The VA is abandoning women veterans' rights for gender identity
The VA's new policy silences reasonable objections to dangerous individuals and ignores the concerns of women.
Women’s equality is founded on sex-based rights, enshrined in law, culturally supported by nearly all Americans and historically protected at institutions like our employer, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Unfortunately, that last statement can no longer be counted on.
VA leadership, perhaps inspired by President Biden's executive order on "Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation," has recently begun enforcing in earnest its directive from 2018 injecting concepts of gender ideology into our clinical work. From here on, the distinction that will matter in patients is their self-identified gender, not their biological sex. We believe this effectively extinguishes the entire class of women, undermining many physical and legal protections for female veterans.
Single-sex spaces within the VA — those ensuring bodily privacy, such bathrooms, exam rooms and medical exam areas — can now be accessed by males who self-identify as women. This VA move is part of a larger cultural pattern, most notably in women’s sports, where biological males identifying as women tend to crush the competition, and in women’s prisons that allow mixed-sex housing based on gender identity, not infrequently with tragic results.
Together, the three of us have a combined 44 years of professional experience, much of it focused on sexual trauma recovery. We know that the perpetrators of sex crimes are usually male. We view this VA policy as a betrayal of our female patients.
Women face a disproportionate statistical risk of assault, harassment and voyeurism by men. And male violence patterns are unchanged by subjective feelings about gender. Long-term research shows that males identifying as women have a similar pattern of criminal behavior to other males.
Yet female veterans are now required to share vulnerable recovery spaces with men, including specialty clinics, therapy groups and residential recovery programs. These are violations of women's privacy, and especially of victims' privacy.
Imagine a rape victim being forced to share a dorm room with a man. Even worse, according to VA policy, if the female veteran objects, she is required to relocate, despite being the complainant. What has happened to women’s security? What of bodily privacy?
The VA must restore single-sex spaces in which biology is the only relevant factor. Why? First, because only women get pregnant by rape. Second, because vulnerable people, especially victims of violence, need clinically attuned help recognizing predators and boundary intrusions. They do not need our government institutions, with obtuse attitudes toward women, to create confusion about these matters.
The VA's policy is silencing reasonable objections to genuinely dangerous individuals and ignores the concerns of women. Objections from women are treated as “an opportunity to educate” the complainants, rather than as grounds for the department to change its misguided policy.
Not only veterans, but also VA employees, are being harmed by this policy, which holds that veterans may claim a gender to the VA contrary to their sex, but which simultaneously orders the VA to provide medical screens, many of which are dependent upon biological sex. This is contradictory, and procedurally incompatible with the practice of medicine.
Further, it imposes mandates upon employees' language, clearly violating their First Amendment right to free speech while corrupting clinical interactions.
As clinicians, we don’t object to the courteous use of preferred pronouns or other such identifiers, so long as we are free to choose their use in a thoughtful, clinical manner. We believe most VA staff and fellow veterans would also agree to such social courtesies, and as therapists we understand that in certain cases our voluntary use of preferred pronouns could help build clinical rapport.
But humans are a sexually dimorphic species, and this has medical consequences irrelevant to the metaphysical concept of gender identity. Sex is an immutable biological trait, carrying with it biological and medical consequences that doctors cannot overlook. Given that reality, the VA cannot rightly discipline employees for expressing opinions, beliefs or viewpoints skeptical of a concept that lacks scientific measurability beyond an individual's subjective view.
Mandated affirmation of subjective feelings, apart from an individual’s unique clinical context, harms rather than helps patients.
The VA's current policy is based on premises we believe are contradictory, anti-female and unconstitutional. It appears to be motivated by politics and fickle media narratives rather than by sound clinical practice.
Other solutions can be sought without damaging women's rights, clinical discretion or the basic constitutional rights of employees. We cannot accept such a policy as a tradeoff for true equality, at the expense of the VA's culture and clinical work, especially as it would effectively turn back the clock on 60 years of advancement in the area of women's rights.
Catherine M. Novotny, Edward Waldrep and Nina Silander are clinical psychologists working at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Views expressed here are not necessarily those of the VA.