Law Equality Act: Should Gender Dysphoria (or Sexual Orientation) Constitute A Protected Class?

[NoDak]

There should not be any protected classes.

 

[oldshadow]

Okay, I'm fine with that perspective.

But that doesn't mean that "pre-op" transgendered persons should be unprotected against employment discrimination. Frankly, I don't even know how discriminatory bodies would be able to tailor that distinction without groin checking.

I don’t have any problem with the job protection as long as whoever can do the job.

But like I said this is too open.

 

[Trotsky]

There should not be any protected classes.

I'm sure you bozos would be fine with people getting fired for being Christian or white. Surely you wouldn't respond with the outrage of a thousand bellowing vaginas.

 

[Ripskater]

I'm sure you bozos would be fine with people getting fired for being Christian or white.

That already happens

 

[Trotsky]

That already happens

So does discrimination against non-Christians and non-whites, which is why protection for all of them exists and should continue to exist.

Moron.

 

[NoDak]

I know that you are separating the T intentionally because you don't think it should be included with orientation, and I understand your argument for that.

I'm not alone there either. This person is insane to think trans people have been "excluded", it's more like forced onto the LGB banner and citing the Human Rights Campaign is particularly laughable considering they operate like a trans-specific activist organization these days. You can read the comments, but some examples below.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...-wake-up-call-mainstream-gay-rights-movement/

I also think it was you in particular I was talking to when I mentioned when this conflation started gaining serious, tangible intra-community traction before spilling out into the mainstream. Note the bolded, they aren't the same thing. Especially now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Non-Discrimination_Act

In 2007, gender identity protections were added to the legislation for the first time. Some sponsors believed that even with a Democratic majority, ENDA did not have enough votes to pass the House of Representatives with transgender inclusion and dropped it from the bill, which passed the House and then died in the Senate. President George W. Bush threatened to veto the measure. LGBT advocacy organizations and the LGBT community were divided over support of the modified bill.

In 2009, following Democratic gains in the 2008 elections, and after the divisiveness of the 2007 debate, Rep. Barney Frank introduced a transgender-inclusive version of ENDA. He introduced it again in 2011, and Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced it in the Senate. On November 7, 2013, Merkley's bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support by a vote of 64–32. President Barack Obama supported the bill's passage, but the House Rules Committee voted against it.

As of December 2018, ENDA still hasn't become law.

 

[NoDak]

This was probably one of the more scathing dismissals I've ever read, penned by a self-described "feminist environmentalist" and she's kooky as, but makes some legit points. The Public Discourse piece in the OP was written by the parent of a transgender teen and the Independent Martina Navratilova article by a lesbian. The last few paragraphs before the end are pertinent.

Transgenderism Is Just Big Business Dressed Up In Pretend Civil Rights Clothes

It’s hard to imagine a civil rights movement so indelibly tied to the capitalist marketplace that it could be used to sell fashion, makeup, hormones, surgery, cosmetology services, movies, TV series, mental health treatment, and women’s underwear, while concurrently being invested in by billionaire philanthropists, the technology and pharmaceutical industries, and banks.

Imagine marketing a suffragette diet of fasting, or makeup so perfect it could cover a welt from police brutality? Imagine Google and Wells Fargo investing millions of dollars to eliminate the prison industrial complex?

Transgenderism, a purported civil rights movement, now intersects at every juncture of the global marketplace. It is hard to remember it came out of the medical industrial complex as a term for the most intense body dysphoria. Children are being prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, sterilized, and groomed into lifelong medical patients and consumers in more than 50 U.S. gender clinics that weren’t here ten years ago. It’s all because of transgenderism and that people fighting to live free of discrimination are hailed as heroes and celebrities for feeling alienated from their own biology.

What are we to make of this cultural storm that has transgenderism positioned as a social justice movement, a medical condition with ties to Hollywood as strong as those to the medical industrial complex, and to our political structure driving its ideology through all our institutions? The media keeps presenting us on the one hand with a trans civil rights movement for the oppressed and, on the other, with a cutting-edge (pun intended) lifestyle.

Transgenderism is looking more and more like Transgenderism™, when we look at the markets opening and its insidious presence in Hollywood. Whoopi Goldberg has started her own trans modeling company on Oprah’s Oxygen network, with trans models reported as the future of modeling. Supernatural Extraterrestrial and Co, a high-fashion clothing line, promotes their willingness to embrace a future of male pregnancy. A look at their new clothing line for 2019 has men strutting fashion runways in pregnancy prosthesis.

Trans celebrities are on constant display in the media, being celebrated as if having body dysphoria were a badge of honor. Cosmopolitan magazine offered a breast-binding guide for young women in 2016. Cosmetology consultant services are a growing business offering help to “trans women.” Crayola has created a new gender-fluid make-up, and Jecca has started a line just for “transgender” people.

Artists are photographing young “trans” children, and almost every new TV series has at least a nod to transgenderism. Jazz Jennings, a male teen who recently had his penis surgically removed, identifies as a transgender woman and has been on many major talk-shows since his family decided he was transgender at the age of four.

Jennings has his own reality TV series, chronicling his transition and how it is affecting him and his family. He also has his own trans foundation and has received many awards and accolades. A children’s storybook about his life, which normalizes for young school children the idea that they can become the opposite sex, has been adopted as part of some school curriculums.

TomBoyX is a woman’s undergarment company. It uses the term “tomboy” in its company name to denote a girl who enjoys so-called stereotypical boy activities like running and climbing trees to sell boxer shorts and comfortable underwear to women. Their message is of empowerment, not being hemmed in by feminine attire, but able to run and feel free “like a boy,” by donning clothes like his, but made for a woman’s body. In a recent ad they chose an attractive young woman with double mastectomy scars donning their boxers under a caption that reads: “This canvas was given to you but you made it your own. You crafted your own story. Share it with the world. #moretome.”

This message is a clear glorification of chosen body disfigurement posing as self-actualization and liberation, sickness as wellness, self-hatred made into empowerment, and cutting and maiming female flesh for public consumption via uber-marketing. George Orwell must be turning over in his grave with the language of doublespeak as prime-time advertisement.

It is not just the pharmaceutical giants, the IT industry, fashion houses, Hollywood, and artists melding themselves to everything trans. Banks and investment housesare sending millions of dollars to transgender organizations all over the globe.

Men at the highest echelons of society—such as billionaire philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker and the creator of SiriusXM Satellite Radio, Martine Rothblatt—are claiming not just a transgender identity, but for Rothblatt, that of a transhumanist as well. Rothblatt believes “transgenderism is the onramp to transhumanism,” the precursor to superhumans.

If you look at the way transgenderism presents in the marketplace, it seems very much like an ad campaign for changing human biology toward making better, “liberated,” “self-generated” individuals, while being tied to the medical industrial complex. Rothblatt’s book, “From Transgender to Transhumanism,” reads like a blueprint for the modern-day trans project to infiltrate every sector of our societies. If that sounds preposterous, scientists are already looking at changing our biology as a way to deal with climate change.

This is happening at a time in our history when the escalation of robots and artificial intelligence are also surging in the marketplace with female-simulated robot sex dolls that are frighteningly close in texture and appearance to real humans acting as stand-in prostitutes in brothels, and for some men, stand-in women in relationships. Robot nannies that supposedly offer guidance and friendship for children while their parents are away, are being marketed by Mattel and other corporations as “the future of raising children.”

At Goldsmiths University in the United Kingdom, an annual conference, Love and Sex with Robots, holds sessions on humanoid robots and robot emotions and personalities, in a range of approaches from the psychological to the sociological and the philosophical. Robot experts project we will be marrying robots by 2050. A quick perusal of YouTube under “robots and humans” will yield in the neighborhood of five million videos.

So while transgenderism removes us from our very biology, we spend more and more time online and engaged in technology than with most of the people we know. For many, sexuality is becoming more and more unmoored from actual intimacy through hook-up culture, porn, and now the advent of robotic sex dolls. We are also being groomed for greater relationships to robots, surveillance, and artificial intelligence.

Rothblatt joined Whoopi on “The View” in 2016 to discuss transhumanism and exhibit a robot made in the likeness of his wife, Bina. Bina, he insists, will live indefinitely when he figures out how to download her personality into cyberspace.

Although transgenderism is positioned under the LGB civil rights banner, it appears to have a much closer relationship to commerce and global powerbrokers who have a penchant for technological megalomania. There is plenty of money flowing to transgender organizations, but even more going to normalizing transgender ideology in the culture, in language, through media, marketing, and commerce, and by billionaires’ philanthropic funding of nonprofits and other institutions.

One has to wonder if the LGB civil rights banner has not just been strategic positioning for transgenderism to claim civil rights, currying popular sympathies already well cultivated for the LGB community, as a pretext to insert itself into the global marketplace, our schools, universities, courts, and medical establishments for more nefarious purposes.

Whether transgenderism is presented as intense body dysphoria, sexual-fetishization, social contagion, a civil rights movement, or cultural gender-bending that speaks the language of the progressive left while actually cementing gender stereotyping, being hyper-capitalistic and censorious, as a project it seems poised to normalize human biology-shifting through chemicals and surgery.

Far from a grassroots movement born from oppression, it is generated by the highest echelons of society and attempts to linguistically obfuscate its aim of creating an abstraction out of biological reality. Transgenderism seeks to dissociate people from their very bodies, and frames it as self-actualization. The trans lobby is fighting hard to change sex on birth certificates. Only a few states don’t allow people to change their sex on their birth certificates.

We need to look at what transgenderism does, how it functions, and how it is growing in the culture, and to ask why it does what it does, what it is asking of us, why it is so tightly wedded to commerce, and where it is leading. The trans lobby screams civil rights, but transgenderism looks and functions just like the worst of capitalism.

 

[NoDak]

Oh damn, @salamander? Haven't seen you in months.

 

[NoDak]

This is America,
We are all EQUAL
No SPECIAL TREATMENT for anyone.
If you don't make it
its your own fault.

That's more of an economic philosophy, no? On a strictly individual level I don't mind the comparative dog-eat-dog, cut throat system America has when measured against the rest of the western world. Okay broe I'll fucking crush you, whatever. However, a treat every motherfucker like they're China approach is not preferable nor is it the sort of policy I really support. I'm patriotic and don't think that makes for a strong country.

 

[I am your real dad]

That's more of an economic philosophy, no? On a strictly individual level I don't mind the comparative dog-eat-dog, cut throat system America has when measured against the rest of the western world. Okay broe I'll fucking crush you, whatever. However, a treat every motherfucker like they're China approach is not preferable nor is it the sort of policy I really support. I'm patriotic and don't think that makes for a strong country.

Equality does make for a strong country.

There is nothing wrong with equality.

 

[SBJJ]

I have said it before, and I will again. I am a social libertarian. People should have the right to adopt kids, get married, ect., No matter what they choose to do in their life. We should all be equal in the eyes of the law.

The civil Rights act was the exception to the rule. The immediate need to address that injustice and systemic discrimination was the rationale for removing the right of private business from being able to refuse service, or hire anyone they choose.

You do not have the right for the government to regulate equal treatment in society.

You shouldnt have a right for employer protection based on your sexual orientation, or gender identity.

If chic-fillet doesn't want to hire gay or trans people, they shouldn't have to. Their is no great injustice in this country against gay or trans people that justifies that kind of government intervention into our society.

As someone who has been to a few Chik Fil A's. I can damn near guarantee they hire homosexuals

 

[tonni]

How should one not familiar with US law interpret "protected class"? Is this protection from being fired, housing, medical assistance etc?

 

[Orgasmo]

No one should be discriminated for their sexual orientation, but nobody should be accommodated for their transgender delusion either. They are mentally ill and deserve compassion, not to be cuddled with fake acceptance.

 

[NoDak]

How should one not familiar with US law interpret "protected class"? Is this protection from being fired, housing, medical assistance etc?

It basically covers all of the X's on the chart in the OP.

The Equality Act is a bill in the United States Congress, that, if passed, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, public accommodations, public education, federal funding, credit, and the jury system.[1] It is expected to be introduced in the 116th United States Congress.[2]

The Equality Act expands the categories of "public accommodations" to include places or establishments that provide goods, services or programs. It prohibits "establishment" from being construed to be limited to a physical facility or place.[3] It also updates the definitions of three terms:

* "sex" to include a sex stereotype, sexual orientation or gender identity.

* "sexual orientation" as heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality.

* "gender identity" as gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or characteristics, regardless of the individual's designated sex at birth.

 

[NoDak]

Equality does make for a strong country.

There is nothing wrong with equality.

Some of us fall by the wayside, some of us soar to the stars and he who is fixed on one does not change his mind. However, a system which encourages the upward predistribution of capital accumulation with ever-increasing and wildly disproportionate levels of wealth and income inequality is not a strong country on the domestic front IMO. It eats away at the fabric of society and is a recipe for social unrest when so many are falling behind.

 

[NoDak]

No one should be discriminated for their sexual orientation, but nobody should be accommodated for their transgender delusion either. They are mentally ill and deserve compassion, not to be cuddled with fake acceptance.

I agree, protect the culturally enriching LGB people and bash teh trannies. No, while the conflation is a major irritant what I really don't like about this is redefining sex to include gender identity. It isn't "discrimination" to not allow males into exclusively female spaces.

As stated before, I don't mind feeding this condition to the extent that it doesn't really intersect with or wield a disruptive influence on society. That means if you're an adult and you want to use synthetic compounds to bring about tangible, largely irreversible physiological and psychological changes to your body, or have cosmetic surgeries done (on your own dime), then go for it.

It doesn't stop there though, everyone else has to play along - or else. A lot of people are obviously getting furious with these radical "trans activists" and their financial benefactors. The trans 'movement' is reflecting in the worst ways despite being so fundamentally different and as one person mentioned, even diametrically opposed to what it's de facto associated with.

We don't need kindergarten age kids being encouraged to question their gender. We can't be taking children to medical conversion clinics and talking about administering puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones and reassignment surgeries. We can't celebrate "kid drag queens" on 'Good Morning America' with nude adults doing photoshoots with them. Boys don't fucking menstruate.

 

[Lovestorm]

The only protection they should be offered is a padded cell.

 

[EndlessCritic]

Isn't it already protected under disability?

I don't even say this glibly. That's exactly how it was framed in Ontario prior to the passing of Toby's law in 2012.
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onhrt/doc/2012/2012hrto726/2012hrto726.html

The applicant contends that the requirement that she have and certify that she had “transsexual surgery” in order to obtain a birth certificate which accorded with her gender identity infringed her right to equal treatment without discrimination on the basis of sex and/or disability with respect to services contrary to s.1 and s.11 of the Code.

...

Accordingly, I find that the respondent has infringed the applicant’s right to be free from discrimination with respect to services on the basis of sex and/or disability ...

 

[NoDak]

 

[nac386]

I agree, protect the culturally enriching LGB people and bash teh trannies. No, while the conflation is a major irritant what I really don't like about this is redefining sex to include gender identity. It isn't "discrimination" to not allow males into exclusively female spaces.

As stated before, I don't mind feeding this condition to the extent that it doesn't really intersect with or wield a disruptive influence on society. That means if you're an adult and you want to use synthetic compounds to bring about tangible, largely irreversible physiological and psychological changes to your body, or have cosmetic surgeries done (on your own dime), then go for it.

It doesn't stop there though, everyone else has to play along - or else. A lot of people are obviously getting furious with these radical "trans activists" and their financial benefactors. The trans 'movement' is reflecting in the worst ways despite being so fundamentally different and as one person mentioned, even diametrically opposed to what it's de facto associated with.

We don't need kindergarten age kids being encouraged to question their gender. We can't be taking children to medical conversion clinics and talking about administering puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones and reassignment surgeries. We can't celebrate "kid drag queens" on 'Good Morning America' with nude adults doing photoshoots with them. Boys don't fucking menstruate.

I know you’re being somewhat facetious in that first sentence. But just to play devils advocate here, how many great cultural icons from the past may have had gender dysphoria?

Many on the list of gay and bisexual and cultural icons that you listed were closeted and the claim that they were not fully heterosexual is based on the testimony of others or clues in their work. There are likely hundreds more that we are not aware of. Could some of them have also had gender dysphoria? How would we even know?

We could make a fairly long list of culturally significant cross dressers. Being a cross-dresser does not necessarily make you gender dysphoric , but I would argue that it is very plausible that some of them were expressing their gender dysphoria in the only way they knew how.

So I would not be too quick to discount the cultural and historical contributions of a group of people that we probably have no real way to identify anyway.

Of course, that does not necessarily influence my opinion on the issue one way or another as far as the law and protections are concerned. But it is definitely something to consider.