postmarxed:

Hey so this story about the Trump administration “defining transgender out of existence” or whatever seems like a really panic inducing headline that’s probably meant to make you so anxious you feel like you have to click the link and read the article. I’m seeing it passed around on here talking about protections for trans people being removed from the civil rights act and info on moving to Canada and Ireland as a refugee and like.

First of all there is no federal civil rights legislation protecting trans people. Maybe in some states? Def not mine but idk. Federally it’s entirely legal rn for people to deny you housing or a job or healthcare or whatever for being trans. That’s just how it’s always been. There’s no protection from that, no laws against it. If you’re a transgender adult and you’re worried about this affecting you it isn’t.

Transgender students tho is who this is gonna hit bc this is regarding title IX of the education ammendments of 1972. Title IX is supposed to protect against discrimination based on sex in educational institutions that receive money from the federal government. That pretty much covers any school, private and public colleges, high schools, all the way down to kindergarten. The interpretation of title IX is left up to the president and Obama kind of extended these protections originally intended for cis women to cover LGBT students as well bc “sex based discrimination” is vague enough that he could get away with including gender and orientation based discrimination.

That’s very likely about to go back to just covering cis women. Which is a big setback and it is a big deal, not having any federal assistance when this kind of discrimination happens. But I know a lot of us have seen the stories of transgender students being forced to move to different school districts again and again and one student who was not even allowed to take shelter during an active shooter drill and for the most part I think we know that help from the feds was already not available any longer. This just puts it in writing that Trumps DOJ isn’t gonna interpret title XI likes Obama’s DOJ did but we already knew that.

That doesn’t mean progress can’t be made on this it just means you can’t depend on the federal government to help anymore but you can still agitate locally and getting these protections from school boards, from municipal and county ordinances, and from state laws is probably the best thing to demand right now to keep this policy from flipping every time the white house flips.