Lies about the Trump administration continue to proliferate faster than flea-borne typhus and Hepatitis A in Los Angeles.

In the media's latest race to the bottom, the New York Times published a story titled, "Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence." His actual offense: the Department of Health and Human Services attempting to redefine the legal definition of sex under Title IX as "a person's status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth." You know, the same definition employed by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama until 2010.

For one thing, this is a practically immaterial story. Title IX, the federal civil rights law, states, "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." In practice, Title IX has mainly culminated in two things: ensuring that women's collegiate athletics receive equal funding and representation to that of men's programs, and ensuring that students experiencing gender discrimination — and by extension, sexual assault or harassment — have a formal form of recourse.

So in essence, if the HHS successfully modified the Title IX definition, a biological female identifying as male would still be able to try a sexual assault in Title IX proceedings or even participate in male athletics at the discretion of the university. Title IX has absolutely nothing to do with gender identity, so changing the definition of sex changes absolutely nothing.

Rather than pointing out that perhaps the Department of Education could consider adding an extra protection specifically for transgender Americans — who do in fact experience sexual assault, hate crimes, and domestic violence at higher rates than cisgender Americans — the media went into a full-scale meltdown.

"The Trump Admin has a new definition of sex that would render 1.4 million transgendered people legally nonexistent," wrote Jonathan Weisman, the deputy Washington Editor of the New York Times, on Twitter. Soledad O'Brien approvingly shared Weisman's tweet, commenting "There's also a lot of intersex people. This makes no sense." (O'Brien's tweet was also scientifically ignorant; the Intersex Society of North America says that intersex children should live as the gender they most closely match in terms of biological form and function, so they are still protected under the HHS proposal.)

The news editor of Kotaku UK, Laura Kate Dale, also shared lies, writing that "This means that a trans woman like that in America would no longer have any legal protection from harassment and hate crimes, as a trans person or as a woman. They would overnight be regulated out of being able to exist in public life."

And of course, wherever a dumb, dishonest Trump controversy arises, Owen Jones shortly follows. The socialist Guardian columnist parroted, "A terrifying wake-up call. The Trump administration is looking to legally define trans people out of existence."

So of course, now when actual pointed criticism about whether the trans community should obtain extra special legal protection arises from the folks wise enough to read past the flagrantly dishonest headline, it'll already be drowned out by the sounds of liberals wailing that Trump is literally inflicting genocide on all trans Americans, turning us into the next Palestine (never forget the Leftist haven where the government is so woke, thousands of LGBTQ Palestinians have to flee to that right-wing hellhole known as Israel!)

A real lesson to be gleaned here — other that to actually read the headlines — is that perhaps the vast, overreaching power of the executive Leviathan should be limited, but of course, Democrats will simply continue to wait with baited breath until the moment they can counter Trump's executive decrees with their own.