View From The Other Side

In the last couple of years the courts have ruled that discrimination based on gender identity and expression is a form of sex discrimination and violates Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. As one judge put it, discrimination when you change from one religion to another religion is still discrimination based on religion and discrimination when you change gender is still sex discrimination.

A result of these court cases the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, the EEOC, HUD, and other federal agencies have written policies prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity. However, these policies do not sit well with the conservatives and libertarians,

Feds Blackmail Virginia’s Largest School District Into Transgender Policy
A case in Virginia demonstrates how far the Obama administration will go to force its sexual ideology—regardless of self-governance, local control, and childish innocence
The Federalist
By Dustin Siggins
May 27, 2015

Since 2009, the Obama administration has expanded upon the power-grabbing traditions of its predecessors. Whether it’s with health care—Lyndon B. Johnson would be proud—the Environmental Protection Agency—Richard Nixon’s creation—or changing the definition of “religious liberty” to fit its ideologies, the administration has overstepped its constitutional bounds in ways almost too numerous to count.
Which brings us to May 7, and the Fairfax County, Virginia school board meeting where board members bowed to U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) bullying: Unless the board approved special treatment for transgendered students and teachers, the state’s largest school district would lose $42 million in federal funding.

Well first off as I said it was the courts that was the driving force and many of the judges were Bush appointees and second requiring everyone to be treated equally is not “special treatment” but allowing certain people to be exempt from the laws because of their religious beliefs is “special treatment.”

The article goes on to say,

Last April, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights decided that gender identity is a protected class, and that Title IX, which only bars sexual discrimination, will now be treated as though it ‘extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.’

But neither the U.S. Constitution nor prior case law requires school boards to make these changes, said Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Casey Mattox, whose children attend Fairfax schools. Citing a recent court case in a short presentation to the board, “There’s absolutely nothing behind [these federal demands],” said Mattox. “They’re bluffing.”

Some of the cases that shaped the U.S. DoEd decisions are the Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins Supreme Court case where the Supreme Court ruled that the definition of “sex” also included appearance. In the Western New England University School of Law article “'On the Basis of Sex': Using Title IX to Protect Transgender Students from Discrimination in Education” they write about the case,

The Supreme Court eventually rejected the view that Congress meant sex discrimination to only mean discrimination against one's biological sex." In Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the Supreme Court considered the case of Ann Hopkins, a female accountant who was passed over for promotion based at least in part on the partners' view that she was too aggressive for a woman. The Court recognized that because aggressiveness is a trait the partners require for promotion, their objections to Hopkins's aggressiveness placed her in an "intolerable and impermissible catch . . . ." By agreeing that "Title VII lifts women out of this bind," the Court interpreted sex discrimination to include not just discrimination on one's sex in the sense of being "biologically" male or female, but also discrimination on the basis of how one presents one's gender relative to one's "biological" sex.

The article cites another case that specifically pertained to a trans person that case was Smith v. City of Salem where a trans person was fired when she transitioned,

Applying Price Waterhouse, a federal court of appeals determined that Smith's case was actionable under Title VII. Specifically, the court drew a parallel between an employer "who discriminates against women because, for instance, they do not wear dresses or makeup" and employers "who discriminate against men because they do wear dresses or makeup, or otherwise act femininely. ... If the former is an example of sex discrimination, as Price Waterhouse says, so too is the latter, and the fact that Smith's gender nonconformity could also be labeled transsexuality did not make the analogy to Price Waterhouse any less persuasive.

Then there was the Schroer v. Billington where she was fired from the Library of Congress after she told them she was transitioning.

So when the author of the Federalist writes that “the administration has overstepped its constitutional bounds” what the administration is doing is setting policy based on what the courts have ruled.