Earlier this month, a British employment judge ruled that a researcher’s anti-trans views did not constitute what’s called a protected philosophical belief under the nation’s Equality Act, which meant that her employer’s decision not to renew her contract over those views did not constitute discrimination. The woman at the center of the case, Maya Forstater, was employed on a contract basis as a tax policy researcher for the Centre for Global Development. In 2018, she began publicly campaigning, mostly on social media, against reforms to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow trans people in the United Kingdom to self-identify their gender. In response to concern from her colleagues, her employer’s human resources department warned her that others might find her anti-trans tweets “offensive and exclusionary,” and eventually declined to renew her contract. Forstater decided to sue, purporting to seek legal protection for her beliefs.

The subsequent ruling against Forstater set off a series of predictably over-the-top reactions from the self-described “gender critical feminists”—also called trans exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs—who dominate the British feminist discourse. In their framing, the case became the latest example of the so-called death of free speech and thought, the result of lefty madness and groupthink. (The author JK Rowling raised the international profile of the case—and was also heavily criticized—after tweeting support for Forstater.)

But a closer look at the case reveals that it doesn’t have much to do with a belief that “there are only two sexes in human beings… male and female,” as Forstater claims (and growing bodies of science dispute). In practice, Forstater was seeking legal cover to disregard the already established rights of trans people in the U.K. Hers was a familiar argument—one that for too long has dominated mainstream coverage of trans rights.

A passage from employment judge James Tayler’s ruling explained it perfectly: “The claimant is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.” Forstater, in her witness statement, more or less confirmed this: It “may be polite,” she acknowledged, to use a person’s preferred pronouns, “but there is no fundamental right to compel people to be polite or kind in every situation.”

Forstater’s claim about protected belief was just a smokescreen for her underlying bigotry, and Tayler saw through it. “It is also a slight of hand to suggest that the Claimant merely does not hold the belief that transwomen are women,” he wrote in his judgment. “She positively believes that they are men; and will say so whenever she wishes.” The case, then, wasn’t so much about belief as it was about actions.

In the U.K., trans people are protected on the basis of their “gender reassignment,” meaning that they should be treated as their transitioned genders under the law. In her employment case, Forstater wanted her own beliefs to supersede the rights of those trans people. Winning her suit would have meant potentially nullifying protections for trans people and eroding emerging social norms that allow trans people to feel safe and respected in basic social interactions.

Anti-trans activists like Forstater can talk all they want about their simple and humble personal beliefs in the supposed immutability of biological sex, but the truth is, as the judge found, those views are—or should be—irrelevant to how trans people are treated in society and on the job.

Trans people are only all too aware of their own assigned sex. Many, like me, have taken hormones and had surgery to change the sexed traits of the body we are born with. But there are no names or pronouns carved into our chromosomes. It doesn’t matter what Forstater believes about trans people or the body—the court found that it didn’t entitle her to misgender people. That’s why non-discrimination laws exist in the first place.

People like Forstater focus on biological sex because that is precisely the axis upon which trans people are othered, but where is the limit on this proposed legal right? Conservative ideologies around biological sex already hurt people in their places of work. The website Pregnant Then Screwed lists hundreds of individual stories of mostly British women who were fired or marginalized from their job because they gave birth or became pregnant. The law, rightly, now works to protect against this. Trans people are entitled to that same dignity. Had Forstater won, it’s possible that her case could have opened the legal door for all kinds of sinister but “sincerely held” beliefs to reign over workplaces in the U.K.

Judge Tayler rightly anticipated the danger: He explained that under British law, religious beliefs and lack of religious beliefs are protected, so a Catholic’s beliefs would see the same protection as an atheist’s. Philosophical belief works in a similar legal fashion. In determining whether a claimant’s beliefs are worthy of protection under British law, it must pass through the Grainger criteria, named after a case which determined belief in climate change to be a protected belief.

The Grainger criteria consists of several legal tests for philosophical beliefs: “the belief must be genuinely held; it must be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available; it must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behavior; it must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance; and it must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not be incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”

Tayler held that Forstater’s belief about biological sex failed to meet the final requirement—that it not be incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.

Cases like this—which pit the actual lives of trans people against the beliefs of somebody who decided to test her colleagues’ patience by posting over 150 anti-trans tweets in a single week—are a win-win for anti-trans activists. If they prevail, they now have a new legal basis to treat trans people like garbage without reprisal. If they lose, they can bang on about how trans people are spreading a totalitarian belief system that crushes anyone who might disagree.

That’s why it’s frustrating to watch these developments as a trans person. This woman is not trans, the judge is not trans, the media now disseminating information about the case is largely not trans, JK Rowling is not trans. But now it’s trans people taking the blow online and in the media.

Commonly held beliefs don’t develop in a vacuum. Trans people have never had control over their own narrative, in science or in media. That has started to change recently, but by and large cis people still hold the power to frame trans lives for the masses. Maintaining that power to define trans lives is what ultimately drives anti-trans activists, not only in their online presence but in the courts and more broadly.

As the case leads us into a new decade, it’s an example of trans people finally finding a tiny foothold in the story of our own lives and bodies. Tayler’s judgment recognizes that hard-earned, long-fought achievement. So does the backlash.

The post When “Biology” Becomes a Cover for Anti-Trans Bigotry appeared first on MyMedicPlus.

The evangelical-led Trump administration has been waging a war against transgender people since 2016, but the way they responded to a Supreme Court case involving anti-trans discrimination may be the most horrifying defense of bigotry yet.

The case in question involves Aimee Australia Stephens, a transgender woman, who spent six years working as a funeral director and embalmer in Detroit. In 2013, she told her colleagues and employers at RG & GR Harris Funeral Home that she would go through sex-reassignment surgery so that her outward appearance matched her true gender.

The proper response would have been, “We wish you the best.” Or maybe “We can’t wait to have you back at work!” Or maybe “This is none of my goddamn business, but more power to you.”

Instead, owner Thomas F. Rost fired her.

Stephens later filed a lawsuit against her employer with two specific allegations: that the company violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by firing her for being transgender, and that they violated sex discrimination laws by saying she was fired for refusing to wear a suit (which was required of all maleemployees). The first allegation was rejected altogether because a court said discrimination on the basis of gender identity was not banned by Title VII, so you couldn’t argue otherwise. The second one has been the basis of a lengthy legal battle.

In 2016, a federal judge said the funeral home didn’t violate the law by firing an employee who wanted to dress as a woman. While discrimination could be argued, the judge said, the employer’s religious rights allowed for it under the law. To put it another way, the employers’ faith, which compelled them to make men wear suits at work, was deemed more important than the right of a female employee to not wear a suit.

An appeals court later (thankfully) overturned that ruling. They said Stephens was a victim of discrimination and that her wanting to wear a dress didn’t burden her employers enough that the religious trump card kicked in.

Now the Supreme Court’s going to weigh in, and the Trump administration issued a brief calling for SCOTUS to overturn the ruling. They want religious business owners to have the right to fire transgender employees. Just because. But they’re going even further by calling for the Supreme Court to make sex discrimination legal regardless of what Title VII says.

In short, the government is saying that when Title VII prohibits sex discrimination, it really means “biological sex.” So firing trans people at will ought to be totally fine.

Dominic Holden at BuzzFeed explains that this is all coming from the Christian Right’s playbook:

The administration’s argument against LGBTQ rights matches the advocacy of conservative Christian groups, which claim Congress only intended to ban discrimination because someone is male or female — saying the sexes cannot be treated differently. Their argument says interpreting the term “sex” more broadly effectively rewrites the law, and only Congress, not courts, has that license.

The counterargument from LGBTQ advocates and several lower courts, however, is that the intent of lawmakers does not limit a law’s reach, but rather its meaning is defined by the statute’s plain text. They say anti-transgender discrimination can result from a person defying traditional sex stereotypes or because the person transitioned from one sex to another — and thus, it is inherently a type of sex discrimination.

That latter argument makes sense. Stephens was fired for, say, wanting to wear a dress, but a cis woman who wanted to wear a dress would still have a job. Stephens was fired, then, for not fitting a gender-based stereotype. That’s sex discrimination. It’s like firing a woman for having short hair.

If the government gets its wish — which is to say, if white evangelical Christians get their wish — then it could become open season for Christian business owners to fire transgender people for the crime of merely existing. (In which case the rest of us should openly refuse to do business with bigoted owners — and to make sure the world knows which businesses are run by those people.)

If all that wasn’t enough, a separate brief filed by the Christian hate group Alliance Defending Freedom took a “sky is falling” approach to what the country would look like if you couldn’t fire trans people.

“It will deny women and girls fair opportunities to compete in sports, to ascend to the winner’s podium, and to receive critical scholarships,” the ADF brief states. “It will also require domestic-abuse shelters to allow men to sleep in the same room as female survivors of rape and violence. And it may dictate that doctors and hospitals provide transition services even in violation of their religious beliefs.”

The people who have earned a reputation for not giving a damn about anyone who doesn’t think just like they do want you to believe they now care about the whole world. (Also, I assure you no trans person has ever forced a doctor to perform a transition service against his or her will. That sounds… like a horrible idea.)

The oral arguments for this case and two others that involve similar issues will occur in early October. Given the Court’s makeup, there’s no reason to be optimistic about what the justices will do.

Never vote for a Republican. The GOP’s only policy goal is to inflict pain on people who disagree with them. LGBTQ people will suffer more than most, and this is just the latest example of it.

The post Conservatives Want the Supreme Court to Legalize Firing People for Being Trans appeared first on MyMedicPlus.