Tag: Transgender

TRUMP: A GROWING GOITER ON THE BODY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

In case anyone was wondering why President Trump broke with White House tradition by not officially recognizing June as LGBT Pride Month, we got the answer this week: he didn’t fly the rainbow flag in June because he was planning to burn it in July. It apparently wasn’t enough for our bully-in-chief to take cruel, cheap Twitter shots at individual citizens. Insulting Meryl Streep, Snoop Dog, his own attorney general and the Broadway cast of “Hamilton” might give him a quick morning buzz, but the Donald’s real highs come from decimating human rights for large groups of Americans. Like the thousands of patriotic transgender soldiers serving in the armed forces.

In a series of three early Wednesday morning tweets, the president said the government “will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military”. That was just the opening act in his anti-LGBT crusade. Later that day, the Trump administration intervened in a major court case for the sole purpose of arguing that gays and lesbians should have no legal protection against employment discrimination. Apparently, that means this 2016 Trump tweet is no longer operative: “Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you . . .”

Depending on who is doing the counting, there are currently between 4,000 and 15,000 transgender troops in the country’s military. Most were closeted until June 30 of 2016, when Obama’s defense secretary, Ash Carter, announced that they could all serve openly. Trump’s Twitter reversal seemed, on its face, to be breathtakingly cruel, even for a president who has made cruelty an art form. These soldiers were told, at long last, they could be who they are and go right on serving their country, only to have the rug yanked out from under them by a tweet. It’s hard to think of any historic parallel where human rights, once granted, were taken away. It would be like Andrew Johnson rescinding the Emancipation Proclamation after he succeeded Abraham Lincoln. Coincidentally, Wednesday’s transgender ban tweet was issued on the 69th anniversary of President Truman’s order abolishing racial discrimination in the armed forces. The question is whether that will withstand another three-and-half years of this president.

The tweeted trans ban has so far produced little beyond anger, confusion and pandemonium. The military brass were stunned and said there will be no immediate changes until the White House clarifies the policy with something other than a tweet. Defense Secretary James Mattis was reportedly caught off guard by the announcement and was said to have been “appalled” by it.

Although some suggested that Trump’s move was a ploy to shore up his base, the immediate reaction from most Congressional conservatives was highly critical. (Here, here and here.) There’s another theory: the transgender ban is all about building the Mexican wall. Trump’s cherished wall project is part of an overall defense spending bill. That legislation has stalled temporarily due to a behind-the-scenes squabble over funding for gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatment. Some Republicans want to exclude such coverage from the bill. Others, including most military leaders, have opposed reducing medical benefits for transgender troops. (The estimated price tag for these services is $8.4 million a year, less than 1% of active duty health care spending.) So the speculation, advanced Friday by Politico, is that an impatient Trump grew tired of waiting for a resolution on the medical costs, and simply gave transgender soldiers the boot so he could get a vote on his wall. Only in a bizarre, two-for-one Trumpian kind of way, does this makes sense: persecute one marginalized group in order to build a wall around an even larger one.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Justice Department intervened in a federal lawsuit brought by another agency – the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – to argue that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. For years, it had been the position of both the Justice Department and the EEOC that the law’s prohibition against sex discrimination included sexual orientation. The EEOC’s case, now before a federal appellate court in New York, involves a sky diving company that supposedly fired an employee because he is gay. Although this story took a back seat to other Trump atrocities of the day, it was a highly significant reversal. The federal government is now officially on record supporting the right of private employers to fire lesbians and gays for being . . .well, for being lesbian and gay. Courts have issued conflicting interpretations and the matter is undoubtedly headed to the Supreme Court. Until Wednesday, it was going there with the U.S. government fully backing the view that the law’s ban on sex discrimination includes sexual orientation and gender identification. In one 24-hour period, this administration not only threw transgender individuals under the bus, it gave every private employer the green light to discriminate against them and lesbians and gays.

With respect to U.S. presidents and presidential aspirants, the story of LGBT rights is not exactly one of profiles in courage. Ronald Reagan turned his back on the AIDS epidemic. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. George Bush used antigay animus to capture a second term. Barack Obama didn’t “evolve” into a marriage equality supporter until the fourth year of his presidency. Hillary Clinton didn’t get there publicly until 2013. But Donald Trump has achieved a level of human rights shame that soars past all of them. He boasts about not being an antigay ideologue. Yet, he is so much worse than that. Trump’s singular ideological commitment is to himself. Everybody else is expendable and irrelevant. He thinks nothing of crushing the hopes, dreams and esteem of transgender soldiers, or putting this country’s official stamp of approval on homophobic and transphobic discrimination, just to assuage whatever momentary mood may pass through him. When it comes to human rights, it just doesn’t get much worse than that.

LET’S BUILD A WALL AROUND NORTH CAROLINA TO PROTECT THE REST OF US

True to my stereotypical Minnesota-Scandinavian roots, I’m a pretty laid back guy. I don’t spend much time wallowing in anger. But North Carolina is really pissing me off. (Stop now, sports trolls; I’m not talking about the Final Four). This is about the Final One Hundred and Seventy, the idiots who make up the state’s general assembly. Wait, my math is wrong. Make it 171 Tar Heel bozos, 170 in the general assembly, and the poorest excuse for a “reform” governor since the likes of George Wallace and Lester Maddox.

There are, to be sure, some kind, intelligent, even wonderful people in North Carolina. They just don’t get elected to public office. The result is a disastrous déjà vu of barbarically fascist legislation and a human rights record that rivals Syria’s.

Just a year ago, then-Governor Pat McCrory courageously ventured out on a political limb in order to strip away the dignity and basic rights of LGBT people. The general assembly passed, and a smiling governor signed, what came to be known as the Bathroom Bill. The law’s original intent was to make transgender folks use a public restroom based on their birth certificates. That meant, for example, that a 35-year-old buxom woman with long flowing blond hair, in a clinging dress and stiletto heels, must hobble into a men’s room if she was identified as a male at birth. Stunned commentators at the time envisioned a genitalia monitor for every stall. But the law was even more abhorrent. Fully transitioned lady and man parts didn’t matter; toilet venue was based solely on whether the M or F box was checked at birth.

Of course, North Carolina lawmakers never think small when it comes to obnoxiousness. Disgusted with renegade liberals on the Charlotte City Council, and their audacity to pass an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identification, the legislation expanded to retroactively revoke the authority of cities to ban discrimination. It was much more than a bathroom bill. It was a mandate to discriminate against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.

The rest of the world reacted in horror, spurring economic boycotts by corporations, entertainers and athletic groups. According to one estimate, good old North Carolina homophobia and transphobia were on track to cost the state $3.7 billion over a span of 12 years. That quickly translated into political problems. Most of the state’s voters could have lived with the discrimination, but they had no hankering to pay that kind of money for it. McCrory, the Republican governor who championed the law, was defeated in November by Democrat Roy Cooper, who promised to get the measure repealed.

In a hyper-technical sense, Cooper, and a new session of the state’s general assembly, pulled off that repeal last week. And then simultaneously replaced it with an equally atrocious law. Up against a NCAA deadline to either dump the law or face a continued boycott, the state’s lawmakers pulled a quick sleight of hand by ditching one bad law and adopting another. As a result, there is now a moratorium on any anti-discrimination protections for LGBT folks through 2020. The new law prohibits cities and counties from banning such discrimination.

Governor Cooper, the Democrat elected on the promise of cleaning this mess up, sheepishly issued this baffling understatement: the “compromise was not a perfect deal or my preferred solution.” No shit, Sherlock. He runs for governor as a savior for human rights and then signs a bill banning them for more than three years. That’s no compromise. It’s a complete capitulation to right wing nut jobs who want it all: an end to the boycotts and continued discrimination.

It obviously never occurred to the governor that he was bargaining from a position of strength. He didn’t win the election because of his opponent’s anti-gay-and-trans views. He won because the state got hit hard economically over the legislation. The NBA pulled its all-star game out of Charlotte. The NCAA canceled games and threatened to withhold years of events from the state. Numerous corporations pulled back on plans to build or expand in North Carolina. Hundreds of entertainers refused to perform there, including: Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Cyndi Lauper, Maroon 5 and Itzhak Perlman. This was a fight, brilliantly guided by the Human Rights Campaign, that cost North Carolina hundreds of millions of dollars and greatly diminished the quality of North Carolina life.

A governor committed to human rights for all would have vetoed the sham repeal and, if overridden, let the boycott continue. Obviously, the majority of assembly members need to feel more heat before they can see the wisdom in doing the right thing. Hopefully, the NCAA, the NBA and other corporate and entertainment forces will continue to stay clear of this state until that happens.

This is what it is like in Donald Trump’s America where the federal government leaves human rights up to the states. Protection from discrimination should not be legislated by zip code. But that is exactly what is happening as a result of Trump putting state’s rights above human rights. Just this year, legislators in 16 states have filed two dozen bills to scale back legal protections for transgender people. Nonsense has a way of spreading, making the continued boycott even more essential.

North Carolina lawmakers are not apt to see the error of their ways without pressure. After all, this is the only state in the country with a law that prohibits cotton growers from using elephants to plow their fields. Of course, the state was fine with purchased black people doing the same thing, and even fought a war to keep those slaves in the cotton fields. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of elephants’ rights, but humans need them too.

TRUMP WINS THE GEORGE WALLACE HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD

In kowtowing to the baser instincts of social conservativism, Donald Trump took another sledge hammer to basic human rights this week. With the stroke of a pen, he rescinded the federal government’s position that transgender students should be allowed to use school bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity. For many on the right, still smarting over their smashing gay marriage defeat, this was some sort of bizarre solace, a token illusion that their revered life style of the 1950s is still in place. For Trump, who supported LGBT rights in a prior life, the move gave him a much needed fix of the fuel that keeps him going: adulation and worship by his base. Sad, isn’t it, that grown adults can feel so good by forcing kids who look, dress, act and feel like boys to use the girls’ restroom (and vice versa)?

Now if Trump had been the straight shooting, down-to-earth non-politician his rally crowds think he is, he would have said something like this: “Frankly, I couldn’t care less what bathroom people use. Caitlyn Jenner is a fantastic woman and a dear personal friend. I’ve told her she can use the Ladies’ Room of her choice at Mar-a-Lago anytime. But many of the wonderful people who voted for me really hate this whole transgender thing, and I just have to throw them a bone because they love me so much.”

He didn’t say that, of course. Instead, like the politicians he so despises, Trump put the oldest spin in the book on his latest human rights assault by declaring, “This is not a federal matter. This is for the states to decide.” Press Secretary Sean Spicer was ready with the talking point: “We believe this is a states’ rights issue.” They both uttered the words like they thought they had just come up with the idea.”

Quite the contrary. This 45th president, who fancies himself as an outsider with a mandate to drain the political swamp, tapped into an argument that is drenched in the swamp’s DNA, dating all the way back to 1776. Every politician who ever opposed human rights did so by wrapping themselves in the flag of “states’ rights.”

Shortly after the American Revolution, the founding fathers worked up a constitution. The original draft banned slavery in the new union of 13 colonies. Virginia, however, insisted that any prohibition on slave ownership by this neophyte federal government was a deal breaker. The slave ban was dropped and the states’ rights gambit was born. It has been a goiter on the body politic ever since, heralding a civil war, periodic threats of succession and an ongoing lame, clichéd excuse for withholding basic human rights.

It doesn’t matter whether the battle is over slavery, whites-only lunch counters, gay marriage or transgender bathroom use. Politicians on the national stage rarely come right out and rave about how cool it is to discriminate. “States’ rights” is their rhetorical stand-in for “discrimination.” It’s more noble sounding to pound your chest in support of the rights of states to run their own shows than it is to advocate against those seeking equality.

In his first inaugural speech as governor of Alabama in 1963, George Wallace brought the local house down with these words of inspiration, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” A year later, as a candidate for president, Wallace said the same thing with different words: “Integration is a matter to be decided by each state. The states must determine if they feel it is of benefit to both races.”

And the rest, as they say, is history. Blacks would still be drinking from segregated water fountains in Alabama, if they had to wait for the white folks there to see the benefit of integration. That is the essence of “states’ rights.” Congress took the states’ right to discriminate away from them in 1964 when it passed the Civil Rights Act and made equality a federal right.

Eight years later, Congress expanded that right by passing a law prohibiting educational institutions receiving federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex. That statute was the basis for the Obama administration’s advisory warning to schools that banning students from using restrooms consistent with their gender identity would constitute illegal discrimination.

Trump, in preparing for a presidential run in 2000, called for federal legislation to shield the LGBT community from discrimination. In his latest incarnation, however, the president trotted out the old, worn battle cry of states’ rights. That leaves transgender kids like Gavin Grimm, a Virginia teen, with the painful indignity of using a girl’s bathroom while looking every bit like a teenage boy straight out of central casting. That’s what it means to leave human rights decisions in the hands of the states.

The question of federal versus state control of human rights split the Democratic Party for years. Eventually, the party lost southern Democrats to the Republicans. The battle was just warming up in 1948 as the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia debated the merits of a federal civil rights law. A young Minneapolis mayor by the name of Hubert H. Humphrey rose to the microphone to support the platform plank in a speech many historians view as one of the best examples of political oratory. Here’s what Humphrey told his fellow delegates:

“To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

That was 1948. It is now way past time for us to escape from that shadow, once and for all. We need that sunshine of human rights. We need it for everyone. And we need it now.

FINDING OUR WAY FROM THE ASHES OF DEFEAT

The defeat this week of a right wing Republican governor in North Carolina was much more than just a consolation prize for progressives. It was a well-timed reminder of how movement power can withstand severe electoral setbacks, particularly when it comes to matters of justice and human rights. While Republicans won every other contest in the Tar Heel State, Gov. Pat McCrory bit the dust largely because of what was seen as his unyielding opposition to LGBT rights.

McCrory conceded Monday to his Democratic opponent in an election that had been too close to call. In the end, he lost by 10,000 votes (out of 6.8 million), while Donald Trump carried the state by four percentage points and the incumbent Republican senator won reelection by six points.

The general consensus among political observers is that the governor was done in by what came to be known as the Bathroom Bill. The legislation, signed by McCrory in March, was about much more than bathrooms. It initially targeted the transgender community by allowing public restroom use only in accordance with a person’s birth gender. In its final form however, it prohibited cities from enforcing discrimination bans on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Flash back now, for just a moment, to those dark, gloomy, I’m-moving-to-Canada days of 2004. Not only did an unpopular George W. Bush manage to win reelection, Republicans picked up seats in both the House and Senate. But wait, there’s more. Constitutional amendments prohibiting same sex marriage were on the ballot in 11 states, and they all passed overwhelmingly. Bush’s political strategist, Karl Rove, was credited with the wildly successful plan of pushing the anti-marriage amendments as a turnout lure for social conservatives, many of whom might not have made the trip to the polls just to vote for Bush. I still remember that deep feeling of hopelessness and angst after the election. Not only did we have four more years of George W., the notion of marriage equality appeared to be dead and buried. Gallop validated the malaise a few months later with a poll showing that only 37 percent of the country supported same sex marriage.

Yet, something altogether different was happening. Thanks to the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT groups, not only did the movement never stop, it picked up momentum and steam. They won marriage equality laws in key states like New York and Maryland. Men married men. Women married women. The sun came up the next day, and attitudes quickly changed, with a speed unparalleled in the history of civil rights. Other states followed suit. By 2012, Gallop’s annual tracking showed for the first time that a majority of Americans supported gay marriage. In large part, those rapidly changing views fueled the 2015 Supreme Court decision that declared marriage equality as the law of the land.

That very same LGBT movement was responsible for the defeat of North Carolina’s Bathroom Bill Governor. The well-oiled and brilliantly strategic Human Rights Campaign has had staff on the ground in North Carolina all year. Having already succeeded at planting the notion of gay and transgender rights as a basic fairness issue in the country’s psyche, they moved quickly to convert it into a business issue. Entertainers and professional sports teams canceled events because of the law. Business decided against relocating to North Carolina. Top corporate giants like Pepsi, Google, Apple and American Airlines all put the heat on the state over this discriminatory law. Although McCrory didn’t initiate the legislation, he made the political miscalculation to support it in order to curry favor with social conservatives. It became the albatross that ended his career.

The moral of the story should be clear. Despite how it felt at the time, all was not lost in the 2004 election. If the Human Rights Campaign had cashed in the chips on election night 12 years ago, several hundred thousand marriages would never have happened and a homophobic governor would have had four more years to wreak havoc in North Carolina. To be sure, movements have their ups and downs. But the quest for justice, fairness and equality never ends. It’s not the destination that changes, it’s the roadmap. It is up to us to find the right route and follow it, with our eyes always fixed on the prize.