Another Nail In Our Coffin

As many of you might remember the guidelines that the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights issued for trans students under the Obama administration which said that schools had to recognize our gender identity. These guidelines were not pulled out of a hat but based on court rulings including cases heard before the Supreme Court (Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins) and other courts around the country. The case that I liked was…

The Schroer [U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in Schroer v. Billington] court compared a change of sex to a change of religion, noting that "[d]iscrimination 'because of religion' easily encompasses discrimination because of a change of religion." The court stated:

"Imagine that an employee is fired because she converts from Christianity to Judaism. Imagine too that her employer testifies that he harbors no bias toward either Christians or Jews but only to 'converts.' . . . No court would take seriously the notion that ‘converts’ are not covered by the statute."

And there are dozens of other federal cases that found we are protected under Title VII and Title IX.

So now the Trump administration is ignoring all the legal precedent and issued their own guidelines,

Trump administration issues new letter on transgender students
Catholic World News
June 23, 2017

The Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education has issued an instruction stating that schools that fail to use transgender students’ “preferred names and pronouns” are committing harassment.
[…]
In February, the Trump administration withdrew the previous year’s directive.

The Trump administration’s new instruction states that this withdrawal “does not leave students without protections from discrimination, bullying or harassment.”

And now schools can force us to use the bathrooms of our birth gender or to use a staff bathroom.

This is just another case of the Trump administration refusing to enforce federal law.