Tag: transgender Americans

Justice Department argues businesses can legally discriminate against transgender employees

The Department of Justice on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that civil rights laws that ban discrimination on the basis of sex do not encompass anti-transgender bias. The argument, if the DOJ wins, would allow employers to legally discriminate against transgender employees, Bloomberg Law reported.

“The court of appeals misread the statute and this Court’s decisions in concluding that Title VII encompasses discrimination on the basis of gender identity,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in a brief regarding a case against a Michigan funeral home. The business is accused of violating federal employment laws when it fired transgender worker Aimee Stephens.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces civil rights law in the workplace, successfully sued on Stephens’ behalf in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. But the Michigan funeral home has appealed the case to the Supreme Court, where the Justice Department would be forced to represent the government.

View the complete October 25 article by Emily C. Singer on the Mic.com website here.

Study finds no link between transgender rights law and bathroom crimes

Credit: John Tlumacki, Globe Staff, file

A first-of-its-kind study being released Wednesday refutes the premise that the state’s transgender antidiscrimination law threatens public safety, finding no relation between public transgender bathroom access and crimes that occur in bathrooms.

Researchers at the Williams Institute, a think tank focused on gender identity at the UCLA School of Law, examined restroom crime reports in Massachusetts cities of similar size and comparable demographics and found no increase in crime and no difference between cities that had adopted transgender policies and those that had not. The data were collected for a minimum of two years before a statewide antidiscrimination law took effect in 2016.

Activists who want to undo that state law through a ballot question in the Nov. 6 election have focused their campaign message on bathroom safety concerns. They suggest that a new right for transgender people infringes on everyone else’s privacy rights, and could be abused by men who want to prey upon women and children in ladies’ rooms. The vote is being closely watched nationwide because it offers the nation’s first public referendum on transgender rights in the state that first introduced gay marriage.

More on the Boston Globe website here.