By Thomas Chung

Copy Editor

 On Oct. 28, during World Series Game 5 at Dodger Stadium, activists Maria Roman and Bamby Salcedo unfurled a large blue, pink, and white banner emblazoned with the words “Trans People Deserve To Live.”

 Roman and Salcedo are members of the TransLatin@ Coalition, a Los Angeles based non-profit organization seeking to advocate for the specific needs of the trans Latin@ community and to plan strategies that will improve their quality of life.

  “People must understand that trans people are part of our society. Our message tonight was to let the world know that we as trans people deserve to be humanized, acknowledged and valued,” Salcedo explained to the Los Angeles Blade. “We are claiming our righteous space in society.”

  The direct action by Salcedo and Roman occurred a week after The New York Times reported that the Department Health and Human Services had issued an internal memo stating that key government agencies should adopt an uniform definition of gender that is “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

  This entails that sex would be defined as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, where gender identity is ignored and changes to one’s official documents can not be made without genetic testing. If this definition is adopted, 1.4 million transgender individuals would lose federal Title IX sex discrimination legal protections.

   The possible adoption of this definition would be one of the Trump administration’s most sweeping attempts to roll back federal Obama-era protections and recognition for transgender people. Civil rights groups have been meeting with federal agencies and proposing legal action to combat the definition, but broad support from the government agencies that enforce Title IX has increased the likelihood that it will be implemented.

  “The Trump-Pence administration’s latest anti-LGBTQ proposal is a direct attack on the fundamental equality of transgender people, and it is constitutes an unconscionable betrayal of young people by their nation’s leadership,” states Sarah McBride, press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign.

  Many allies of the transgender community have voiced their concern. On Nov. 1, more than 50 companies representing over $2.4 trillion in annual venue and 4.7 million in employees, have signed a joint letter opposing the administration’s proposed gender definition changes. Furthermore, more than 1,600 scientists, among them 700 biologists, 100 geneticists, and nine Nobel Prize winners, have also signed a letter condemning the definition change proposals.

  “[The proposal] is in no way ‘grounded in science’ as the administration claims,” the authors of the letter wrote. “Though scientists are just beginning to understand the biological basis of gender identity, it is clear that many factors, known and unknown, mediate the complex links between identity, genes, and anatomy.”