The Senate ENDA Bill Is Held-up

The Senate last week said that they are holding back the ENDA bill that passed the House.
The Advocate has an article about the bill,

The Gender (Identity) Divide

The exclusion of gender identity from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act helped guarantee the bill’s failure in 2007. Now that ENDA is once again moving on the Hill, will it finally protect those who need it most?

Are we going to be thrown under the bus as Congress did back in 2007? Are we going to go through this all over again?

On the federal level, the T of LGBT has long been an inessential element in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit antigay discrimination nationwide, bolstering the current patchwork of laws in liberal-leaning states. ENDA was first introduced in Congress in 1994, though a precursor to the bill was originally written 20 years earlier.

Since 1994, ENDA has been reintroduced in every congressional term except one. None of the versions included gender identity until 2007, with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress. But when a preliminary vote in the House of Representatives reportedly failed to muster adequate support, Massachusetts representative Barney Frank split ENDA into two separate bills, one with gender identity protections, one without. The former died in committee; the latter passed the House, only to die in the Senate. While any version of ENDA was subject to a near-certain veto by then-President George W. Bush, many national gay organizations denounced Frank’s move as unacceptable. The nation’s largest gay rights lobbying group, the Human Rights Campaign, which supported passage of the non–transgender-inclusive bill, became the subject of controversy, with transgender activists and their allies protesting HRC fund-raising dinners nationwide.
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Yet this month’s Senate committee hearing on the bill did not include testimony from transgender individuals, which elicited measured concern from National Center for Transgender Equality executive director Mara Kiesling and dismay from Diego Sanchez, senior legislative adviser to Frank. “This was a wake-up call for me that we’re not done educating people,” Sanchez told The Advocate last week. “If the biggest piece of discussion about this bill is gender identity, then it’s only logical that you would want to cast the light on the one part that people understand the least.”
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Unless transgender men and women become more visible — and valued — members of the gay community, Beasley says she isn’t hopeful the picture is going to change anytime soon, even if she believes a federal law banning discrimination is a step in the right direction. “Most of society and the community looks down on transgenders,” Beasley says.