[167/366] SCOTUS says trans rights

[cosmolinguist]

...even if they're doing the good thing for a bad reason, they're still doing a good thing. And this is really good. Enshrining LGBT employment protection in Title VII rights makes this very strong, not to mention making it nationwide -- this is the first legal protection trans people have gotten in many states, and the employment protection for any LGBT people in some states.

It looks, from Lawyer Twitter, like this also will apply to sectors other than employment, like housing and health care, which importantly stymies the depressing efforts over the weekend to remove trans rights to health care from the ACA.

Twitter has been an unusually gleeful place to be, from one of the ACLU lawyers who represented aimee stephens, reacting to the ruling in real time...

there's a profundity to seeing @chasestrangio, one of the ACLU lawyers who represented aimee stephens, react to the ruling in realtime that i don't know how history books could capture pic.twitter.com/nVtqmV9xrs

— Anushka Patil (@anushkapatil) June 15, 2020

...to trans politicians marveling at the respect shown the trans person whose death, caused by losing her job and her healthcare, was a catalyst for this decision

In the text of the SCOTUS opinion, the Court refers to Aimee Stephens with she/her pronouns and uses the phrase "different sex from the one assigned at birth."

This is more than a Title VII ruling.

They're recognizing trans people for who we are.https://t.co/SY6T31xYGA

— Danica Roem (@pwcdanica) June 15, 2020

to the glee of imagining the late Justice Scalia having this decision read to him in hell and delighting over people still alive who are angry that they can't discriminate against the queers.

bigots: SEX EQUALS GENDER. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR SEX AND YOUR GENDER. GENDER IS THE SAME AS SEX, AND SO TOO IS THE REVERSE
supreme court: ok. protections against sex discrimination also count for gender
bigots: wait. not like thathttps://t.co/S5hJqIRTR5

— Ada Powers (looking for design and writing work!) (@mspowahs) June 15, 2020

The ruling is full of goodies too, my favorite (that I know of; I haven't read it beyond what's turned up on social media) being "The limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the drafters' demands." That's a sentence with some strong fucking energy.

GOOD US NEWS "An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. The limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the drafters' demands."

— Benny (@MxEmmaBen) June 15, 2020

And as my friend po8crg said (I hope he doesn't mind me quoting him):

But the really big one is that for binary trans people, this is Civil Rights. This is Brown vs Board of Education and Roe vs Wade and Lawrence vs Texas. Aimee Stephens gets she/her pronouns and Gorsuch uses the phrase "different sex from the one assigned at birth". This isn't just protection against discrimination at work; this is the Supreme Court of the United States of America recognising that (binary) transgender people are real. Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts say trans rights.

I had goosebumps from reading that.

Comments

[po8crg]

Oh, you can quote me on that one!

There are a couple of things I'm quite proud of having written today. That's one.

The other is this tweet:

https://twitter.com/po8crg/status/1272656825092014082

[po8crg]

It's worth saying that, with Lawrence vs Texas and Obergefell v Hodges, LGB people already had some rights in the USA.

But our trans siblings didn't have *any*

They went from zero to a lot overnight. They have the same rights as women or black people, which isn't enough, and the law doesn't work for many people, as Black Lives Matter has demonstrated day after day for too many years, but it's still a fuck of a lot better than nothing.

Being theoretically equal citizens isn't a match for being actually equal citizens. But it beats the hell out of barely being any sort of citizen at all.

[cynthia1960]

+1000

[haggis]

"Being theoretically equal citizens isn't a match for being actually equal citizens. But it beats the hell out of barely being any sort of citizen at all."

Absolutely. Employment rights are a funny thing - they mostly force bigoted employers to pretend that they want to sack you for some other reason and many US states have 'at will employment' which makes it ridiculously easy to do so. But this is still a massive step forward and deserves to be celebrated.

[cosmolinguist]

Especially because, the U.S. being the nightmare country it is, employment = health care. As this case illustrates, sadly.

[sfred]

I was so delighted to read about this!

[barakta]

Delighted, surprised and relieved to see this.

Do we know how protected bisexual and nonbinary people are included in this? (I am guessing it is about attitudes as much as technical legalities in practice, cos employers won't feel as empowered to be LGBT-phobic shitheads.

[cosmolinguist]

I saw some discussion of this yesterday and it sounds like it'd be unlikely to the point of impossible to argue that this doesn't apply to bi or non-binary people too. But IANAL and I don't know all the ins and outs.

[silveradept]

I can see this case becoming a swiftly and repeatedly-cited precedent for knocking down a lot of sex-based nonsense in workplaces, especially those bits that are related to gender presentation and the expectations that employers have for employees regarding the same.

And a few other spots, as well, about care and access through insurance. Those will probably take some time to work their way through the courts, but I can definitely see a lot of work being done by court case in the near future. Not a lawyer, so I don't know how or what, but this looks like the foundation for a good series of rulings.