Why don’t you spend your efforts ensuring rights are a thing that still exists, first?
They’re using minorities as rhetoric again, and it keeps working. Someone downvoted you and will downvote me, maybe call me a Russian bot, because look Democrats care about us. Meanwhile they’re doing nothing meaningful to stop ice, police, or war crimes. They love that no one is talking about the fact that they’re fully supportive of starving Cuba right now, liberal voters already forgot about their enthusiastic support for genocide. “Look, they care about the trans community”.
As a trans person myself – I want general improvements to quality of life. Don’t single us out. I want to appreciate the effort here, but this is just putting trans folks in the crossfire.
For the last 3 years, the manosphere had radicalized young men on the idea that “women get all the benefits” because of woman-only scholarships, woman-only shelters, and laws from Bill Clinton’s administration that specifically protect women from Domestic Violence. When I read this bill, all I can think of is some muscular tan bro talking into a microphone saying: The world takes care of trans people. We get none of that.
Don’t make the rule that “you can’t deny someone food stamps due to their trans identity”; say people can’t be denied food stamps. Ditto for unemployment benefits, public housing, and (quoting from the bill): medical care, shelter, safety, and economic security. Pass laws for medical dignity and autonomy; not just against doctors refusing or delaying HRT, but for all general elective procedures and medications. Let the transgender news content creators explain why these are good for queer folks.
On top of that, maybe make it illegal to disclose whether someone is trans or not in court to prevent biasing a jury. That would be it IMO.
General civil blanket rights protections don’t work. We already have laws against sex discrimination. By any objective measure, discriminating against trans people is sex discrimination. It is literally sex discrimination to ban hormone treatments for minors. Imagine a doctor that will prescribe a cis girl E is she has low E levels, but she won’t prescribe a trans girl E because of her perceived or actual sex. That is literally sex discrimination. Yet the courts are letting laws against trans medical care stand.
What is needed is explicit legal protections for gender identity and gender expression. These laws protect both cis and trans people from being discriminated against based on these factors. But you can’t just rely on generic sex-discrimination provisions, as conservative courts have found absurd interpretations of the law to find that plain sex discrimination is anything but. You need to give the slimy bastards zero wiggle room.
Or for another example:
Don’t make the rule that “you can’t deny someone food stamps due to their trans identity”; say people can’t be denied food stamps.
This statement is nonsensical. What do you mean, “people can’t be denied food stamps.” Of course people can be denied food stamps! Bill Gates doesn’t need to qualify for food stamps. When you want to ban a form of discrimination, you have to specifically define what form of discrimination is banned. You cannot just pass a blanket law that says, “don’t discriminate against anyone for any reason,” as there are countless valid reasons to discriminate against people. It’s just not valid to discriminate against people based on innate traits. If I’m a restaurant owner, it’s perfectly fine to throw someone out if they’re rude or a belligerent asshole. I’m discriminating against assholes.
You just can’t rely on vague legal language, as courts will always find a way to rule that marginalized groups for some reason don’t qualify under the generic protections. This is why we had to pass laws specifically banning race, gender, and religious discrimination. More generic protections had already failed. After all, the highest law of the land, the Constitution, already has the Equal Protection Clause, and minority groups have found its protection to be incredibly weak.
“[Nor shall any State] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
According to the plain text of the Constitution, the Civil Rights, the Women’s Rights, and the Queer Rights movements should have been completely unnecessary. After all, Jim Crow laws plainly violated this provision. Yet because the language was weak and nonspecific, it was easy for courts to find that black people could be denied the right to vote.
As far as appealing to the manosphere? You’re trying to appeal to a carnival of liars and con men. The objective reality of your actions has little bearing on who they choose to target for their five minutes of hate.
Good policy opens up protections to everyone. Poorly versed politicians frame things narrowly because their privileges make them blind to everyday life.
I imagine you are right. Remember, these folks make $174,000 a year, and have taxpayer-funded healthcare </3
For Republicans to vote down? Ok.
The DOJ has had a moratorium on pursuing any Title 9 claims related to gender identity for several years now. The EEOC has not been investigating claims of discrimination related to gender identity in several districts also for several years now.
These are specific items that need to be addressed. I’d like there to be separately pushed, because “Trans Bill of Rights” already sounds like it’s going to be nuked from orbit.
I had more than one job offer explicitly revoked because of my gender identity, including a federal one (cited Trump’s EO.) I sought help and did not find it. Living in a red state gives you zero recourse.
Glad they waited until it’s borderline impossible to actually get it passed into law. /S
Me looking for what happened to the original bill of rights
Why not pass a bill of rights that will address material conditions for everyone, no need to be exclusive. Here is a great one from 1944.
Employment (right to work) An adequate income for food, shelter, and recreation Farmers' rights to a fair income Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies Decent housing Adequate medical care Social security EducationOr even just take this part "people under the law and ensure their access to medical care, shelter, safety, and economic security.” and ensure that the same applies to everyone, even if they aren’t trans. I’d love if everyone, including trans people, had those rights.
I think there’s value to being specific about the rights of trans people because they are in an especially vulnerable position and are actively being denied basic rights. Yes we need rights for all, but to say “Why should trans people get special treatment with a bill like this?” at this moment has a whiff of the “all lives matter” about it.
Black Lives Matter is a great slogan for social justice. The Black Bill of Rights is a terrible thing for a government whose purpose isn’t racial apartheid. Either we are all equal under the law or we aren’t.
We can’t rely on generic civil rights laws. We already tried that with the Equal Protection Clause, which provides a blanket ban on all forms of government discrimination. We already tried what you propose. In practice, when you want to protect civil rights, you have to ban specific categories of discrimination. Generic bans are toothless.
Laws are toothless if society doesn’t care about them being enforced, and if politicians benefit from not enforcing them. Do you actually think that we’d be in a better situation if the Equal Protection Clause had an addendum that said “especially black people?”
Sure. History has proven that civil rights laws that are very specific and explicit are much more resilient to legal challenge than broad ones. They probably should have been a hell of a lot more specific in the Reconstruction amendments.
Right. Over specificity in establishing rights and protections is how we end to with trans people being denied rights and how we have to argue semantics about who is actually protected by the law. The same thing happened for gay and lesbian people, and could happen again as protections for discrimination against some sexual orientation(s) are not explicit in some cases, and open to reinterpretation by bad actors in SCOTUS. Even if you cover that gap now, the it may not help the next group that falls along the fringe or entirely outside of those specific protections when they’re targetted in the future. It should be written to be broad in protection and specific in exemption (where necessary), not the other way around.
Over specificity in establishing rights and protections is how we end to with trans people being denied rights and how we have to argue semantics about who is actually protected by the law.
This isn’t true. It’s the vague generic protections that are easy for courts to warp. Discrimination against trans people is a plain violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause and is a form of illegal sex discrimination. Yet courts have found ways around those. You need to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.
Discrimination against trans people is a plain violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause and is a form of illegal sex discrimination.
You’re kind of making my point. The right would argue that they’re not discriminating on sex because sex differs from gender identity (and frankly, they’d be correct about that even by the definition of transgenderism). Had the law not been written to protect discrimination based on “sex”, among other traits and categories, we wouldn’t be arguing over what “sex” means in terms of the law and gender identity. That’s what I’m saying about over specificity.
Like you said, it should already be covered under current sex based discrimination, but it’s not. And so “You need to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.” If the language had been more broad to begin with and not set such narrow areas of protection, they could already be covered by default if not explicitly excluded, so we wouldn’t need to add more protections in the first place.
I’m not saying that adding explicit protections is bad in itself though, but it shouldn’t JUST include the protections that are relevant now and leave open discrimination where we can’t even predict in the future. It will just move the goal post and we’ll keep playing constitutional whack a mole with bigots for generations.
Sex discrimination is already fairly generic. The only way to get more generic is the Equal Protection Clause, and that’s proven completely toothless. Generally the less specific a protection is, the less real impact it has.
Absolutely vital, i wish they showed this enthusiasm when they had a chance of passing it
We have fascists looking to kill people and the Dems want to play identity politics.
Now is not the time. To be honest, there may not ever be a time unless all of the baby boomers die, gen x gets a clue, and gen z males walk back Nazism.
Trans people were among the first victims of the Nazis. And here you are, continuing their legacy.
Yeah, and trans people are amongst those they want to kill.
They know without a doubt this won’t make any traction and will just get booed out of the public space right now, this whole performance is hurting trans rights and equality broadly.
But I’m quite sure they know that and are doing this on purpose.
Most gen x has a clue, some became Nazis. what we don’t have is the numbers even if we were 100% united.
We might actually have Republicans willing to vote on issues involving the Epstein files, and the reach and funding of ICE and these people are…(checks notes) are wasting time on something no republican will even look at.
These people don’t want to do the work. They need to be primaried.
I’m all for trans rights but right now this is just a fucking puppet show.
Trans folks, especially teens and kids, need to see someone in power fighting for them. It’s necessary to have some hope to avoid suicide. So it is good in that regard
However for myself, I do not trust the democrats to actually follow through on any trans protections. It feels disingenuous. Why didn’t they go to bat for us before the election? Why is newsom spouting anti-trans rhetoric? It feels like theater, remind the alphabet to not get too radicalized and actually throw off our oppressors
I feel like pandering leads to more hopelessness when nothing meaningful ever changes — but that’s just me. Not to say that this is pandering, but it will be functionally if nothing comes of it.
🎯🎯🎯
I’m a supporter of Trans people but I this is such a waste of time and effort-- grandstanding for an fraction of a percent of the population while the constitution and standards of living are actively being eroded for everyone
Agreed. This is a waste of fucking time for as long as the pedophile death cult is at large.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It is so sad this needs to be done.
