid. You matter. You are loved. We will not stop fighting for your rights and you #WontBeErased by this heartless administration. #TransRightsAreHumanRights."

“We do not comment on alleged leaked documents,” a Health and Human Services spokesperson said in response to the Times story, NBC News reported.
The Trump administration through the United States Department of Health and Human Services plans to include a legal definition of gender in the federal civil rights Title IX law. The proposed alteration to the law would define gender as an unchangeable anatomical and genetic condition determined at birth. Members of the LGBT community plan to contest the move, which they state would largely end protections for transgender Americans.