Defending and protecting the rights of transgender people

When my youngest child told me that she was experiencing difficulty, her language let me know that she was feeling gender dysphoria, experienced by people whose gender identity does not align with their sex assigned at birth. I wanted to do whatever I could to support my child but also to defend the rights of transgender people. I found a transgender center in Los Angeles and my daughter has begun her transition to being a male. He will soon file papers in court for a name change.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration changed the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. Under the current administration, the Department of Health and Human Services began an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times. The Department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender: “Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.” The new definition would eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves—surgically or otherwise—as a gender other than the one they were born into.

The move would be the most significant of a series of steps to exclude the transgender population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s recognition of expanded gender identity. The administration has legally challenged civil rights protections for transgender people embedded in the nation’s health care law. Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The current administration sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and the Supreme Court agreed.

In addition to the inhumanity of denying people their personhood, the arguments advanced by the administration are not supported by the medical profession. Defining gender as a condition determined strictly by a person’s genitals is based on a notion that doctors and scientists abandoned long ago as oversimplified and often medically meaningless. Researchers who have studied gender issues and provided health care to people who do not fit the typical M/F categories said that the Trump administration’s latest plan to define gender goes beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, in many areas of the country there is still lack of good qualified medical help and mental health practitioners for transgender people.

Additionally, there is another concern: The rights of transgender children who also have special needs.

To establish protection in law for transgender people, there is a bill in Congress, The Equality Act, that, if passed, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity and would provide consistent and explicit non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people across key areas of life, in employment, housing, public accommodations, public education, federal funding, credit, and the jury system.

Over the decades since their passing, civil rights laws are shown to be effective in decreasing discrimination because they provide strong federal remedies targeted to specific vulnerable groups. By explicitly including sexual orientation and gender identity in these fundamental laws, LGBTQ people will finally be afforded the same protections as other covered characteristics under federal law. The bipartisan Equality Act was introduced in the House of Representatives and Senate on March 13, 2019. The bill was introduced with 287 original cosponsors—the most congressional support that any piece of pro-LGBTQ legislation has received upon introduction. The American Bar Association is drafting a letter in support of the legislation.

Also, there is one small victory for transgender rights – United Airlines will provide travelers a broader range of options than male or female when selecting gender during making reservations.