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Category: LGBT

I’m a Black, Queer Woman Working as an Adjunct Professor—And I’m Going on Strike

Posted on by Workplace Fairness
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Victoria Collins

Last fall, after nearly two years of underemployment due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I began teaching at Mercy College in New York as an adjunct professor. I was excited to finally be back in the classroom doing the thing I loved: teaching. I knew the terms of my contract, and while I wished the compensation was better, I accepted the offer in hopes that a steady income would be the start I needed to finally get back on my feet. 

My story is not unique — it mirrors the lived conditions of Black and brown folks in academia across the country. According to a 2020 report from the American Federation of Teachers, nearly half of U.S. adjunct faculty members “struggle to cover basic household expenses” and more than 20 percent depend on public assistance. The pay rate for Mercy College adjuncts is $3,000 per course, and, while rates vary, adjunct pay remains low. Nationally, adjunct faculty members make, on average, just $3,500 per course. 

This low pay, paired with precarity on the job and two years of stalled negotiations with management, has led adjunct faculty members at Mercy College to plan to strike during the week of May 2. I stand in full support of these workers, and all of those seeking just working conditions.

If Mercy college, along with all U.S. colleges and universities, wishes to attract a more diverse faculty pool, they must begin by offering better working conditions for adjunct faculty members, including higher wages and longer contracts. This is crucial because the majority of Mercy students are low income and people of color. Representations of different racial, class, and gendered experiences among faculty is important. I can attest to the positive effects of having someone who looked like me helming a classroom.

As educators, we give our all to our students. However, when queer educators of color face the socioeconomic disparities that accompany their experiences as marginalized people of color in America, it is more likely that a larger proportion of these educators’ time and attention will be occupied by the day-to-day struggle of staying afloat and living paycheck-to-paycheck rather than serving their students. For institutions whose students are largely people of color, BIPOC representation in faculty — from adjunct to tenured staff — is critical to student success and engagement, and to creating a safe and welcoming campus culture. 

As an educator who knows the economic realities that Black and queer people in academia face sustaining a living, I support striking in order to improve the pay of Mercy adjuncts. Black and brown students and adjuncts at Mercy deserve more, and I hope with this strike that they are able to create a Mercy community that truly empowers students to thrive.

About the Author

Victoria Collins Victoria R. Collins (she/?they) is a queer, Black, southern writer and educator born and bred of the clay soil of Mississippi, currently living and working in The Bronx. Vic holds an MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from The New School. Follow Vic @vicwritesthings

This blog originally appeared at In These Times on 4/28/2022. Reprinted with permission.” https://inthesetimes.com/article/mercy-college-new-york-strike-adjunct-labor


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‘We Took Care of Each Other’: A Maritime Union’s Hidden History of Gay-Straight and Interracial Solidarity

Posted on by Jonathan Kissam
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Jonathan Kissam – LAWCHA

Decades before the modern LGBTQ+ movement, a small but militant union of maritime workers on the West Coast with openly gay members and leaders coined a slogan linking discrimination against gay men, racial discrimination, and red-baiting. For the better part of two decades, the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union fought discrimination on the ships where its members worked and in society, until it was crushed by the same corporate and government forces that tried to destroy the United Electrical Workers (UE) during the Cold War.

The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (MCS) was formed in 1901 by the workers who waited on passengers, carried bags, cleaned rooms, cooked meals, and served drinks on the passenger and cruise ships that provided both travel and leisure for the middle and upper classes. They fed crews and washed the dishes and pots and pans on ships of all types. They faced grueling conditions, often being forced to work 16 hours a day, seven days a week, with no overtime pay, and sleeping in substandard quarters they called “floating tenements.”

Many of the cooks and stewards were Black and Asian, but MCS, like too many unions at the time, restricted membership to white workers. And although a high percentage of the cooks and stewards were “queens,” as gay men preferred to call themselves at the time, the union rarely if ever stood up for them when they were taunted—or “queen-baited”—by straight workers.

This all changed during the great waterfront strikes of the 1930s, when both MCS and the longshore union, prodded by rank-and-file activists, realized the need to unite all workers in order to win against the powerful ship owners. Black and Asian workers joined the unions and the strikes, which were ultimately successful in establishing coast-wide contracts for MCS and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union—both of which joined the newly-formed Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Victory did not come without a cost. On July 5, 1934, known as “Bloody Thursday,” police killed two workers—a longshoreman and a cook—as the ship owners tried to reopen the port of San Francisco by force. The flowers at their graves were tended by an MCS member known as the “Honolulu Queen.”

‘IT’S ANTI-UNION TO RED-BAIT, RACE-BAIT, OR QUEEN-BAIT’

As MCS established its presence on the ships—and used its hiring hall to integrate formerly all-white crews—its members continued to face taunts and harassment for their sexual orientation, their race, and their politics from bosses, passengers, and members of the conservative Sailors Union of the Pacific.

Revels Cayton, a Black, straight steward who became an MCS official, told historian Allan Bérubé how the union worked to address this situation. “In 1936 we developed this slogan: It’s anti-union to red-bait, race-bait, or queen-bait. We also put it another way: If you let them red-bait, they’ll race-bait, and if you let them race-bait, they’ll queen-bait. That’s why we all have to stick together.”

Sticking together worked. Bérubé relates, “The insults keep coming, but the gay stewards are getting bolder because they know their union is watching their backs.” Stephen “Mickey” Blair, a white, gay MCS member told Bérubé, “Marine Cooks and Stewards took the dignity that was in each of us and built it up, so you could get up in the morning and say to yourself ‘I can make it through this day.’ Equality was in the air we breathed.”

A WALKOUT TO HIRE LUELLA LAWHORN

During World War II, the ships that MCS members worked on were converted to serve the war effort, carrying troops and munitions. MCS membership tripled. Many of the new members were gay men who want to serve their country in the fight against fascism but had been kicked out of the military for their sexual orientation. Bérubé writes, “Merchant seaman pay a high price during the war… Although they are civilians, they are killed at a higher rate than are servicemen in any branch of the armed services other than the Marine Corps.”

After the war, MCS continued its traditions of aggressive struggle and uniting all workers. Messmen’s wages tripled between 1945 and 1949. When MCS dispatched a Black woman, Luella Lawhorn, to work on the fancy passenger liner Lurline and the company refused to accept her, the entire stewards department walked off the ship. The company backed down, and Lawhorn became the first Black stewardess on a U.S. passenger ship in the Pacific. In 1949, recognizing that its white leadership didn’t reflect its multiracial membership (by 1949 more than half of the members were Black, and a significant number Asian), the union diversified its leadership within a year.

However, MCS soon fell prey to the same wave of Cold War repression that attempted to destroy UE, the ILWU, and other “Them and Us” unions. Along with UE, ILWU, and eight other unions, MCS was brought up on charges of “communist domination” and expelled from the CIO. The Coast Guard declared MCS activists as “security risks” and prevented them from taking jobs on ships. Other unions used homophobia and racism, as well as red-baiting, to try to destroy the MCS. Ultimately the union was absorbed into the conservative Seafarers International Union.

‘OUR HISTORY HAS BEEN ERASED’

Bérubé, who was working on a book about the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union at the time of his death in 2007, wrote that “Their history is unknown today because, through fear and intimidation, it was first rewritten as an un-American activity, then dismissed as an insignificant failure, and, finally, erased from our nation’s memory, as if what they had achieved had never even happened.”

“We were 50 years ahead of our time. We were so democratic this country couldn’t stand it,” Peter Brownlee, a white, straight MCS member told Bérubé. “The most important thing was not that we had gays. It was that an injury to one was an injury to all—and we practiced it. We took care of each other.”

Stephen Blair told Bérubé, “What many of you younger people are trying to do today as queers—what you call inclusion and diversity—we already did it 50 years ago in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. We did it in the labor movement as working-class queens with left-wing politics, and that’s why the government crushed us, and that’s why you don’t know anything about us today—our history has been totally erased.”

This blog originally appeared at Labor Notes on June 23, 2021. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Jonathan Kissam is the communications director for the United Electrical Workers (UE).


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LGBT advocacy groups sue over Trump diversity training order

Posted on by Rebecca Rainey
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LGBT advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate President Donald Trump’s September executive order banning the government from working with contractors that conduct “any form of race or sex stereotyping,” including diversity training.

The groups receive federal grants and contracts to provide multiple services and health care to LGBT individuals. Their lawsuit, filed Monday in a California federal court, contends that the order limits them from using “scientific and medical-based information regarding systemic race or sex disparities in the provision of medical treatment” when training their staff.

The organizations say they provide training to their staff “to prevent and address discrimination against the populations they serve,” which includes information “about how systemic racism and implicit bias contribute to health disparities, mortality, and disproportionate criminalization.”

Trump’s executive order explicitly prohibits contractors from using any workplace training “that inculcates in its employees any form of race or sex stereotyping or any form of race or sex scapegoating.”

The Labor Department clarified that “race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating” includes using concepts in training that suggest “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” or that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

The lawsuit argues that the order violates freedom of speech protections and is overly vague as to what conduct would violate the order.

The advocacy groups say that if the order is allowed to stand, “more people will fall out of care, become homeless, fail to get tested, decline to take a vaccine when one becomes available, sicken, and even die.”

Opposition building: Groups from across the political spectrum have lined up in opposition to Trump’s order.

More than 150 trade groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have urged the president to abandon the executive order, warning that it will “lead to non-meritorious investigations, and hinder the ability of employers to implement critical programs to promote diversity and combat discrimination in the workplace.”

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, National Urban League and National Fair Housing Alliance also filed a lawsuit over the order late last month.

This blog originally appeared at Politico on November 3, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Rebecca Rainey is an employment and immigration reporter with POLITICO Pro and the author of the Morning Shift newsletter.


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LGBTQ groups vow to extend landmark court ruling beyond workplace

Posted on by Rebecca Rainey
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Justice Samuel Alito warned that the ruling “is virtually certain to have far-reaching consequences,” in his dissent from the 6-3 decision.

The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that federal anti-discrimination law extends to gay and transgender workers could usher in a new era of expanded rights for LGBTQ people in areas from housing to health care.

While the high court’s ruling Monday only applies directly to the workplace discrimination protections provided under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, advocacy groups are vowing to extend to myriad other laws the justices’ view that discrimination “based on sex” includes sexual orientation or gender identity.

Justice Samuel Alito warned that the ruling “is virtually certain to have far-reaching consequences,” in his dissent from the 6-3 decision. “Over 100 federal statutes prohibit discrimination because of sex,” wrote Alito.

There are still no explicit federal legal protections for gay and transgender individuals in health care, credit and education, among other areas. Advocates are hoping the ruling will bolster efforts to win such protection in the courts or in Congress. Gabriel Arkles, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, said he expects hundreds of cases to be filed in the wake of the ruling.

“There’s so many other aspects of our lives where there are no federal protections, or where those protections are being challenged,” said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “We have to recognize that Title VII is a great piece of legislation, but it does not provide comprehensive protections.”

The Supreme Court ruling affects employment, “the area of law where Congress has prohibited sex discrimination,” said Sarah Warbelow, legal director at the HRC, during a press call Monday. “We will fight to ensure that it extends to every sex non-discrimination statute in federal and state law.”

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch addressed this concern in the majority opinion, writing that “none of these other laws are before us; we have not had the benefit of adversarial testing about the meaning of their terms, and we do not prejudge any such question today.”

“Whether other policies and practices might or might not qualify as unlawful discrimination or find justifications under other provisions of Title VII are questions for future cases, not these,” he added.

The ACLU says it already plans to seize on the high court ruling to challenge the Trump administration’s move on Friday to formally roll back an Obama-era policy that banned health care providers from discriminating against transgender patients.

“The administration cannot rewrite the statute,” said Sean Young, legal director of the ACLU of Georgia, “and they cannot overrule the Supreme Court. So today’s decision directly undermines any of the administration’s attempts to eviscerate protections for LGBT people when it comes to health care.”

The Supreme Court ruling is a matter of statutory interpretation, meaning that Congress still has the ability to change the law.

“Not all of the provisions of the Act include sex as a protected characteristic, most notably, it’s missing from public accommodations, and from a guaranteed across the board non-discrimination with respect to federally funded programs,” said Warbelow. “Congress must act to provide those protections.”

Gay and transgender people have reported widespread harassment due to their orientation or gender identity.

At least 1 in 5 said they have experienced discrimination when applying for jobs, in their compensation, when being considered for promotion, or when trying to rent a room or apartment or buy a house, according to a 2017 survey conducted by National Public Radio and the Harvard School of Public Health.

A 2016 survey of nearly 28,000 people conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality also found that 26 percent of trans people lost a job due to bias and that 50 percent were harassed on the job. Some 20 percent of respondents said they were evicted or denied housing, and 78 percent of trans students said they were harassed or assaulted.

Of the more than 23,000 Title VII sex-based discrimination charges the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received in fiscal 2019, 1,868 were related to LGBTQ discrimination, according to the agency’s data.

In May 2019, the Democratic-controlled House passed the Equality Act, which would codify anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, employment, credit and federally funded programs, among other areas.

But the bill hasn’t been taken up by the Republican-majority Senate and is not likely to go far, especially during an election year.

Absent a new law passed by Congress, attorneys say discrimination in other areas outside the workplace will have to be litigated in court.

“These issues are out there.” said Jim Paretti, a former chief of staff to the acting chair of the EEOC during the Trump administration. “They will continue to percolate,” he said, saying that questions around other statutes that use the same language as Title VII will have to be worked out in the courts.

This blog originally appeared at Politico on June 16, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Rebecca Rainey is an employment and immigration reporter with POLITICO Pro and the author of the Morning Shift newsletter. Prior to joining POLITICO in August 2018, Rainey covered the Occupational Safety and Health administration and regulatory reform on Capitol Hill. Her work has been published by The Washington Post and the Associated Press, among other outlets.


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LGBT History Month Pathway to Progress: The Founding of Pride At Work

Posted on by Kenneth Quinnell
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History has long been portrayed as a series of “great men” taking great action to shape the world we live in. In recent decades, however, social historians have focused more on looking at history “from the bottom up,” studying the vital role that working people played in our heritage. Working people built, and continue to build, the United States. In our series, Pathway to Progress, we’ll take a look at various people, places and events where working people played a key role in the progress our country has made, including those who are making history right now. In honor of LGBT History Month, we will take a look at the founding of Pride At Work (P@W).

Prior to 1969, the labor movement mostly ignored issues that affected LGBTQ working people. The events at Stonewall Inn and the rebellion that followed woke up many in the ranks of labor to the need to step up efforts to include all workers, including our LGBTQ siblings. After Stonewall, unions began to recognize that discrimination based on sexual orientation was another assault on working people, one that victimized union members and weakened efforts at solidarity among working families.

As the 1970s began, the AFT was the first union to pass a resolution against discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 1974, the Teamsters worked with the LGBTQ community members in San Francisco on a boycott against the anti-union Coors Brewing Co. Over the next few decades, support for LGBTQ rights in the labor movement continued to grow. The AFL-CIO passed a resolution that called for legislation to ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. More and more unions started creating LGBTQ caucuses and opened up space for LGBTQ workers to be activists and open about their sexual orientation.

While some unions took the lead, the labor movement was largely silent on issues related to LGBTQ rights and issues. This lead LGBTQ union activists to come together to form Pride At Work. The activists met in New York in 1994, the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. Earlier efforts at organizing had led to groups such as the Lesbian and Gay Labor Alliance (in the San Francisco Bay Area), the Lesbian and Gay Labor Network (New York) and the Gay and Lesbian Labor Activists Network (New England). Efforts such of these would eventually be consolidated into a larger LGBTQ workers organization, Pride At Work. In 1997, the organization was officially recognized by AFL-CIO as a constituency group.

Among Pride At Work’s first campaigns were efforts to pressure Chrysler to ban anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Chrysler made the requested changes in 1999 and Ford and General Motors soon followed. Domestic partner benefits were gained a year later. Later, in 2005, P@W successfully convinced the AFL-CIO to support marriage equality. In 2012, the AFL-CIO supported the legal case that led to the national legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

Today, Pride At Work continues to educate the labor movement and wider culture about the importance of unions for LGBTQ workers and the value those workers provide employers. Pride@Work also supports electoral candidates that support LGBTQ workers and helps LGBTQ working people run for political office.

This blog was originally published by the AFL-CIO on October 29, 2019. Reprinted with permission. 

About the Author: Kenneth Quinnell is a long-time blogger, campaign staffer and political activist. Before joining the AFL-CIO in 2012, he worked as labor reporter for the blog Crooks and Liars.


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The Supreme Court Case Testing the Limits of Gorsuch’s Textualism

Posted on by Richard Primus
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Image result for richard primusIn three cases argued last week—Bostock v. Clayton County, Altitude Express v. Zarda, and Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC—the Supreme Court confronted this question: Does Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination “because of [an] individual’s … sex” forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity?

Several lower courts and most academic commentators have said that the answer is yes. The logic is pretty simple. If a male employee is fired because he has sexual relationships with men, but female employees in the same workplace can have sexual relationships with men without getting fired, then the male employee was fired “because of [his] sex,” inasmuch as he would not have been fired had his sex been different. The same is true of a woman assigned female at birth who is fired because she lives as a man. If you’re tempted by the thought that firing a person for having a same-sex partner doesn’t discriminate on the basis of sex because the employer would fire people of any sex who have same-sex partners, ask yourself whether a law prohibiting people of any race to marry outside their racial groups, or to ride in a railroad car designated for people of a different race, discriminates on the basis of race. (It does.)

To be sure, nobody thinks that Congress in 1964 intended to ban workplace discrimination against LGBTQ persons when it prohibited discrimination “because of … sex.” But the words of the law turn out to do so, regardless of what Congress had in mind. The question before the Supreme Court, therefore, is what prevails when the text of a statute does something that the legislature that passed the statute did not have in mind—and would not have endorsed.

The justice to whom that question is posed most sharply, and who may well cast the deciding vote in these cases, is Justice Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch may find himself pulled in different directions by two of his strong jurisprudential commitments. On one hand, he generally thinks that courts should not be engines of social change, including by expanding the reach of antidiscrimination laws. Those sorts of changes, he believes, should come from legislatures. But on the other hand, Gorsuch is a proud and articulate textualist. In his oft-repeated view, a court applying a law passed by a legislature should be governed by what the words of the statute actually say, regardless of whether the court thinks the words of the statute embody good public policy. Nor should courts let the meaning of statutory text be overcome by considerations about the general purposes of the law or what members of the legislature said or thought during the lawmaking process. What matters is the text of the statute. And the text that Congress adopted, read literally, covers LGBTQ scenarios.

To be sure, all nine justices would probably describe themselves as textualists of one sort of another in cases of statutory interpretation. None of them thinks that courts can ignore what statutes say. But most are more open to considering other factors as well, including the legislature’s purpose. (The leading alternatives to textualist approaches to statutory interpretation are usually called “purposivist,” because they advocate taking into account what Congress meant to accomplish, not just what the law literally says.) Gorsuch’s textualism is the most uncompromising, and being a principled textualist is a big part—perhaps the biggest part—of Gorsuch’s public identity as a jurist.

So if Gorsuch were to write that employers are able to discriminate on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation—whether because of a concern about precipitating social change or otherwise—critics will surely charge that his textualism is more rhetorical than real. They will say that he pretends to have a consistent interpretive theory, but he’s willing to jettison that theory when he doesn’t like the result it would lead to. That criticism might sting. But in the end, the charge of playing fast and loose with his principles is not the most significant problem Gorsuch would have to face if he ruled for the employers. He would also risk exposing one of the key premises of textualism as flawed.

At oral argument, Gorsuch recognized the strength of the textualist argument in favor of the LGBTQ plaintiffs. But Gorsuch also suggested that this point might not decide the case, because of a competing concern about the appropriate role of courts within the legal system. To decide that existing federal law prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, Gorsuch mused, might cause significant social disruption. Perhaps, he said, American society is not ready for, or does not want, a legal rule protecting LGBTQ persons against workplace discrimination. And like most conservative-leaning federal judges—indeed, like most federal judges regardless of politics—Gorsuch takes the view that major social change should not come from court rulings but rather from democratically elected legislatures. Indeed, a big part of the point of textualism for someone like Gorsuch is that it prevents courts from substituting their own policy intuitions for those of legislatures.

How much social disruption would actually result from a ruling for the plaintiffs is of course a matter of guesswork: Counsel for the plaintiffs argued that it might not be so disruptive. But to a strict textualist, the degree of potential social disruption shouldn’t matter. If courts shouldn’t be in the business of making judgments about social policy, and instead should just apply statutes as written, then societal outcomes should be no reason to hesitate to do what the text of the statute says. It might feel like a ruling for the plaintiffs would constitute judge-ordered social change, but from a textualist viewpoint, ruling for the plaintiffs wouldn’t expand antidiscrimination law. It would just enforce the law that already exists.

That’s not to say that social disruption—were it to occur—wouldn’t be a problem. But a key tenet of statutory textualism is the idea that if statutes are problematic, the solution is not for courts to tinker with them. Courts must enforce laws as they are, warts and all, and leave any needed repair work to Congress. In the present case, that means that if Congress doesn’t think that Title VII should prevent discrimination against LGBTQ persons, Congress could add clarifying language to the statute. A textualist with faith in this process should have no problem enforcing the statute as written and leaving the rest up to Congress.

Like most justices, though, Gorsuch is a sophisticated observer of congressional behavior. He knows that in reality the legislative process is full of veto opportunities even when it isn’t completely gridlocked. Getting anything through Congress is difficult, and imagining that Congress will respond to every statutory interpretation it doesn’t like by passing appropriate statutory amendments is more than a little naïve. In this case, Gorsuch knows that Congress is unlikely to respond to a literal construction of Title VII by affirmatively authorizing discrimination against LGBTQ persons. There probably isn’t a sufficient majority in Congress today to pass legislation specifically prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ persons, but there probably isn’t a sufficient majority for passing a law specifically denying that protection, either. So whichever way the Supreme Court decides is likely to be how the law remains for some period of time.

That’s why the possibility of social disruption concerns Gorsuch: If he believed a legislative fix were a realistic possibility, he could just follow the text of the statute and let Congress do whatever cleanup work it thought was needed. But Gorsuch is entirely correct to doubt that any legislative fix would be forthcoming.

If Gorsuch writes an opinion in this case that suggests (even implicitly) that he does not trust the possibility of a legislative fix, he will have done more than give his critics grounds to say that he abandoned his textualist principles when he didn’t like the results. He will also be suggesting that, when push comes to shove, he knows that one of the premises of hard-core statutory textualism—that fixing statutes is the job of the legislature—is not in practice workable. That is not a signal that a Supreme Court justice who aspires to be his generation’s leading hard-edged textualist ought to want to send. The simplest way to avoid sending that signal, of course, is to apply the statute literally—that is, to rule that Title VII covers discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. That would look like evidence that Gorsuch is seriously committed to his textualist approach, regardless of his views about the policy wisdom to which it leads in any given case.

This article was originally published at Politico on October 15, 2019. Reprinted with permission. 

About the Author: Richard Primus is the Theodore J. St. Antoine Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and a former clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Follow him on Twitter @Richard_Primus.


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Don’t Leave Equality To The Supreme Court

Posted on by Theo Wuest
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Are you a woman? Imagine if you were fired for wearing a skirt to work.

Are you a man? Imagine getting fired for not wearing a skirt to work.

This sounds ridiculous, right? It sounds unfair. But for many Americans, it’s a reality we must face every day.

Take the case of Aimee Stephens, a Detroit funeral home employee. Aimee is transgender, a woman assigned male sex at birth.

For most of her career, she went undercover, wearing men’s clothing every day and pretending to be a man. When she finally told her boss that she was in fact a woman and would like to start wearing work-appropriate women’s clothing, she was fired.

In 29 states, there are no protections against workplace discrimination of this sort for transgender people like me. If I lived in Michigan like Aimee, my employer could fire me at will, just because I’m transgender. (In fact, I could also be denied housing, credit, or public accommodations.)

Facing this injustice, Aimee Stephens sued. Her case against her employer has now made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

The court will decide whether firing someone because they’re transgender constitutes discrimination “on the basis of sex,” which would be illegal under the Civil Rights Act. If they rule in favor of Stephens, transgender Americans would finally be afforded the same protections that everyone else has as a right.

The Trump administration has argued that the Civil Rights Act doesn’t protect people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. But advocates have countered that it does apply, since discrimination along these lines punishes people who defy stereotypes attached to their assigned sex.

Whatever the court decides, there’s no disputing that transgender people in the United States face alarmingly high rates of unemployment and poverty. In fact, we’re twice as likely to live in poverty as the general population, and 30 percent of us have experienced homelessness at some point.

Against this backdrop, housing and employment discrimination are an added devastation — and in all likelihood part of the reason these numbers are so high in the first place.

So it’s no exaggeration to say the Supreme Court’s ruling will have a drastic material impact on the millions of transgender people living in the United States. Allowing this discrimination to continue will threaten many more with unemployment and economic hardship.

With the court’s current right-wing majority, that’s a real danger. But Congress could address it by explicitly legislating anti-discrimination protections — for the workplace, housing, credit, and everything else — for this vulnerable group.

In fact, the House of Representatives has already passed the Equality Act, which would clearly codify the inclusion of gay, lesbian, transgender, and non-binary people in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. However, the GOP-controlled Senate has refused to consider it.

Without this legislation, the rights of millions of Americans like me are at the mercy of this Supreme Court.

No matter how the court rules, it’s the responsibility of Congress to ensure that “freedom and justice for all” includes transgender Americans, too. We need laws to prevent people like Aimee Stephens from losing their livelihoods due to employer prejudice.

We’re supposed to be a free country. We’re supposed to be an equal country. It’s time to make it that way.

This article was originally published at Daily Kos on October 10, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Theo Wuest is a Next Leader at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

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The Corporate Media Failed to Warn Us About the Trump Admin’s Attack on LGBTQ Workers

Posted on by Andy Roth
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Image result for Andy Lee Roth“Sex,” Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia University, told the New York Times, “is a confounding term in our culture, in our language and certainly in the law.” As the Supreme Court opens a new session, its justices are set to tackle the conundrum of defining “sex.” At issue is whether Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination “because of sex,” applies to gay, lesbian, and transgender employees.

There are many reasons why LGBTQ Americans deserve federal protection against employment and workplace discrimination. Simplest and most glaring: In a majority of states, it is perfectly legal for an employer to refuse to hire someone, or to fire them, simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. In its preview of Bostock v. Clayton County, Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda, and Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, SCOTUSBlog described the trio of cases as “some of the biggest” of the Court’s forthcoming term. The Court’s decisions will be consequential for how secure all workers—whether straight or queer; transgender, cisgender, or nonbinary—are in their jobs, because the cases will also test a 30-year-old decision that established gender stereotyping as a form of sex discrimination.

It is distressing that corporate news media have not deemed employment protections for LGBTQ workers to be newsworthy until the Supreme Court decided to hear these cases, but it is no surprise to us. The inadequate news coverage fits a pattern we found in a study of several hundred news reports on LGBTQ issues published by four major newspapers between January 2016 and November 2018. The study, “Stonewalled: Establishment Media’s Silence on the Trump Administration’s Crusade against LGBTQ People,” appears in Censored 2020: Through the Looking Glass (Seven Stories Press, 2019).

Our study concluded that, during that period, corporate news media consistently muted, marginalized or ignored the steady rollback of LGTBQ protections and rights under the Trump administration. Another recent study, focused on television news coverage, reached similar conclusions: Since Trump became president, news coverage of LGBTQ issues has “all but disappeared.”

From the 2016 presidential campaign through the midterm elections of 2018, we found that corporate news coverage of LGBTQ issues focused on two main issues: the president’s proposal to ban transgender people from military service and so-called “bathroom bills.” Together these two topics accounted for more than forty percent of all LGBTQ-focused news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. By contrast, during the same time period, the independent news outlets in our study covered a much wider range of issues facing LGBTQ Americans, devoting less than 10% of their coverage to the proposed transgender military ban and “bathroom bills.”

Based on the findings from our study, we forecast three trends in news coverage of the Supreme Court’s hearing of the Title VII anti-discrimination cases. The first pattern we expect to hold is a positive, encouraging one; the remainder are causes for concern.

News coverage will center LGBTQ voices.

LGBTQ people—including spokespersons for leading LGBTQ rights organizations, such as Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Transgender Equality—will achieve what sociologist William Gamson calls “media standing.” Standing, in Gamson’s use of the term, goes beyond being covered or mentioned in the news; the figures that journalists quote directly are positioned as agents whose insights and actions matter.

In our study, we found that at least 7.5% of quoted sources identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Although the actual numbers of LGBTQ people in the United States are difficult to determine, that figure is higher than recent estimates of the nation’s adult population indicate, suggesting that journalists are making good faith efforts to represent “the diversity of opinion and experience within the LGBTQ community,” as recommended by Sarah Kate Ellis in her introduction to the GLAAD Media Reference Guide.

This point about the inclusion of LGBTQ voices may seem obvious, even trivial, but a long history of systemic prejudice against LGBTQ people by the nation’s most prominent news outlets makes the achievement of media standing by LGBTQ people noteworthy. As recently as 1996, for example, Edward Alwood, author of Straight News, concluded that U.S. news media “rarely focus” on the leaders of gay and lesbian rights organizations.

As coverage of the LGBTQ cases argued before the Supreme Court will show, in 2019 news organizations have improved in this regard.

Corporate news will provide limited historical context for understanding these cases.

News stories are geared toward current events and journalists often fail to provide the long-term historical view necessary to fully understand those events.

If news coverage frames the Bostock, Altitude Express and Harris Funeral Homes cases in terms of the history of civil liberties in the United States, this will be due to the advocacy of civil liberties organizations and their allies.

In October 2018, for example, the Trump administration proposed to define gender as a biological fact, determined at birth. In our data, we found that spokespeople for civil liberties groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, articulated their opposition by linking protections of and inclusion for LGBTQ people to the history of the civil rights movement, including the racial integration of the military by President Truman in 1948, and the desegregation of schools, as mandated by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Had the newspaper articles in our study not included the voices of civil liberties advocates, readers would have had no historical context with which to make sense of the Trump administration’s audacious proposal.

To what extent will news coverage of the Supreme Court cases on employment discrimination be enhanced by historical perspective? Our study suggests that the answer to this question depends on whether that coverage features the voices of civil liberties organizations.

Corporate news coverage will whitewash anti-LGBTQ advocates’ most virulent positions.

In our study, establishment newspapers frequently quoted Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, as a newsworthy opponent of state laws and ordinances that would prohibit LGBTQ discrimination.

Quotations published by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, for example, portrayed Perkins as a fair partisan, engaged in legitimate debate, but failed to inform readers of Perkins’ more virulent anti-LGBTQ statements or that, in 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center listed the Family Research Council as an anti-gay hate group.

Similarly, Media Matters has documented how establishment media outlets have highlighted Mike Pence’s civility with gay men in public and professional meetings while downplaying his long record of anti-LGBTQ positions, first in Congress, then as Governor of Indiana, and now as Vice President.

Numerous studies show that hate crimes against LGBTQ people—including violence that is often deadly—is on the rise, while acceptance of LGBTQ people in everyday situations is eroding. But corporate news coverage of the trio of Supreme Court cases is likely to downplay these realities, in part by depicting the opponents of employment protections for LGBTQ Americans as reasonable and principled figures—even when they have taken virulent homophobic or transphobic positions in the past. Call it the Tony Perkins Syndrome.

At its best, journalism provides insights into complex issues, puts news into context, and highlights abuses of authority. We would be happy for establishment news outlets to report on the Supreme Court’s LGBTQ cases in ways that prove our critical predictions wrong. But, based on our study of recent news coverage, we expect otherwise.

The Supreme Court is not likely to rule on the trio of LGBTQ employment cases until June 2020. We do not have to wait until then to judge the establishment media’s coverage of crucial LGBTQ issues, or to hold news organizations accountable when they fail to provide the kind of coverage we need to act as informed members of our communities.

This article was originally published at InTheseTimes on October 8, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Andy Lee Roth is associate director of Project Censored, a media watchdog organization established in 1976. His research, including the study described in this article, focuses on the power of news to shape public opinion. He is the coeditor of in Censored 2020: Through the Looking Glass (Seven Stories Press, 2019) and nine previous Censored yearbooks.About the Author: April Anderson is the lead author of “Stonewalled: Establishment Media’s Silence on the Trump Administration’s Crusade against LGBTQ People,” which appears in Censored 2020. A member and advocate of the LGBTQI+ community, they work as a Research and Instruction Librarian at Macalester College.


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Scary times as Trump Supreme Court tackles abortion restrictions and anti-LGBTQ job discrimination

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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Almost exactly a year after Brett Kavanaugh’s lies succeeded at getting him onto the Supreme Court, his first chance to limit abortion rights is in his grasp. The court announced Friday it would take a case on Louisiana’s abortion restrictions, restrictions that are very similar to Texas provisions the court struck down in 2016. That’s not the only bombshell the Trump court could be dropping soon—next week the court will hear a set of cases on employment discrimination against LGBTQ people.

Louisiana, as Texas previously did, wants to require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital—a significant burden to providers since some hospitals will not give them admitting privileges at all, while also being of basically no benefit to patients since hospital admission after abortion is vanishingly rare and can be accomplished without the provider having admitting privileges. The most conservative appeals court in the U.S. upheld that law, but the Supreme Court put it on hold while considering whether to hear the case. Which it will now do, with a decision expected in 2020.

Even before that case comes up, though, the court will hear a set of cases involving people who were fired for being gay or transgender. Those cases involve Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits job discrimination “because of sex.” The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decided in 2015 that it would be discrimination because of sex to treat a woman in a relationship with a woman differently than a woman in a relationship with a man, and judges in two of the cases before the court next week have found similarly, with one writing “sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination” and another that it’s “analytically impossible to fire an employee based on that employee’s status as a transgender person without being motivated, at least in part, by the employee’s sex.” But we are talking about the Trump Supreme Court here, so … it’s hard to be optimistic about anything, ever.

This article was originally published at Daily Kos on October 4, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is a Daily Kos contributor at Daily Kos editor since December 2006. Full-time staff since 2011, currently assistant managing editor.

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CNN’s planning a 2020 LGBTQ forum. Here are some issues advocates say the candidates should address.

Posted on by Casey Quinlan
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High on the list: Reversing the ban on transgender troops and addressing the plight of LGBTQ people of color.

A prominent LGBTQ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) announced Thursday that it will host a presidential town hall on LGBTQ issues next month. The event will air on CNN.

LGBTQ advocacy groups told ThinkProgress that they know exactly what ideas they want to hear discussed at the town hall set for Oct. 10, which is National Coming Out Day. Many said that first and foremost, they want candidates to acknowledge the struggles of the most marginalized in the community, including LGBTQ people of color, and put forward policies to respond to anti-LGBTQ bias in the criminal justice system.

“LGBTQ people are more likely to come into contact with the police due to discriminatory policing, be incarcerated, and experience violence while locked up than non-LGBTQ people. Black and Latinx LGBTQ people are most impacted,” Tyrone Hanley, senior policy counsel for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told ThinkProgress.

Hanley said that aspirants to the White House must put criminal justice reform as one of the issues topping their list. “Candidates must demonstrate an understanding that anti-LGBTQ discrimination and violence is impacted by issues of race, gender, and class just as they are for other communities,” he said.

The town hall comes at a critical time, as the Trump administration has rolled back health-care protections for transgender people and protections for transgender students, implemented a ban on transgender people in the military, and proposed a rule that allows broad religious exemptions for businesses with federal contracts.

Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA); former Vice President Joe Biden; South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro have accepted the invitation to the town hall, and others may yet join them.

HRC invited candidates who reach at least 2% in four national polls chosen by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and who have met the DNC’s threshold of 130,000 unique donors.

The candidates will answer questions from CNN journalists and the members of the audience at back-to-back town halls over the course of the evening. LGBTQ advocates have a broad range of issues on their list of topics they want to see discussed.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said he’d like to see how each candidate stands on reversing the president’s ban on military service by transgender troops. Minter said he would like the candidates to acknowledge that health care, poverty, and food insecurity are all LGBTQ issues.

And, he added, the candidates should also demonstrate how they would carry on the progress of the Obama administration when it comes to tackling the issue of conversion therapy, programs in which young people are told they can and should change their sexual orientation and in some cases, their gender. The American Medical Association has said conversion therapy, especially in youth, may cause significant psychological distress.

“While regulating that issue falls primarily to the states, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a groundbreaking report on the harms caused to minors by conversion therapy in 2015 that has played a key role in supporting state legislation,” Minter said.

“We would very much like to see candidates pledge to continue and expand such educational efforts. The president’s voice is powerful, and we urgently need national leadership on this issue, which poses such a severe threat to the health and well-being of LGBTQ youth.”

Stacey Long Simmons, director of advocacy and action for the National LGBTQ Task Force, echoed the views of others in saying that the presidential candidates should focus on the community’s most vulnerable populations.

“When we are having conversations with policymakers, we typically ask about issues affecting members of our community who are most deeply marginalized and in particular thinking about people who may have multiple marginalized identities,” Long Simmons said.

“They may be undocumented or transgender or gender-nonconforming. They may be racial minorities or religious minorities. All of those things are things we tend to highlight when we’re in conversations with people,” she said.

She added that candidates have to understand how all issues connect to the LGBTQ community and roll back many of the anti-LGBTQ policies of the Trump administration, which have undone much of the work of the Obama administration to bolster LGBTQ rights.

“There’s not an issue out there that is being discussed that doesn’t directly impact members of our community,” she said.

“We would want to be involved in as many ways possible to shape policy because we know that, given the way society is structured, whether it’s climate change or healthcare policy or criminal justice policy, all of the things decision-makers put out affect our community and so we want to make sure they don’t worsen some of the conditions we’re currently grappling with.”

In a statement to ThinkProgress, Sharon McGowan, chief strategy officer and legal director at Lambda Legal, said that candidates need to explain how they would use “all of the tools at their disposal,” including the bully pulpit, executive powers, and legislative acton where possible to address and reverse the policies of the Trump administration.

McGowan said of these policies, “These harms include this administration’s weaponization of religion as an enemy of civil rights protections for LGBTQ people (among others), and the ways in which this administration has taken aim at the most vulnerable in our community, including transgender people, young people, and LGBTQ people of color.”

She said Lambda Legal would also like to see the candidates “discuss the damage that has been done to the federal judiciary by the appointment of scores of anti-LGBTQ ideologues to lifetime positions on the federal bench, and how they intend to address this crisis.”

As other organizations have said, McGowan said candidates need to understand that all policy issues, whether they be safe schools, police misconduct, and treatment in government custody, are all LGBTQ issues.

In his statement announcing the town hall, HRC President Alphonso David said that despite enormous gains in the past decade, there remain a number of areas where LGBTQ people face discrimination and disadvantages “because of who we are.”

“Today, in 30 states, LGBTQ people remain at risk of being fired, evicted, or denied services because of who we are. Thirty-five states have yet to ban the dangerous and debunked practice of ‘conversion therapy,’ which is harming our young people. Hate crimes are rising, and more than 100 transgender people — most of whom are transgender women of color — have been killed in the United States in the last five years,”  David said.

Many Democratic candidates acknowledged the LGBTQ community during the first presidential debate in June. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said that violence against transgender people of color was a serious issue that the country needs to address. At least 16 transgender people have been killed this year, according to HRC, and the overwhelming majority of these murders were of black trans women. Last year, there were at least 26 killings of transgender people.

Castro called for making health care inclusive to trans people, although he misspoke about which trans people should be considered when he talked about reproductive justice. Warren used inclusive language to discuss how the economy isn’t working for Latinx people. Klobuchar also mentioned shifting attitudes in marriage equality.

Several candidates for the Democratic nomination have released plans in the past few months on how they plan to tackle policy issues that affect the LGBTQ community.

Warren released proposals and policies designed to advance LGBTQ rights. Her ideas included supporting the Equality Act, reversing President Donald Trump’s military trans ban, a vow to “protect civil rights for transgender people,” outlawing conversion therapy, reversing the State Department’s denial of family visas to same-sex domestic partners of diplomats, and ending discrimination against queer men who are currently barred from donating blood.

Warren tweeted in August about a trans woman of color who died in isolation at Rikers Island, “Let’s be clear: Layleen Cubilette-Polanco should still be alive. Solitary confinement is cruel and inhumane. We must end this practice, enforce strict standards for medical care, and provide extra layers of protection for LGBTQ+ people.”

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) has released his plan to fight for LGBTQ rights, which included reversing the trans military ban, directing the Justice Department to investigate crimes against transgender people, specifically trans women of color, and making sure that LGBTQ people are included in federal data collection efforts.

Last month, some of the candidates spoke about the needs of transgender Americans with the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) Action Fund for its Transform the White House initiative.

Booker and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spoke at length about their approach to advancing transgender equality. They spoke on issues such as rolling back Trump administration policies that undid much of the progress of the Obama administration on transgender equality, violence against transgender people and the criminal justice system, and economic policies that would improve trans people’s lives.

In later interviews, Castro and Klobuchar spoke with the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund. Castro mentioned discrimination against transgender people in housing, the large share of homeless youth who are LGBTQ, and the detainment of transgender immigrants.

Klobuchar said she would reverse the trans military ban in her first 100 days and touted her support of national nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people over the years.

 

 

This article was originally published at Think Progress on September 5, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Casey Quinlan covers policy issues related to gender and sexuality. Their work has also been published in The Establishment, Bustle, Glamour, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, The Atlantic, and In These Times. They studied economic reporting, political reporting, and investigative journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where they graduated with an M.A. in business journalism.

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