Shamus Khan is professor and chair of the sociology department at Columbia University. Joss Greene is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at Columbia University. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion on CNN.



(CNN) The Trump administration is considering a policy that is arguably the most significant federal attack on civil and political rights in at least a generation, one which, the New York Times reports, would define 1.4 million transgender Americans "out of existence." The Department of Health and Human Services is leading an effort to legally define gender under Title IX as a "biological, immutable condition, determined by genitalia at birth," removing federal recognition and thereby rights and protections for those who identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.

Joss Greene

This proposed policy -- along with a recent proposed ban on transgender individuals serving in the US military -- stands in stark contrast to the pride many Americans have expressed over the country's perceived world leadership on issues of LGBT rights. And yet the Trump administration's attempts to erase the humanity of transgender people serves to pull back the curtain on the long history of Western myopia, wherein we mistakenly imagine ourselves as the primary and leading source of freedom around the world.

The truth is other countries are several steps ahead of us. In 2004, England passed the Gender Recognition Act to allow transgender people to change their legal gender. England was followed by Spain in 2007 and Uruguay in 2009. In 2012, Argentina passed what the New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer dubbed "the most progressive gender-identity law in the world," allowing individuals to change their name or gender in public registries without a doctor or judge's approval and guaranteeing free access to hormones and gender-reassignment surgery. And, in 2015, Colombia passed a similar law that allowed citizens to change their legal name and gender marker by simply appearing before a notary public.

But European and Latin American countries aren't the only ones extending legal rights to transgender individuals. Just consider Pakistan, a country strongly influenced by its Islamic tradition. Last spring, its legislature passed the "Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act." In doing so, Pakistan affirmed that it must respect "a person's innermost and individual sense of self as male, female or a blend of both, or neither; that can correspond or not to the sex assigned at birth."

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The law allows citizens to have this identification recognized on all state documents, such as passports and drivers' licenses. What's more, the Pakistani government will be required to provide protection centers and safe houses for those who feel at risk, and trans citizens will have the right to inheritance, to run for office and to assembly.

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