Did the Trump administration really just “ask the Supreme Court to legalize firing transgender workers?” If you get your news from left-wing outlets such as Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post, you’d certainly think so.

JUST IN: Trump administration tells Supreme Court it’s legal under federal law to fire workers solely for being transgender, saying Title VII’s ban on “sex” discrimination doesn’t apply to gender identity and trans status. Full story: https://t.co/6lIZWOXLuk — Dominic Holden (@dominicholden) August 16, 2019

The reality is much more complicated, and a closer look at the Department of Justice brief in question shows that the liberal media’s coverage of this issue is steeped in disingenuous outrage-mongering. What so-called Buzzfeed journalist Dominic Holden calls an “aggressive step” to “setback LGBTQ rights nationwide” is actually just the Trump administration advocating for the law to be enforced as it is written — not as his liberal friends wish it was.

The issue in question is a case of alleged anti-transgender employment discrimination, where a transgender woman says she was fired for her gender identity. The legal question at hand is whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits such discrimination. The Trump DOJ is simply pointing out that it clearly does not.

“Title VII does not prohibit discrimination against transgender persons based on their transgender status ... it simply does not speak to discrimination because of an individual’s gender identity,” the DOJ brief says.

Here’s the relevant text of Title VII:

It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

The debate is over whether this law, as written, prohibits transgender employment discrimination. Not whether it should, but whether it does. And given the clear lack of the words “gender identity,” “transgender status,” or anything similar in Title VII’s protected clauses, it’s obvious that it does not. This is all the Trump DOJ is saying: That current anti-discrimination law does not protect transgender people, and if left-wing activists want that to change, they must work to change the law — not ask judges to re-write it by judicial fiat.

Yet the activist interpretation of Title VII says that the protection of biological “sex” as a class actually somehow applies to transgender people. The logic goes like this: A transgender woman who faces discrimination for say, dressing as a woman despite being male, is facing treatment that would not be given to a biological female. Thus, the discrimination is supposedly really rooted in sex discrimination, not transgender identity. As a result, they say, anti-discrimination laws that protect “sex” also protect gender identity.

This is clever, if convoluted, logic. But it doesn’t really work.

For one thing, Title VII was passed in 1964. Are we really supposed to believe that lawmakers in the 1960s intended “sex” to encompass transgenderism? That strains credulity and reveals activist claims as a blatant attempt to twist the law in their favor.

Besides, the very basis of transgender theory originally pushed by the Left relies on the fact that they define “sex” and “gender” as two distinct, separate things. The theory says that sex (male and female) is tied to biology, whereas gender is a social-construct associated with pronouns, wardrobe, and the like — a social construct we’re told can change and is subject to self-identification.

Whatever you think of this argument, it is undeniable that it declares sex and gender to be two different things. This is how the Left has convinced many to go along with transgender theory. If they’d had to convince Americans that people can truly change biological sexes, it would be a much harder sell.

On the very terms of transgender ideology, then, Title VII has nothing to do with gender. Yet liberals now want judges to declare sex and gender one and the same in activist interpretations of anti-discrimination law. They are trying to have it both ways. Their approach is intellectually dishonest and misguided.

If we want anti-discrimination law to ban discrimination based on gender identity, you need to pass a new law. It’s improper judicial activism to attempt to re-write law in the courts as you wish it had been written and agreed to according to our democratic processes.

And even if you disagree with the Trump administration’s legal position, it’s clearly a reasonable argument rooted in the rule of law, not based on anti-trans animus or even on any moral judgment about what the law ought to be, as media coverage has depicted it.

Still, critics will ask why, then, President Trump hasn’t supported the Equality Act, a so-called LGBT rights bill passed by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives that would explicitly add gender identity and sexual orientation protections to Title VII. The answer, of course, is because the bill is filled with poison pills and crushes religious liberty.

Advocates who truly want to increase anti-discrimination protections should take to Congress, not the courts, and work with both sides of the aisle to pass a bill that respects religious liberty but adds protections for gay and trans people that apply to secular employers. For that to happen, the malicious media misrepresentations, rank partisanship, and false cries of bigotry must end.