Tag Archives: transgender

Trump Just Signed Another Executive Order. It’s an Attack on Women.

Mother Jones

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President Trump marked the National Day of Prayer Thursday by signing what’s being billed as an executive order on “religious liberty.” The much-anticipated order will not include explicit, sweeping provisions allowing individuals and organizations to discriminate against people who are LGBT or having sex outside of marriage, as many had feared after a draft of the order leaked in February. Instead, it gives protections to groups that want to limit access to contraception and sets the stage for more political dark money to pour in from religious groups previously prohibited from political speech.

Many religious conservatives argue the right to freely practice their religion enshrined in the constitution permits them to legally discriminate or be exempt from certain laws on the basis of their faith. The executive order codifies this philosophy by strengthening employers’ ability to limit women’s access to contraceptive and other preventative healthcare services promised in the Affordable Care Act from private health plans. The order asks three agencies to consider issuing amended rules to make this process easier for employers if they have a religious objection.

The order was met with a mixed response from some conservative groups. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian nonprofit that advocates on various political issues, said it did not go far enough. “Though we appreciate the spirit of today’s gesture, vague instructions to federal agencies simply leaves them wiggle room to ignore that gesture, regardless of the spirit in which it was intended,” said General Counsel Michael Farris in a statement. “We strongly encourage the president…to ensure that all Americans…enjoy the freedom to peacefully live and work consistent with their convictions without fear of government punishment.”

The order also makes good Trump’s campaign promise to his religious base to “get rid of and totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations, including churches, from engaging in political activity. Only religious organizations and churches will be exempted from the law, meaning other nonprofits will still be prohibited from political speech. “This executive order directs the IRS, not to unfairly target churches or religious organizations for political speech,” Trump said. “No one should be censoring sermons or targeting pastors.”

A number of advocacy organizations point out that exempting powerful religious organizations from prohibitions on political speech will bring a lot more dark money into politics. “This policy would create a massive loophole for dark money, allowing unlimited sums of money to flow to religious nonprofit organizations for expressions of political views,” said Noah Bookbinder, the head of the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, in a statement.

Bookbinder has called charitable groups the “next frontier” in undisclosed political spending because without the Johnson amendment in the way, it’ll be easy to start spending lots of money right away. “You have these ready-made, very large organizations that could do a lot of political spending,” he told me back in February after Trump reaffirmed his commitment to dismantle the law at the National Prayer Breakfast. “You wouldn’t have the challenges of having to set up a new organization and raise a lot of money for it.” Plus, Bookbinder says, those contributions are tax deductible, meaning people will likely give more.

Trump’s executive order may not have the anti-LGBT provisions the leaked draft does, but it gives Jeff Sessions plenty of leeway to develop rules, if he so chooses.

“In order to guide all agencies in complying with relevant federal law, the Attorney General shall, as appropriate, issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in Federal law,” the order reads.

Responding to the order, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality Mara Keisling said, “President Trump has simply asked others in his administration to do much of his dirty work.”

In anticipation of the executive order, many civil rights groups began preparing lawsuits, and at least one group still intends to file. “President Trump’s efforts to promote religious freedom are thinly-veiled efforts to unleash his conservative religious base into the political arena while also using religion to discriminate,” ACLU director Anthony Romero said in a statement. “It’s a dual dose of pandering to a base and denying reproductive care. We will see Trump in court, again.”

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Trump Just Signed Another Executive Order. It’s an Attack on Women.

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After Losing Millions in Revenue, North Carolina Is Set to Repeal Its Horrible Bathroom Law

Mother Jones

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The North Carolina law that famously blocks transgender people from using the bathrooms of their choice appears to be on its deathbed. On Monday, Governor-elect Roy Cooper announced that House Bill 2, seen as the most sweeping anti-LGBT law in the country, would be repealed in a special session of the Legislature Tuesday.

The announcement came after the city council in Charlotte voted Monday morning to rescind a local nondiscrimination ordinance, passed in February, that had inspired state lawmakers to speed HB2 through the legislative process in a single day in March. In addition to blocking trans people from bathrooms, HB2 preempted local governments like Charlotte’s from passing measures that protect gay and trans people from discrimination.

Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, who passionately supported HB2 and narrowly lost his reelection bid, confirmed he would call a special session of the Legislature on Tuesday to repeal HB2. Governor-elect Cooper said the state Senate majority leader and House speaker had assured him they would kill the law because Charlotte had agreed to get rid of its local ordinance. “I hope they will keep their word to me and with the help of Democrats in the legislature, HB2 will be repealed in full,” Cooper said in a statement.

“Full repeal will help to bring jobs, sports and entertainment events back and will provide the opportunity for strong LGBT protections in our state,” he added. North Carolina lost millions of dollars of revenue after the law passed, as companies protested by canceling plans to bring jobs to the state, Bruce Springsteen and other musicians pulled out of concerts there, and the NBA and the NCAA moved sports events to other locations

Charlotte’s city council had previously refused to rescind its nondiscrimination ordinance. On Monday Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts defended the decision to do so. The vote “should in no way be viewed as a compromise of our principles or commitment to nondiscrimination,” she said.

Outgoing Gov. McCrory, whose popularity fell after HB2 was passed, criticized Charlotte leaders for not getting rid of the local ordinance sooner—and argued they waited for political reasons. “This sudden reversal, with little notice after the gubernatorial election, sadly proves this entire issue originated by the political left was all about politics and winning the governor’s race at the expense of Charlotte and our entire state,” McCrory’s office said in a statement.

LGBT rights organizations praised the plan to repeal HB2, which Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin described as “shameful and archaic” legislation. But they added they were disappointed to see Charlotte’s local ordinance go. “The problem has never been Charlotte,” said Equality North Carolina Executive Director Chris Sgro, noting that hundreds of cities across the country have similar ordinances to protect gay and transgender people from discrimination. Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in a statement that the repeal of HB2 could open a door for other cities in the state to pass nondiscrimination protections in the future: “Completely repealing HB2 is only the first step lawmakers must take to repair the harm they have done to their own constituents. Even after it is repealed, there will be a long way to go.”

If the Republican-majority Legislature follows through and repeals HB2, it would be a surprising act of cooperation with the incoming Democratic governor. Just last week, Republican lawmakers in the state introduced a series of bills that would curtail his powers in office.

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After Losing Millions in Revenue, North Carolina Is Set to Repeal Its Horrible Bathroom Law

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The VA Just Dealt a Big Blow to Transgender Veterans

Mother Jones

The Department of Veterans Affairs is calling off plans to allow sex reassignment surgeries for transgender veterans, citing budget concerns.

The decision is a blow to trans veterans who need the surgery to treat gender dysphoria, a medical condition characterized by extreme distress over a mismatch between a person’s body and gender identity. It also marks a departure from the Pentagon’s recent move to cover the surgery for eligible active-duty troops. (There are an estimated 1,320 to 6,630 trans soldiers in the military.)

The VA Department has banned sex reassignment surgeries for veterans since the early 1990s, but it covers hormone therapy. In June, the department announced that it was considering lifting the ban on surgeries “to remove any barriers to transition-related care.” But in a statement to the Military Times this week, VA officials said the proposal had been scrapped by the Office of Management and Budget because it was not clear how the department would pay for it. The National Center for Transgender Equality has estimated that more than 134,000 veterans are transgender, though it’s not known how many would have tried to get the surgery. When the Pentagon decided in September to cover sex reassignment surgery, researchers noted that of thousands of trans troops, only an estimated 25 to 130 soldiers would opt for the procedure each year, amounting to less than a 0.13 percent increase in current health spending.

The VA Department said it would consider covering the surgery “when appropriate funding is available.”

“Increased understanding of both gender dysphoria and surgical techniques in this area has improved significantly and is now widely accepted as medically necessary treatment,” it said in the statement. “VA has been and will continue to explore a regulatory change that would allow VA to perform gender alteration surgery.”

Though he has called for a return to “traditional values,” President-elect Donald Trump has not commented on whether the government should pay for transition-related health care for trans vets. Nor has he taken a clear stance on trans rights more generally. In May, he said that if elected president, he would rescind Obama administration guidelines that protect trans rights in schools and health care—before adding that the government had a responsibility to “protect all people” and that he looked forward to learning more about the push for trans rights. In October, he described as “ridiculous” the Pentagon’s decisions to allow transgender people to serve openly in the military.

As the Republican president-elect prepares to head to the White House, LGBT advocacy groups worry trans veterans may be out of luck for some time. “This is a deeply disappointing setback,” Ashley Broadway-Mack, president of the American Military Partner Association, said of the VA Department’s decision not to offer sex reassignment surgeries. “As we now face a new incoming administration, we implore fair-minded Americans to stand united in holding our new administration officials accountable by insisting this be fixed.”

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The VA Just Dealt a Big Blow to Transgender Veterans

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Supreme Court Will Weigh In on Transgender Bathroom Use

Mother Jones

Gavin Grimm Steve Helber/AP

For the first time, the Supreme Court will weigh in on the question of whether transgender students should be allowed to use bathrooms matching their gender identity, rather than the sex listed on their birth certificates.

On Friday, the justices announced they would hear the case of 17-year-old Gavin Grimm, a trans boy in Virginia who sued his school board last year after it blocked him from using the boys’ bathroom at his school. In 2014, doctors diagnosed Grimm, who was born female, with gender dysphoria and recommended that he live and be treated as a boy. Grimm argues that the school board’s bathroom policy singles him out for being different and violates Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding.

The case comes as the national debate about transgender bathroom access has reached a fever pitch. The Obama administration, which has thrown its support behind Grimm, told public schools in May that they could lose federal funding if they blocked trans kids from the bathrooms of their choice. Twenty-three states have since sued the Department of Education over this directive. They argue that Title IX applies only to sex discrimination, not gender identity discrimination, and that allowing trans kids to use the bathrooms of their choice could violate the privacy rights of other children.

Grimm, who is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, initially lost his case in district court. But in April, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, kicking the case back to the lower court and urging it to respect the Obama administration’s trans-friendly guidance on bathroom access. The district court then granted an injunction allowing Grimm to use the boys’ bathroom while it considered his case again.

In July, the school board filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, asking the justices to temporarily block Grimm from the boys’ room while they decided whether to review the appeals court decision; otherwise, the school board argued, parents might pull their kids out of school. In August, the Supreme Court agreed and temporarily blocked Grimm from the boys’ room. That decision remains in place until the case is resolved.

If the justices are divided and the case results in a 4-4 split, the appeals court’s ruling in Grimm’s favor would stand.

For Grimm, the decision can’t come soon enough. Right now, he has two options: use a single-stall bathroom or visit the bathroom in the nurse’s office. “I feel the humiliation every time I need to use the restroom and every minute I try to ‘hold it’ in the hopes of avoiding the long walk to the nurse’s office,” he wrote recently. A few weeks ago, he had to go to the bathroom at an evening school football game. “Suddenly a night out with friends was marred by the realization that someone was going to have to take me to a gas station if I needed to use the restroom,” he wrote.

He continued, “If you told me two years ago that the Supreme Court was going to have to approve whether I could use the school restroom, I would have thought you were joking…If the Supreme Court does take up my case, I hope the justices can see me and the rest of the transgender community for who we are—just people—and rule accordingly.”

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Supreme Court Will Weigh In on Transgender Bathroom Use

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The Attempt to Keep Transgender People Out of Bathrooms Is Working

Mother Jones

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This year, states across the country have struggled with the question of whether transgender people should be allowed to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity rather than the sex listed on their birth certificate. In March, North Carolina enacted a law blocking trans people from public bathrooms of their choice, and lawmakers in many other states have considered similar legislation. Proponents of these bathroom bills say they want to protect women and girls from male sexual predators; opponents say the legislation discriminates against a vulnerable minority.

Some new statistics out Monday from the National Center for Transgender Equality show how bathroom access—or lack of access—can affect the health and safety of transgender adults. In the largest-ever survey of transgender people in the United States, the NCTE, an advocacy group, heard from more than 27,000 transgender adults in August and September 2015.

Fifty-nine percent of those surveyed said they’d avoided public bathrooms over the past year because they worried about potential confrontations.
Twelve percent said they’d been harassed, attacked, or sexually assaulted in a bathroom over the past year.
Thirty-one percent reported that they’d avoided drinking or eating over the past year so they wouldn’t need to use the bathroom.
Eight percent said they’d had a kidney or urinary tract infection or another kidney-related problem because they’d avoided using bathrooms.

Mara Keisling, executive director of the NCTE, says the statistics show how transgender people are affected by discrimination and violence, and “how trans people try to work around the harassment and discrimination we fear every time we use public bathrooms.” Keisling noted that in a majority of states, restaurant and store managers can legally prevent transgender customers from using bathrooms of their choice or can boot them from the premises for being trans.

The bathroom statistics were released Monday as preliminary findings of the 2015 US Transgender Survey. More data will be available later this year.

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The Attempt to Keep Transgender People Out of Bathrooms Is Working

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There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

Mother Jones

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The number of transgender Americans may be twice as big as we thought. According to a new analysis of state and federal data, an estimated 1.4 million adults in the United States, or 0.6 percent of the total population, do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

The analysis by the Williams Institute at UCLA comes as policymakers increasingly consider questions of transgender rights in schools, workplaces, and the military.

Previously, the most widely accepted estimate suggested 0.3 percent of American adults were transgender. That figure came from a smaller analysis by the Williams Institute in 2011, based on a health survey in Massachusetts and a survey about tobacco use among LGBT people in California. The new analysis draws on a much bigger set of data from 19 states that have since started asking about gender identity in questionnaires about health risk behaviors run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers also used Census Bureau data to estimate the transgender populations in the 31 other states.

Williams Institute

The study’s authors say their analysis is the first in the United States to estimate the transgender population in each state. Hawaii, California, Georgia, and New Mexico had the biggest percentages of adults who identified as transgender, at 0.8 percent each. North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota had the smallest percentages, at about 0.3 percent each. Young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were most likely to identify as transgender (0.7 percent), compared with 0.6 percent of those between the ages of 25 and 64 and 0.6 percent of adults older than 64.

The District of Columbia had a far higher rate of transgender identity than any state in the study, at an estimated 2.8 percent of adults.

The Census Bureau does not ask about gender identity in its population count, so we still don’t know exactly how many Americans identify as transgender. In May, Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona introduced a bill that would require federal agencies to include questions about gender identity in national demographic surveys.

“The findings from this study are critical to current policy discussions that impact transgender people,” says Jody Herman, one of the study’s authors. “Policy debates on access to bathrooms, discrimination, and a host of other issues should rely on the best data available to assess potential impacts, including how many people may be affected.”

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There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

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A Very Brief Timeline of the Bathroom Wars

Mother Jones

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A very brief Twitter conversation yesterday got me curious about the timeline of transgender bathroom hysteria. Where and when did it start? I’m not interested in going back to the beginning of time and regaling you with the history of Jim Crow bathroom laws and the origin of sex-segregated bathrooms in 18th-century Paris and Victorian Britain. I just want to know the recent history. As best I can piece it together, it goes something like this:

March 2016: The North Carolina legislature meets to discuss the now-infamous HB2, which requires people to use the bathroom of their birth gender. It was passed and signed into law the same day it was introduced. It was a response to:

February 2016: A new law in the city of Charlotte that effectively allowed transgender people to use bathrooms that match their gender identity. Charlotte was following the lead of San Francisco, which in turn was part of a wave of trans-friendly bathroom bills:

2015: In December, Washington State had clarified that existing law allowed transgender people to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity. In September Philadelphia adopted rules that would require gender-neutral signage on single-occupancy bathrooms. “It’s a sign change,” said the mayor’s director of LGBT affairs. “We’re labeling restrooms as what they are: restrooms, not gender-monitored spaces.” In July the Justice Department took the side of Gavin Grimm, a Virginia high-school student who argued that he should be allowed to use school bathrooms that match his gender identity. In April President Obama opened the first gender-neutral bathroom in the White House. These actions were largely a response to transphobic laws that had been proposed in red states all over the country:

Late 2014 and early 2015: Texas and several other states introduce “bathroom surveillance” bills that would require transgender people to use bathrooms that match their birth gender. The communications director at the National Center for Transgender Equality says the wave of new legislation seemed to be a backlash to “the gains we have seen in state and local non-discrimination policies that protect transgender people.” For example:

August 2014: Austin approves a law that requires gender-neutral signage on single-occupancy bathrooms. Among others, they join Portland (one of the first a year earlier) and Washington DC, and are soon joined by West Hollywood, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. These cities were largely been inspired by:

2012-13: A growing movement to install gender-neutral bathrooms at university campuses. During this period, 150 university campuses installed gender-neutral bathrooms, along with a growing number of high schools. The movement for gender-inclusive bathrooms in public facilities started at least as early as 2009 in the state of Vermont.

Ancient history: For our purposes this is anything more than five or six years old. A few random examples include the Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, a 2010 collection of papers about (among other things) nongendered bathrooms. In 2005, U of Chicago law professor Mary Anne Case gave a presentation called “On Not Having the Opportunity to Introduce Myself to John Kerry in the Men’s Room.” She has been performing surveys of mens and womens bathroom facilities for years. And of course, there’s the ur-hysteria of recent decades, when Phyllis Schlafly led a campaign against the Equal Right Amendment throughout the 70s out of fear that it would lead to gay marriage, women in combat, taxpayer-funded abortions, and, of course, unisex bathrooms. We never got the ERA, but as it turned out, Schlafly was pretty much right, wasn’t she?

This timeline was surprisingly hard to put together, and it may not be 100 percent accurate. But it gives you the general shape of the river. There are two points I want make about all this. First, there’s a lot of griping about the hypersensitivity of university students these days. You know: safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings, and so forth. And, sure, maybe some of this stuff is dumb. History will judge that eventually. But I’ve always found it hard to get too exercised about this stuff. These kids are 19 years old. They want to change the world. They’re idealistic and maybe ??. So were you and I at that age. Frankly, if they didn’t go a little overboard about social justice, I’d be worried about them.

But guess what? The first concrete movement toward gender-neutral bathrooms started at universities. Now it’s becoming mainstream. Good work, idealistic college kids! This is why we should think of universities as petri dishes, not a sign of some future hellscape to come. They’re well-contained areas for trying stuff out. Some of this stuff dies a deserved death. Some of it takes over the world if the rest of us think it makes sense. Stop worrying so much about it.

Second: “Who started this fight?” Yes, that’s a crude way of putting it. But if we contain ourselves to the last decade or so, the answer is: liberals. Before then, the status quo was simple: men used one bathroom and women used another. It was liberals who started pressing for change, and the conservative response was a response to that.

As I’ve said before, we should be proud of this. Most of the right-wing culture war is a backlash against changes to the status quo pushed by liberals. And good for us for doing this. The culture war is one of our grandest achievements of the past half century. It’s helped blacks, gays, women, immigrants, trans people, the disabled, and millions more. Sure, conservatives have fought it all, but that’s only natural: they’re conservatives. What do you expect?

So own the culture war, liberals! Why are we always blaming such a terrific thing on conservatives?

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A Very Brief Timeline of the Bathroom Wars

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Carson Joins Trump Idiocy About Jersey City, Then Backs Away

Mother Jones

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The latest from la-la land:

Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson joined GOP rival Donald Trump in claiming that he, too, saw news footage of Muslim-Americans cheering as the World Trade Center towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001 — despite the fact that no such footage has turned up yet. “I saw the film of it, yes,” Carson told reporters at a Monday campaign event, adding that it was documented by “newsreels.”

Newsreels? What is this? 1943? But wait. We have breaking news via Twitter from Jon Karl of ABC News:

@RealBenCarson spox Doug Watts: Carson was mistaken when he said he saw film of Muslims celebrating on 9/11 in Jersey City….”He doesn’t stand behind his comments on New Jersey and American Muslims,” Watts told ABC’s @KFaulders….”He was rather thinking of the protests going on in the Middle East and some of the demonstrations” there on 9/11.

This is nuts. These guys are trying to put the Onion out of business for real. “We have investigated and discovered that East Jerusalem is not on the Hudson River after all.” But hell, at least Carson is willing to admit his error. One brownie point for that—though it does raise some questions about his vaunted memory. Trump will continue to insist forever that he saw it, and his supporters will continue to believe him because you can never trust the mainstream media, can you? They’re always covering up for Jersey City’s Muslim community.

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Carson Joins Trump Idiocy About Jersey City, Then Backs Away

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Americans Both Love and Hate Government

Mother Jones

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Pew Research once again shows us that Americans are hopelessly confused. Do they distrust government? You bet! Only 19 percent say they trust the government most or all of the time.

Does the government do a good job? Hell n—wait, what? Majorities think the government is doing a pretty good job in almost all areas—including keeping the country safe from terrorism. In fact, the only two areas that get a low score are immigration and poverty.

So why all the distrust? I haven’t read the whole report yet, so I don’t know what ideas they have. Maybe I’ll do that later tonight. Basically, I just think this shows once again that Americans are schizophrenic. They hate education but love their local schools. They hate Congress but love their local member. The hate the government but….yeah, it’s actually doing a decent job. The French may have a problem governing a country with 246 kinds of cheese, but what do you about Americans? You could always just ban a couple hundred kinds of cheese if you really wanted to, but how do you get Americans do adopt some kind of coherent view of how they want to be governed?

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Americans Both Love and Hate Government

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Robots Will Take Your Job Someday, But In the Meantime They’ll Decide Which Jobs You Can Have

Mother Jones

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Are you worried about the robots coming to take your job? You should be! But that’s still a ways away for most of us. In the meantime, the robots will be deciding which jobs we’re allowed to have. Today, the consistently fascinating Lydia DePillis points us to a new study that evaluates how well computer algorithms do at hiring new workers. The test bed is a large company with multiple locations. The workers perform relatively rote cognitive work that the authors can’t reveal, but it is “similar to jobs such as data entry work, standardized test grading, and call center work.”

In order to hire better workers, this company rolled out a new test that consists of “an online questionnaire comprising a large battery of questions, including those on technical skills, personality, cognitive skills, fit for the job, and various job scenarios.” So how did stony-hearted Mr. Robot do?

Better than humans, according to the authors. The test rates each applicant as green, yellow, or red, and they found that greens stayed on the job for 12 days longer than yellows, who in turn lasted 17 days longer than reds. This is significant since the average job tenure at this company is 99 days. More to the point, the authors find that more interference from hiring managers leads to worse results. “In our setting it provides the stark recommendation that firms would do better to remove discretion of the average HR manager and instead hire based solely on the test.”

But maybe hiring managers choose more productive workers? Nope. “In all cases, we find no evidence that managerial exceptions improve output per hour. Instead, we find noisy estimates indicating that worker quality appears to be lower on this dimension as well.”

Hmmph. I guess it’s HR managers who really need to be scared here. Apparently they simply add no value at all for jobs like this. Eventually, though, we’re going to start looking at whether these tests systematically discriminate against women or blacks or other protected classes. It would be pretty easy for this to happen either intentionally or unintentionally. Then the robots will either have to get smarter or else, ironically, find themselves out of a job.

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Robots Will Take Your Job Someday, But In the Meantime They’ll Decide Which Jobs You Can Have

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