The Onslaught Begins

Remember last month all the headlines said the Trump would keep President’s protections in place for us? Well that didn’t last long, his true colors are starting to show.

US Withdraws Stay Request in Transgender Bathroom Case
ABC News
By Jamie Stengle, AP Dallas
February 11, 2017

President Donald Trump's administration is stepping back from a request made by former President Barack Obama's administration in an ongoing lawsuit over bathroom rights for transgender students in public schools.

In a filing Friday with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal government asked to withdraw a motion filed last year that asked a judge to scale back a temporary injunction blocking Obama's guidance on the issue.

The Department of Justice's filing, which came a day after Jeff Sessions was sworn in as Trump's attorney general, said the parties were "currently considering how best to proceed in this appeal."

Texas and 12 other states filed the lawsuit last year challenging the former president's guidance, which directed public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity.

The Washington Blade reported that,

Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, placed the blame of the brief seeking to undermine the transgender student protections squarely with Sessions.

“After being on the job for less than 48 hours, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has signaled his intent to undermine the equal dignity of transgender students,” Griffin said. “Transgender students are entitled to the full protection of the United States Constitution and our federal nondiscrimination laws. It is heartbreaking and wrong that the agency tasked with enforcing civil rights laws would instead work to subvert them for political interests. President Trump must immediately reverse course and direct the DOJ to uphold guidance protecting transgender students.”

And it doesn’t stop with the case in Texas,

Betsy DeVos Poses Immediate Danger To LGBT Students
Huffington Post
By Matt Baume
February 8, 2017

Meet your new principal, America: Betsy DeVos, Donald’s new Secretary of Education. She’s now in charge of the nation’s schools — or at least, in charge what’s going to be left, once she’s finished dismantling them. Betsy’s built her career on undermining public schools; and wouldn’t you know it, among the things she’s likely to take apart are some potentially life-saving protections for LGBT students.
[…]
Anyway, her money seems to have been well spent, because she’s influenced her way into an administration with a plan to move $20 billion out of public schools, where LGBT kids are guaranteed equal access to education, and into private schools, where they are guaranteed nothing whatsoever. But the taxpayers still have to pay for it!

There’s no mistaking Betsy’s ideological slant: Her family’s given upwards of $200 million to groups like the National Organization for Marriage and Focus on the Family — groups that explicitly oppose equality for queer people, and even promote ex-gay junk science. Some of that money went through a foundation that listed Betsy as the Vice President, but when asked about it, she said that was a misunderstanding — she had nothing to do with that family organization, and was simply identified as its Vice President by mistake. For thirteen years. That’s exactly the kind of rigorous attention to detail that qualifies a person to run the nation’s school.

And so it begins. The dismantling of all the court rulings in our favor over the years going all the way back to the Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins 1989 Supreme Court decision that ruled sex discrimination also includes sex stereotyping, in other words when people do not behave or look like a typical male or female. The courts over the years have applied that ruling to cover us because we definitely do not look or behave like a typical man or woman.

And now before the Supreme Court the case of G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board which will be heard on March 28 where Gavin Grimm sued the Board of Education because they wouldn’t let him use the boy’s bathroom. They did let him use the boy’s bathroom until outside agitators came in stirred up trouble.

I give the Supreme Court a 60% chance of finding in favor of Grimm even if Judge Neil Gorsuch is on the bench. I think Kennedy will find in favor of him. I also predict that if he wins Congress will pass a law forcing us to use the bathrooms of our birth gender and it will be even worse because they can say it applies to ALL schools that receive federal funding and that means all public schools even the ones here in Connecticut!