Victory!

We won in Puerto Rico and in Oregon, both major victories but how long will this winning streak last now that Trump and the Republicans are packing the courts with “Originalist” and judges who put the Bible above the Constitution.

Judge’s ruling supports Oregon school’s transgender policy
WTOP
By The Associated Press
July 25, 2018

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit against an Oregon school district’s policy that allows transgender students to use locker rooms and bathrooms of the gender they identify with instead of their birth sex.

Some parents and students at a high school in Dallas, Oregon, said in the lawsuit that the policy caused “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, intimidation, fear, apprehension, and stress produced by using the restroom with students of the opposite sex.”

Similar lawsuits have been dismissed by courts in several other parts of the country. Mat dos Santos, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon which intervened in this lawsuit, said the group would fight a similar one recently filed in Sutherlin, Oregon.

In his 56-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez said “high school students do not have a fundamental privacy right to not share school restrooms, lockers, and showers with transgender students whose biological sex is different than theirs.”

In another federal case…

The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia in May rejected a similar lawsuit, saying plaintiffs may experience stress because of transgender students’ presence in school facilities, but that stress was not “comparable to the plight of transgender students who are not allowed to use facilities consistent with their gender identity,” Hernandez noted.

I love their thinking “comparable to the plight of transgender students who are not allowed to use facilities consistent with their gender identity.”

Meanwhile down in Puerto Rico,

A 19-Year-Old Puerto Rican Transgender Woman Cheers Gender-Change-Policy
Daniela Arroyo González: "Puerto Rico is now a more free and inclusive country"
NBC Chicago
By Sofia Cerda Campero
July 25, 2018

After a 15-year legal battle, the Puerto Rican government began a policy which allows transgender people to correct their birth certificate to reflect their gender identity.

This change comes into effect on July 15, three months after Lambda Legal brought the case, Arroyo v. Rosselló, to the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico on behalf of three transgender Puerto Ricans: Daniela Arroyo-González, Victoria Rodríguez and a transgender man identified as J.G, and the NGO Puerto Rico Para Tod@s.

“This fight began a long time ago and we have finally succeeded,” Omar González Pagan, an attorney for Lambda Legal, told NBC.
[…]
District Judge Carmen Consuelo Cerezo who signed the order, stated: “The right to identify our own existence lies at the heart of one’s humanity. And so, we must heed their voices: 'the woman that I am,' 'the man that I am.'"

She said the historic change would give a voice to a community greatly harmed by discrimination, adding  “They cannot wait for another generation, hoping for a lawmaker to act.”

Another smart judge.

I worry about what the courts will become with almost 200 judges appointed by Trump.