I Read A Lot Of Blogs And News Article

And one of the ones that I follow is the Connecticut Employment Law Blog and yesterday he wrote about trans bathrooms and the Supreme Court.

Restroom Access and Transgender Issues in the Workplace Go Supreme
By Daniel Schwartz on November 3rd, 2016

One of the topics we handled was one suggested by several attendees at last year’s seminar: Transgender Issues in the Workplace.  I’ve talked about this before in some prior posts here and here.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the areas we covered was restroom access.  This seems to be one area that employers continue to grapple with. Indeed, as I noted last year in a post on the topic, the issue “that seems to get the most press is restroom access.”

He then goes on to talk about the Supreme Court decision to hear the Gloucester County School Board v. G.G. case and he goes on to say that any decision that the court will probably not impact us here in Connecticut because of PA 11-55.

He points out that the court is looking at a very narrow part of the case, he quotes the SCOTUS Blog,

In granting review today, the justices sidestepped the most prominent issue they had been asked to take on: whether they should overrule their decision in Auer, which has been the target of criticism by conservative lawyers and jurists. Instead, they agreed only to weigh in on two other, lower-profile questions presented in the school board’s petition: whether courts should defer to a letter, like the Department of Education opinion letter in this case, that was issued as part of the specific dispute before the court; and whether the Department of Education’s interpretation of the federal civil rights laws and the 1975 regulation as requiring schools to treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity should be given effect.

The school board’s case, as well as the others in which the justices granted review today, likely will be argued during the court’s February sitting, which begins on February 21.

So don’t expect any sweeping decisions to come out of this case, it could be a victory in that it will affirm the DoEd interpretation of the Title IX.

The Connecticut Employment Law Blog ends with…

At the seminar, one of my law partners, Kevin Roy, suggested that employers who feel flummoxed by the legal rules, should approach the issue from the perspective of trying to treat employees with “dignity and respect”.  That may be the simplest and easiest way to tackle a still-evolving issue.

To that I say Amen.