President Trump has expanded the Mexico City Policy, which blocked U.S. foreign aid to organizations that promote or support abortion, to also block aid going to organizations that promote gender ideology. Trump’s presidency has been characterized by putting American interests first. This revision to the Mexico City Policy reflects one element of this: standing for biological reality.
“The Department does not believe taxpayer dollars should support sex-rejecting procedures, directly or indirectly for individuals of any age,” the policy states. “A person’s body (including its organs, organ systems, and processes natural to human development like puberty) either healthy or unhealthy based on whether they are operating according to their biological functions.”
For too long, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have operated as activist groups for transgender ideology under the guise of global humanitarian assistance. In one case, USAID was funding three transgender clinics in India. Another USAID grant issued $15 million for condoms for the Taliban. Another $47,020 funded a transgender opera in Colombia.
Under Secretary Rubio’s leadership, the State Department has torn down this facade and ensured that taxpayer dollars don’t fund thinly disguised ideology. The real work of NGOs – from disaster relief to providing health care to impoverished areas – is too important to allow ideologues to use it to instead promote the erasure of women and biological sex.
President Trump’s new policy, Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance (PHFFA), ensures that American taxpayer dollars aren’t funding overseas what is already banned at home. Under this policy, NGOs must affirm the reality of two distinct biological sexes and organize single-sex spaces where appropriate in accordance with those categories to continue receiving funding from the United States. This rule affects more than $30 billion of foreign aid related to global health.
The extent of funding to these corrupt organizations is staring us right in the face, courtesy of a President Biden-led directive to the State Department that NGOs report all the ways in which they fund and support “advancing the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world,” going to so far as to call it a “U.S. foreign policy priority.”
The funding included more than $3 million in small grants to 116 LGBTQI+ organizations across 73 countries, with over $7 million going to support activities at USAID outposts.
Gender ideologues are incensed over the revised policy — for example, Keifer Buckingham from the Council for Global Equality, said the change was, “about weaponizing U.S. foreign assistance to promote an ideological agenda.” But they are missing the point: standing up for biological truth is not an ideological agenda. Indeed, the transgender lobby has moved so quickly in its political and cultural goals that it has forgotten its most basic claim. Namely, the idea that men can magically become women would be opposed and labeled lunacy, even by the most liberal Democrats, as recently as 15 years ago.
Characterizing this revision as radical is completely at odds with the realities of public opinion. According to America’s New Majority Project, 59 percent of Americans would support a law making it illegal to use taxpayer dollars to fund so-called “gender-affirming care.”
It is embarrassing that the United States had, until now, been wasting its hard-earned status on the world stage by exporting gender ideology. Think of how many young children, both in the United States and abroad, were offered irreversible transition surgeries, hormones, or puberty blockers because of the way the administration chose to spend American tax dollars. Or consider how embarrassing it was to have the leader of the free world expounding nonsensical statements like “trans women are women,” denying basic biological reality and science. Revising the Mexico City Policy to put a stop to this madness was the right move.
Sarah Wilder is a writer, wife, and mom-to-be based in southwest Michigan. She is a graduate of Hillsdale College. Formerly a reporter at the Daily Caller, her work has been featured in The American Conservative, National Review, Chronicles Magazine, and others.
