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Tag: LGBT

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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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 â€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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Kristen Stewart’s experience is emblematic of LGBTQ people’s struggles in Hollywood

Posted on by Casey Quinlan
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Image result for casey quinlanIn an interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK, actor Kristen Stewart, who has been romantically linked to model Stella Maxwell since 2017, said, “I have fully been told, â€If you just like do yourself a favor, and don’t go out holding your girlfriend’s hand in public, you might get a Marvel movie.’ I don’t want to work with people like that.”

Stewart has said publicly she does not identify as bisexual or lesbian, and doesn’t want to choose a label for her sexuality. In the same interview she added, “I was informed by an old school mentality, which is — you want to preserve your career and your success and your productivity, and there are people in the world who don’t like you, and they don’t like that you date girls, and they don’t like that you don’t identify as a quote unquote â€lesbian’, but you also don’t identify as a quote unquote â€heterosexual’. And people like to know stuff, so what the fuck are you?’”

Although it may, at times, appear as though LGBTQ representation and participation in Hollywood has achieved some semblance of parity, Stewart’s experience is far from unique. Several young, openly LGBTQ actors such as Ellen Page and Ezra Miller have talked about how their gender and sexuality have affected how people talk to them about their careers.

Ellen Page, star of Inception, Juno, and Tallulah, came out as gay in 2014. “I was distinctly told, by people in the industry, when I started to become known: â€People cannot know you’re gay.’,” she said to Porter Edit earlier this year. “And I was pressured — forced, in many cases — to always wear dresses and heels for events and photo shoots. As if lesbians don’t wear dresses and heels. But I will never let anyone put me in anything I feel uncomfortable in ever again.”

Ezra Miller, who has starred in Justice League, Madame Bovary, and the most recent Harry Potter franchise Fantastic Beasts, came out as queer in 2012 to Out, and told GQ in 2018 that their gender is fluid.

“I’m comfortable with all the pronouns. I let he/his/him ride, and that’s fine,” Miller said.

But Miller said they were told not to be open about their sexuality and gender by a number of people who thought it would damage their acting career.

In 2017, Miller said, “I won’t specify [who told me not to come out.] Folks in the industry, folks outside the industry. People I’ve never spoken to. They said there’s a reason so many gay, queer, gender-fluid people in Hollywood conceal their sexual identity, or their gender identity in their public image. I was told I had done a â€silly’ thing in…thwarting my own potential to be a leading man.”

Sarah Paulson, who also chooses not to label her sexual identity, told Porter Edit in 2017 said that she was told that her relationship with Holland Taylor could be a liability for her career.

“Early on, when people found out I was with Holland, some said: â€I think you have to be careful, I’m afraid it’s going to affect your career negatively,’” the Ocean’s 8 actor said.

One of the most notorious examples of Hollywood reacting negatively to an actor’s sexuality was Rupert Everett, star of My Best Friend’s Wedding and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who said that he stopped getting offers for roles in 2007. He has since focused on writing scripts and roles that he could play, such as poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.

He said in 2010, to BBC’s Radio 4, that Hollywood is “an extremely conservative world” that “pretends to be a liberal world.”

Although LGBTQ character diversity in films is increasing in some respects, Hollywood has a lot of progress to make on LGBTQ inclusion. According to GLAAD’s 2019 Studio Responsibility Index, LGBTQ characters had more screen time than in previous years — of the 20 LGBTQ-inclusive films released last year, 10 featured more than 10 minutes of screen-time for an LGBTQ character. When looking at each of the 45 LGBTQ characters GLAAD counted, 26 had less than three minutes of screen time and 16 had less than one minute of screen time. Transgender characters were absent from the 110 major studio releases for the second year in a row.

And there is often tremendous buzz around movies’ supposed LGBTQ representation, only to ultimately fail to deliver anything meaningful in terms of screen time or actual representation of a queer relationship.

Often there is only a hint of a relationship, or a wink and a nod, rather than representation in line with relationships between straight people. Beauty and the Beast’s live action remake was applauded for featuring a gay LeFou, but he was only very briefly shown dancing with a man in drag during a ballroom scene, largely for comedic effect. Finding Dory briefly showed two women together in a park, which some audience members interpreted as a lesbian couple and others didn’t, and they were only shown in a speechless reaction shot. When questioned about the women, the movie’s co-director Andrew Stanton said, “They can be whatever you want them to be. There’s no right or wrong answer.” Most recently, Marvel’s Avengers Endgame tossed in a quick throwaway line alluding to a gay relationship, a scene Disney pumped up as the first openly gay character in the largest box office franchise in cinematic history.

Some LGBTQ viewers were upset with the representation of Harry Potter character Albus Dumblemore in Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald, who J.K. Rowling said had a relationship of a “sexual dimension” with Gellert Grindelwald. But when it came time to show that relationship onscreen and address Dumbledore’s sexuality in general, the director, David Yates, said those things would not be explicit in the film. Similarly, in Thor: Ragnarok, the character Valkyrie — portrayed by out actress Tessa Thompson — had a scene which made her sexuality explicit but was ultimately cut from the film. Some of that representation may improve soon, however — In Thor: Love and Thunder, the next sequel in the same franchise, Valkyrie will reportedly get more explicit representation of a relationship with a woman, according to i09. Marvel Studios confirmed a romantic storyline of Valkyrie seeking a new queen.

This article was originally published at Think Progress on September 4, 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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EEOC now gives nonbinary people a way to be counted in workplace

Posted on by Casey Quinlan
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Image result for casey quinlanThe EEOC quietly acknowledged nonbinary workers in a change to the “Frequently Asked Questions” section on its site.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), an independent federal agency that is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws against workplace discrimination, recently changed its website to address how employers can report workers as nonbinary.

Before the EEOC’s actions last week, employers didn’t have a way to report nonbinary workers in what are known as EEO-1 reports, which are filed with the agency as mandated by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1967.

More Americans are informing people that their gender is under the nonbinary umbrella, which places a pressing need on employers to recognize their gender, and more states are recognizing this diversity.

According to a Harris Poll done on behalf of GLAAD in 2017, 12% of millennials say they are transgender, agender, genderfluid, or bigender, which is double the percentage of Generation X who said the same. The report said there were growing levels of young people whose genders are outside of the gender binary. More than one third of people in Generation Z say they know someone who uses non-binary pronouns such as they and them.

A few states allow nonbinary people to choose a marker other than “M” or “F” on government identification such as driver’s licenses and ID cards. California, Oregon, Minnesota, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia allow nonbinary people to have this option such as an “X” designation. Washington, Oregon, and New Jersey allow nonbinary birth certificates.

The EEOC has recognized this need under its Frequently Asked Questions page addressing 2017 and 2018 compensation data. According to the National Law Review, these changes were made on August 15.

Although this guidance for employers is not a long-term solution for nonbinary people, it is an improvement over completely erasing nonbinary people’s genders. It also defies the binary understanding of gender that the Trump administration has embraced from the beginning. The EEOC directs employers to write the nonbinary worker’s gender in the comment box on the Certification Page and to preface it with “Additional Employee Data.” The EEOC provides an example:

Harper Jean Tobin, director of policy at the National Center for Transgender Equality, said the EEOC was likely responding to employers’ questions about how to account for nonbinary workers.

“There has not been a concern that something bad was going to happen to employers because they didn’t include this data. Employers wanted to know how to provide accurate data to the EEOC so the EEOC said that’s fine. We’re not going to get into the business of defining people’s gender,” she said.

“If you have employees who are nonbinary, you can use the narrative comment section of the form, like you could for anything else that doesn’t fit into the boxes they give you to report a number of nonbinary employees.”

Tobin compared this case of acknowledging nonbinary workers to actions at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to undo protections for transgender people. HHS recently rolled out a proposal that would quash guidelines that are part of the ACA which explicitly includes gender identity under sex discrimination. Last year, The New York Times also reported on an HHS memo that classified sex as either male or female and determined at birth.

“It does stand in contrast to the position U.S. Health and Human Services has staked out in its recent health care rule, which is a position contrary to medical science that gender is immutably determined at birth and that there are only two genders,” she said.

“The EEOC is recognizing the reality that employers know who their own workforce is.”

“The EEOC is recognizing the reality that employers know who their own workforce is, and who their employees are because they work with them every day, whereas HHS is simply covering its eyes and saying we don’t see nonbinary people. They don’t exist. That is part of a broader problem in the HHS proposal and its approach to civil rights laws. Denying that gender identity is a core part of human identity, that gender transition is often medically necessary, that our civil rights laws have long been understood to protect transgender people from discrimination.”

Although this may seem like a small tweak, it matters to nonbinary workers to be counted and not forced to choose between two genders when neither accurately describes them.

This action can also be understood in the context of other recent actions from the EEOC. Last week, the Justice Department filed a court brief on behalf of the EEOC to argue that transgender people, and in turn other people affected by sex stereotypes, are not protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. It would essentially overturn Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989). In 2014, the EEOC sued for alleged discrimination against Aimee Stephens, a trans woman who said she was fired because she informed her employer that she was a woman.

Stephens said the termination violated the Civil Rights Act. The EEOC won in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. At the U.S. Supreme Court level, however, the EEOC has to be represented by the Solicitor General, who can say the opposite of what the EEOC has said in the lower courts. Tobin said this rarely happens, but has occurred twice in recent months. Although the general counsel for an agency usually signs these briefs, the EEOC did not. The National Law Journal writes that this may be evidence that the EEOC doesn’t agree with the Justice Department’s argument.

“It’s telling that lawyers for the EEOC weren’t willing to sign their names to the brief … We’ve had many cases in the recent past where Justice Department lawyers were not willing to sign their names to briefs filed on behalf of the administration because of its legal arguments and this may be another such case,” Tobin said. “In this case, it also happens to not reflect the view of commission in the way that day-to-day it’s still interpreting and enforcing the law — at least what is consistent with most of the case law.”

There have been attempts to politicize the EEOC. Members of the commission are usually reconfirmed without much attention but in 2018, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), objected to the reappointment of Chai Feldblum, who is a lesbian. Lee said she had “radical views on marriage.”

These nominations are usually passed by unanimous consent. Feldblum later withdrewher name from the nomination process. In an interview with HRDive in February, she said that Title VII protects sexual orientation and gender identity.

This article was originally published at Think Progress on August 20, 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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Supreme Court to decide if LGBTQ workers are protected by US civil rights law

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The U.S. Supreme Court in its upcoming session will hear arguments on whether anti-LGBTQ employment discrimination is sex discrimination.

The court will hear arguments on October 8 about whether LGBTQ workers are protected by the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“This is a momentous occasion. It is a pivotal moment and the public should be paying attention,” Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, senior attorney at Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization focused on LGBTQ people, told ThinkProgress.

“These cases will affect the ability of LGBTQ people to be full members of society and to contribute to society by entering the workplace and be free of discrimination.”

In the worst case scenario, LGBTQ people would have to rely on a patchwork of state protections for employment protections and the Equality Act, a sweeping LGBTQ nondiscrimination bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in May, would become even more critical to protecting LGBTQ rights.

Twenty-one states, the District of Columbia, and two territories explicitly prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Christy Mallory, senior counsel for the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, said, “The court may decide that neither sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination are forms of sex discrimination prohibited by Title VII. This would remove existing non-discrimination protections for LGBT people under Title VII, which would have a particularly significant impact on LGBT people who live in states without statewide non-discrimination laws.”

There are three cases but two questions before the court. Zarda v. Altitude Express and Bostock v. Clayton County have been consolidated to consider sexual orientation as sex discrimination and Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC will consider discrimination against transgender people.

The Zarda case involved an employee named Donald Zarda being fired from Altitude Express, where he worked as a skydiver. He informed a woman he was gay while they were strapped to each other because he thought it would make her feel more comfortable. She later informed his employer that she wasn’t happy with his sharing his being gay and he was subsequently fired. Zarda died in 2014 but his estate pursued the case.

The Bostock case focuses on Gerald Bostock, a child welfare services coordinator who was in a gay recreational softball league. He said his participation in the league and his sexual orientation became a problem with someone at work. Then he was fired for “conduct unbecoming of a county employee,” which he said was tied to his sexuality.

Harris involves Aimee Stephens, a trans woman, who was fired from her job at a funeral parlor after she informed the funeral director she worked for that she was transgender. She had worked in funeral services for nearly 20 years and received positive feedbackfrom her employer.

The briefs from plaintiffs and their supporters have focused on a textualist understanding of the law — hewing closely to the original text of the Constitution, which the conservative justices may be more inclined to accept — rather than legislative intent, or what lawmakers had in mind in passing related legislation.

Several law professors have argued in their briefs that the court can look to Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989), which says employers can’t use sex-based stereotypes when taking employment actions.

Gonzalez-Pagan said one doesn’t need to believe that anyone can be transgender. Despite the mountains of evidence, “the reality is that in the discrimination in this case against this employee, Aimee Stephens, she did not conform to the expectations of her birth-assigned sex that the employer had.”

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal group whose attorneys have linked marriage equality with a “degradation of our human dignity,” and filed a petition asking the court to hear one of these cases, has argued that lower courts “redefined” sex in the law. Mallory pointed out that Title VII itself does not define the term “sex.”

But plaintiffs and others can also argue that when discriminating against queer and trans people, you necessarily have to consider sex.

“The fact is that in the arguments we are making, that plaintiffs are making, and others are making in this case, this is really about the text of the statute. This is really a very conservative argument — textualist and adhering to the letter of the law. And the reality is that when you consider somebody’s same-sex attraction, somebody’s transgender status — by definition you have to consider their sex,” Gonzalez-Pagan said.

“You are impermissibly considering sex in taking an employment action. There’s no way around that. It’s not that we are in this case proposing that there be another definition of sex. It is being elucidated in other cases and in scientific literature and the medical establishment and there is a consensus that is built but we don’t even have to go there. Because either way, because no matter the definition you consider of sex, you’re still considering that sex in making that employment decision.”

Some historians have argued in an amicus brief that the understanding of sex in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s was such that LGBTQ people could have been understood to be included. They wrote, “This broad understanding of sex, as evoking a range of sex roles, sexual expression, and sexual instincts, shaped public knowledge about LGBT individuals. Mid-twentieth century writers sometimes grouped LGBT people under the term â€sex variants’—a term introduced by psychiatrist George Henry to mean primarily persons he considered homosexuals, though he sometimes also included individuals who wished to change their sex, regardless of their sexual desires.”

They added, “The word â€sex’ thus covered a broad range of meaning in the mid-twentieth century—one that encompassed the behavior, practices, and identities of LGBT individuals.”

Gonzalez-Pagan said that a common argument against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s was that by prohibiting sex discrimination, one could apply it to LGBTQ people.

“[O]pponents of LGBTQ equality that are trying to dismantle these protections recognized by EEOC and federal courts and vast majority of public — what they’re trying to do is have their cake and eat it too,” he said.

“They are saying these protections aren’t necessary because they will essentially protect LGBTQ people and now they’re saying they don’t cover LGBTQ people. So it’s really illustrative of their bad faith.”

He added, “It’s not about not whether we have arguments on our side, but whether the court will adhere preferences for statutory interpretation, or political ideology. That’s what really what’s at stake here.”

This article was originally published at Think Progress on August 17, 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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Proposed anti-LGBTQ Labor Department rule would let federal contractors discriminate

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The Labor Department proposed a new rule Wednesday that would allow broad religious exemptions for businesses with federal contracts, which could undermine the rights of LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups. This could apply to hundreds of thousands of contractors and subcontractors.

It applies to a number of organizations, such as schools, societies, and corporations. The rule says, “A religious purpose can be shown by articles of incorporation or other founding documents, but that is not the only type of evidence that can be used.”

“The problem isn’t so much that [contractors] will necessarily hold sincerely religious beliefs, but they will use this as an excuse for their homophobia and their transphobia,” said Victoria Rodriguez-Roldan, senior policy counsel for the National LGBTQ Task Force. “At the Task Force, we are concerned and many people of faith and faith-based communities that are progressive may see this as a problem.”

Several LGBTQ organizations and organizations focused on the separation of church and state attended meetings with Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) officials this summer in anticipation of the rule. The National LGBTQ Task Force, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, National Women’s Law Center, National Center for Transgender Equality, and the Human Rights Campaign held meetings with officials from May to July about the proposed rule.

Rodriguez-Roldan said that she met with the director of the OFCCP, Craig E. Been, and that he “kept insisting” that, under OFCCP regulations, gender identity and sexual orientation were still protected.

“I did say we are aware but we don’t want any exceptions to them based on religion,” she said.

An August 2018 directive mentioned several U.S. Supreme Court cases to justify its guidance to OFCCP officials, including Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Communication,Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and recent executive orders.

In the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which shop owner Jack Phillips refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, the court narrowly ruled in 2018 that the Colorado Civil Rights Communication did not employ religious neutrality when it found that the bakery discriminated against the couple. It reversed the CCRC’s decision. In the case involving Trinity Lutheran Church, the court held in 2017 that when a state program denied a grant to a religious school and provided grants to non-religious groups, it violated freedom of religion. The court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. that closely held for-profit corporations are legal persons under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

In 2017, President Donald Trump released an executive order on Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty that would “guide the executive branch in formulating and implementing policies with implications for the religious liberty of persons and organizations in America.” In 2018, the president established a White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative. LGBTQ rights groups said they were concerned these orders would weaponize religious freedom rights to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

In 2014, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that amended two executive orders by addressing LGBTQ anti-discrimination protections for federal employees. Trump said he would not rescind it. However, a Justice Department brief argued against protections for queer workers.

In a statement following news of the rule, m the National Center for Transgender Equality said the regulation is “another attempt to allow contractors to circumvent a 2014 executive order prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by any federal contractor. In 2017, President Trump weakened this rule by eliminating reporting standards for contractors.”

“This administration has clearly shown a propensity to use religious liberty to give a license to discriminate,” said Frank J. Bewkes, policy analyst for the LGBT Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress. (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent newsroom housed within the Center for American Progress Action Fund.)

In an interview before the proposed rule dropped, Bewkes said he does not see how the cases mentioned in the directive would justify this rule. Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told INTO last year that the directive was “contrary to established law” and said that, in the past, the department has made it clear religious contractors can prefer members of their religion but can’t discriminate because of their religion.

“By eliminating that important qualification, the new directive is confusing at best and at worst sends a dangerous and false message that such discrimination is now permitted,” he said.

Protections for workers or prospective workers for federal contractors and subcontractors are important for the protection of LGBTQ workers’ rights when there is only a patchwork of employment protections on the state level. Senate Republicans refuse to consider the Equality Act, which would clarify and expand LGBTQ protections on the national level in employment, housing, and other areas. According to the Movement Advancement Project, only 21 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination and gender identity in employment and housing.

The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, using Gallup data, estimates that 4.5% of American adults are LGBTQ. Among millennials, 8.2% identified as LGBTQ. Federal contractors are responsible for employing about one-fifth of the country’s workforce.

Bewkes said the rule could affect an even larger number of people.

“This is a huge number of people this is affecting who are LGBTQ workers. And once you consider religious exemptions, sometimes people use it for other things. What if you’re in an [interracial marriage] and your employer disagrees with that on religious grounds?” Bewkes said. “Is that something that is going to be a problem? We’ve seen in South Carolina with adoptions and religious exemptions that people are not necessarily turned away because of their sexual orientation and identity. They’re being turned away because their specific religion is not the religion of the agency.”

Bewkes added that this is really an expansion of exemptions that already apply to The Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“They are asking for an expansion of that … They’re asking for [an exemption] for anyone who is religiously affiliated in any way, and that opens up a whole Hobby Lobby issue and would be very concerning. The larger the exemption the more undermined any nondiscrimination protection becomes, because it’s enforceable against fewer people. It’s just simple numbers. What they’re asking for would be overly broad.”

This article was originally published at Think Progress on August 14, 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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Activists urge pro-LGBTQ companies stop to funding anti-LGBTQ lawmakers

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By almost all measures, AT&T has been a stalwart supporter of LGBTQ equality for a long time. It has protected workers from sexual orientation discrimination since 1975. It sponsors the Trevor Project to help LGBTQ youth in crisis. It received a perfect 100 score from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in its annual equality index, ranking among the nation’s most inclusive places to work.By any measure, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is among the nation’s most anti-LGBTQ bigots. He defended bans on same-sex marriage as “sound public policy” and spearheaded the effort to block the elected government in Washington, D.C., from enacting marriage equality. He boasted of receiving a “True Blue Award” from the Family Research Council, a Souther Poverty Law Center (SPLC)-designated anti-LGBT hate group. He consistently earns a 0 score on HRC’s congressional scorecard, ranking among the lawmakers most virulently opposing equality.

Yet, AT&T’s corporate political action committee has given tens of thousands of dollars to Jordan’s campaigns since 2010, helping bankroll the re-elections of a man who HRC once inducted into its anti-equality “Hall of Shame” for “proactively [working] to undermine existing legal protections and promote anti-LGBT discrimination.” And AT&T’s PAC has given more than $400,000 to other firmly anti-LGBTQ members of Congress in recent years.

AT&T did not respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment about its support for Jordan and other opponents of equality. But it is hardly alone in its seemingly contradictory political giving.

A new activist pressure group called Zero for Zeros aims to change that. In recent days, it has released a list of more than two dozen major companies with 100 HRC scores, urging them to stop their donations to Jordan and other lawmakers with zero HRC ratings.

Lane Hudson, a longtime LGBTQ-rights activist, is campaign manger of the effort. He explained in an interview with ThinkProgress that “to really glean out the worst of the worst, the ones who take extra actions to work against our community, the ones that really fight against equality,” the group filtered the people with zero ratings even further. After picking 10 U.S. representatives and 19 senators with the worst ratings, the group found 49 had used their corporate PACs to support the worst.

Hudson explained that he understands that companies make PAC contributions based on more than just LGBTQ issues. “[I]t doesn’t surprise me,” he said, that the companies’ corporate PACs are “supporting politicians that are connected to those other issues.” But, he added, it is important that these companies hold lawmakers to a higher standard.

“What we’re asking those companies to do is to apply their corporate values to their political giving,” he said. “They create safe and welcoming workspaces for their LGBT employees. They market to LGBT customers. They support their LGBT employee resource groups. They march in full force at [Pride events] around America and sometimes abroad … These are companies that have been with us for a long time and helped us win a lot of the progress that we made and their political contributions to these people threaten to undermine everything we’ve done, and undermine their own efforts.”

On Tuesday, Zero for Zeros released a list of 14 technology and lifestyle companies with otherwise stellar pro-equality records, but also a history of PAC contributions to anti-LGBTQ extremists. On Wednesday, it released an additional list of 13 financial services giants in the same category.

ThinkProgress reached out to each of the 27 companies for comment. Four responded with statements. Two declined comment.

Those responding included:

American Airlines

American Airlines has been recognized by the Human Rights Campaign for nearly two decades as a leader among U.S. companies when it comes to workplace policies and practices for LGBTQ team members. American participates in the political and public policy process in a number of ways, including by making contributions from our political action committee. With respect to the contributions that we make, we don’t agree on every issue with the lawmakers to whom we make contributions, but we fundamentally believe that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect — and equally under the law. We are proud to stand with the LGBTQ community, and our commitment to equality for all of our team members and customers is unwavering.

Capital One Financial Corp

Capital One’s longstanding support for the LGBTQ+ community reflects our core values and our commitment to diversity, inclusion and equality. Our efforts to ensure non-discrimination and equal opportunity in the workplace include the early adoption of policies, benefits and other practices that apply equally to our LGBTQ+ associates. We work with and support legislators and policymakers who are relevant to our business, our associates, our customers and our communities. We support candidates on a bipartisan basis. Our support for any candidate should not suggest that we agree with their positions on every issue.

Intel

Intel does not support discrimination in any form. The Intel PAC continuously evaluates its contributions to candidates.

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance

[T]hank you for recognizing MassMutual’s stellar pro-LGBTQ record and 100% HRC rating year over year. At MassMutual, we help all customers secure their future and protect the ones they love, regardless of race, gender, age, abilities, place of birth, religion or who they love. We actively advocate for inclusion, fairness and equality, value people for who they are, and celebrate all diversity. From our people policies to our involvement in pro-LBGTQ amicus briefs to lending our voice to specific ballot initiatives, we have an established record of active and engaged support for the LGBTQ community.

Citigroup and Wells Fargo each said that they had no comment.

Amazon, AT&T, Cigna Corp, Cisco Systems, Compass Bank, Dell Inc., Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Facebook, Google, JPMorgan Chase, KPMG, Mastercard, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, PNC Financial Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Sap America, T-Mobile, and Visa did not respond as of publication time.

HRC national press secretary Sarah McBride told ThinkProgress in a statement that while the corporate equality index “captures LGBTQ-inclusive policies, practices and benefits, there isn’t a one size fits all way to consistently score companies on the scope and impact of their political donations.”

“We do monitor employers’ contributions to anti-LGBTQ ballot measures and organizations whose primary mission includes anti-LGBTQ advocacy,” she added. “It is important for reporting like this that asks tough questions of corporations and brings these donations into the public discussion. The Corporate Equality Index is a critical tool for advancing LGBTQ equality in the workplace, but it is not the only tool.”

Hudson said he and his team are talking with the companies and are hopeful that they will take anti-LGBTQ extremism into account more in their future PAC giving.

“This effort is meant to not be an attack on these companies, because we view them as our allies. They have invested in their employees and customers and been with us in these court battles,” Hudson said. “We sent letters to their CEOs and I also reached out to the government affairs staff and asking them for a conversation about this, so we can talk about why it’s important not only to the LGBTQ community but to their employees and their customers and to the overall movement in general and how it can be beneficial to their business.”


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Americans are underestimating discrimination against LGBTQ people

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Many Americans think there has been a lot of progress on LGBTQ rights. But there is a long way to go.

An overwhelming majority of Americans think there has been progress in the LGBTQ rights movement, according to recent polls. But they are also underestimating the amount of discrimination LGBTQ people face.

Eighty-four percent of Americans think there has been a great deal or some progress in the LGBTQ rights movement, compared to only 14% who say there has not been much or none at all, found a new CBS News poll.

When it comes to discrimination against lesbians and gay men, 44% said there is a lot of discrimination, but 31% said there was only some and 22% said there was only a little or none. People were more likely to believe transgender people face a lot of discrimination if they know a transgender person. Fifty-six percent believed there is a lot of discrimination against transgender people, but 66% of those who know transgender people believe the same. The poll did not ask about discrimination against bisexual people.

Among those who were asked what changed their mind about marriage equality, 12% said they knew someone who is gay or lesbian, 22% said they knew more about the issue, and 26% said people should be able to make their own choices.

Perhaps so many Americans think there has been major progress on LGBTQ rights because a large share don’t understand that there aren’t many federal protections for LGBTQ people. Despite the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized marriage equality across the country, LGBTQ people don’t have explicit national nondiscrimination protections in the workplace, housing, public accommodations, and credit.

A Reuters poll released earlier this month found that 45% of all Americans believe that federal law currently protects queer people from discrimination. Only one in three Americans knew that transgender people were not protected from discrimination in federal law. Forty-three percent of Americans said LGBTQ people were treated “about the same” as cis and straight people when it comes to health care access, and just 17% said LGBTQ were treated worse. Others said they did not know the extent to which LGBTQ people were treated differently.

LGBTQ folks have successfully argued that they’re covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the past. But there is no national law with explicit nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has rolled back Obama-era rules and guidance protecting LGBTQ people and banned transgender people from the military.

On the state level, protections are uneven. Currently, only 21 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination and gender identity in employment and housing and 20 states and D.C. prohibit discrimination in public accommodations. Fourteen states have nondiscrimination laws covering credit discrimination.

The Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation in housing, employment, education, federal programs, jury service, public accommodations, and credit and lending. The legislation would also update the law to include protections against discrimination in public spaces and services like retail stores, transportation services, banks, and legal services. It passed the House in May. Nearly all House Republicans, or 173 members, voted against it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) does not plan to bring the bill to the floor, and a senior Trump administration official has said that President Donald Trump won’t support the Equality Act.

Although there have been signs of progress in LGBTQ acceptance in the long term, a 2019 national GLAAD survey found a decline in overall comfort and acceptance of LGBTQ people among people ages 18 to 34 in 2018. GLAAD said there has been a steady decline in comfort in personal situations among this age group since 2016. Thirty-six percent of cis and straight people said they were uncomfortable learning a family member is in the LGBTQ community, and a third said they would be uncomfortable with a child being placed with an instructor in the community in 2018, compared to 24% and 25% in 2016, respectively.

In addition to legal barriers and personal discomfort with LGBTQ people in family and education environments, LGBTQ people still face threats of violence. At least 10 trans black women have been murdered in 2019. In 2018, the FBI reported a 17% year-over-year rise in federal hate crimes in the United States, and threats of violence and assault against queer people continue.

This article was originally published at ThinkProgress on June 24, 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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