Dale Carpenter, a law professor and IGF contributing author, has posted on the Volokh Conspiracy a detailed response to the expressed concerns of some gay groups, including Lambda Legal, that a gay-only ENDA might not adequately protect gays: He writes:
we now have decades of experience with state laws that protect gay people from discrimination based on sexual orientation but not gender identity. If the inadequacy of sexual-orientation protections were a real problem-as opposed to a hypothetical or theoretical one-we should expect to see many such cases. But neither Lambda nor any other organization has yet produced a single instance in which an employer successfully argued around a gay-only employment protection law by claiming that it really fired the person for gender non-conformity.
The ENDA "T" or not-to-"T" debate, and the wider assertion about the existence of a progressive "LGBT community," is mostly about gay cultural politics and whether the activist/academic-inspired focus on gender-identity will prevail over the "assimilationist" goals that are of actual concern to most gay people.
8 Comments for “ENDA to a “T””
posted by ETJB on
The inclusion (or lack theirof) of gender identity has little to do with the ‘big, bad, evil, gay left’ attacking the ‘poor assimiliationist gays’.
It is mostly about transgender people. A class of people who have been on the front lines with LGB-rights since its formal foundation.
posted by Dr. Jillian T. Weiss on
Mr. Carpenter’s analysis is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. See Jennifer Levi’s trenchant comments at the original post, and my post at Transgender Workplace Diversity Blog (http;//transworkplace.blogspot.com)
Jillian T. Weiss, J.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Law and Society
Ramapo College
posted by BobN on
How is it anti-assimilationist to want transgender people to have the same right to assimilate as gay people? What this fight boils down to is a bunch of “conservative” gay people who don’t want to be associated with “those people” and who can’t — or won’t — remember that we were “those people” just a decade or two ago (and still are in most of the country).
posted by Randy on
Baloney. This argument is not about whether T’s should be included in ENDA. Of course they should, and most people agree with that.
The problem is that if you include T’s, ENDA will not pass. So here is the stark choice: Either T are not included in ENDA, and they are not covered when it is passed, or T’s are included and ENDA fails. In EITHER case, T’s don’t get coverage. That’s the sad truth. I wish it were different, but it isn’t.
however, if ENDA passes, then there is still a good chance that T’s can get in at a later date.
Look, if ENDA only provided protection for lesbians, I would be happy to let it pass congress, because then gay men would follow at some point. Better that some people get protection than none at all.
posted by Bobby on
Randy gets it perfectly. If you want to make it legal to carry a gun on a plane, you don’t ask to carry a gun and an AK-47, first you get the gun, and later on you add AK-47’s to the legislation.
Everything in politics is done with incremental steps. Including transgendered people is a big mistake.
First of all, most Americans don’t even know the meaning of the word transgender. Secondly, most Americans think changing your sex is wrong. So what gays are doing is making it impossible for straights to support their legislation.
Besides, people fear anti-discrimination laws because it ends up leading to fascism.
Like this story in The Guardian.
Straw moves to ban incitement against gays
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/story/0,,2186690,00.html
“The new law would not prohibit criticism of gay, lesbian and bisexual people, but it would protect them from incitement to hatred against them because of their sexual orientation.”
If ENDA leads to us becoming more like Britain, then I hope this law fails. Freedom before security, people! This is a free country, let’s keep it that way.
posted by ETJB on
Britian is a different nation. Different laws, especially when it comes to Freedom of Speech.
Dont care apples and organges. Especially when this bill only applies to civilan-secular, employmeent.
posted by Bobby on
Well ETJB, Britain used to be pretty much like America, until the left took control and started passing all kinds of crazy laws. Look at San Francisco, they decided to ban plastic bags! SF is a great example of what happens when the left takes control, complete and utter lunacy.
“when this bill only applies to civilan-secular, employment.”
—For now. The question is, what will gays and other lefties want once this bill is passed? It’s not like liberals pass one law and go to sleep. They always want something else. That’s how mainstream America sees it.
posted by ETJB on
Bobby;
No, America and Great Britian are not ‘pretty much’ like each other. That is kinda why we had that entire Revolutionary War. Yes, have strong dipolmatic-political-economic ties, but we also had two very different legal-political-economic systems.
Great Britian does not have a written Bill of Rights, instead it has lots of unwritten rules and regulations that are ‘tradition’ and thus can change alot.
The American First Amendment is probably the strongest in the industrial worlds and most nations do not really that one or a second amendment, for that matter.
I doubt very much that ‘mainstream’ America is with you, considering the strong, bipartisan support for both the ENDA and the HCPA.
…and if you going to argue that the political right cannot be complete and utter lunacy, you are just spewing bs.