Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Good News, Bad News… First The Bad News

It looks like South Dakota is going to be the first state to ban bathrooms use for us.
Transgender Law Center condemns South Dakota bill targeting transgender youth
Transgender Law Center
February 16, 2016

Today, the South Dakota Senate voted 20-15 to pass HB 1008, a dangerous bill that singles out transgender students and prohibits them from using restrooms and locker rooms consistent with who they are. The bill already passed the House and now goes to the governor’s office.

Statement from Transgender Law Center Executive Director Kris Hayashi:

“It is distressing and disturbing that South Dakota legislators would jeopardize the state school system’s funding and the lives of South Dakota youth in an effort to single out transgender students for discrimination, harassment, and exclusion. Every single child, including transgender youth, should have the opportunity to succeed and be treated fairly by our schools and elected officials. Using state law to force a student to use a separate bathroom from their peers just because they are transgender is not only dangerous and wrong, it is a violation of federal law.
The vote in both cambers was right down party lines. The Republican voted for discrimination and the Democrats voted against the bill.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 has been found by the courts to include discrimination against gender identity under sex discrimination. Federal courts has ruled that gender identity is sex discrimination based in the Supreme Court decision in the Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins ruling that sex discrimination encompasses sex stereotyping, in other words that if a person is being discriminated because they don’t look or behave like a “typical” person of their gender it also falls under sex discrimination.

In the past the U. S. Department of Education has threaten to cut funding to school districts that discriminate against trans people. South Dakota received over $300 million dollars in federal education funding, that is all on the line now if the governor signs the bill into law.

2 comments:

  1. Diana, one small observation. CBS News reports that: "Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans unsuccessfully opposed the measure in the Senate." Your blog says that the vote was "right down party lines." I'm not certain which is correct, but, if CBS is correct, it's only fair to properly report that a few Republicans saw that it was wrong and tried to reject it. Despite that, we all agree that this type of discrimination is unconscionable.

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  2. One of the sources that I read said that. So I just looked at the South Dakota's legislature website and it does look like some Republicans voted for the bill since there're 27 Republicans and only 8 Democrats and the vote was 27 to 15. Here is the vote. So you are right, however, there were no Democrats who voted for the bill.
    http://legis.sd.gov/Legislative_Session/Bills/RollCall.aspx?Vote=20953&Session=2016

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