Title IX and Transgender Students

I've been invited this weekend to a symposium sponsored by the University of Wisconsin Law School's Journal of Law, Gender and Society, on the subject of Transcending Gender Lines: Title IX and Transgender Rights. I thought I'd take a break from my recent series on filing employment discrimination complaints to talk about Title IX and transgender students.

There are a lot of other fabulous people coming, and the full line up is here.

My paper is entitled "Protecting Transgender Students: Application of Title IX to Gender Identity or Expression and the Constitutional Right to Gender Autonomy." The bottom line of this paper? If you're filing a case to protect transgender students' rights to proper forms of address, dress codes, facilities usage and protection from invasive questioning, then you can't count on Title IX alone. You should also file a claim under the U.S. Constitution for the right to gender autonomy.

You may remember me banging on about the "right to gender autonomy," in a post right here on The Bilerico Project, some years ago when I was writing a law review article on it. That article eventually was published in the Touro Journal of Race, Gender and Ethnicity. Anyway, after the jump is my brief take on the application of this constitutional right to Title IX and transgender students. There are a few typos -- it's just a conference draft -- but look for a much expanded and polished version this coming Fall in the Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender and Society.

Reposted from Bilerico.com. Click here to read more...

EEOC File 13: Waiting for Godot

A country road. A tree.

Evening.
Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting.
He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.
As before.

Enter Vladimir.

ESTRAGON:
(giving up again). Nothing to be done.

VLADIMIR:
(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.

Thus begins Samuel Beckett's classic, Waiting For Godot, which reminds me a lot of filing a complaint with the EEOC. Cross-posted from Bilerico.com - Click here to read more...

Where to File an Employment Discrimination Lawsuit

When you experience discrimination at work, first stop should be HR, though you have to be careful about how you approach it. 

But what happens if HR doesn't solve the problem after a reasonable period of time? Your next stop is an employment discrimination lawsuit. My best advice for that is to find a lawyer who has experience in the area, and is going to charge you a fee you can afford, or, better yet, will take the case on a contingency, meaning no legal fee unless an award is given. You should keep in mind that a contingency fee is a business arrangement. That means that the lawyer who accepts a case under such an arrangement is betting that there will be an award, and that it will be enough to cover the time and office expenses spent on the case. This lawyer is generally not on a crusade for justice, except to the extent that it means getting you some compensation.

It is a good idea to contact legal organizations, like Lambda Legal, the ACLU, the Transgender Law Center, or the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, to see if they are interested in the case. Their resources are limited, however, so they only take on cases that have a good chance of success and fit within certain legal priorities that the organization considers most important for the community. They can take on only a fraction of the cases flooding into their offices. Even they, however, won't necessarily want to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Some cases are just better off being settled, because litigation is always a roll of the dice.

Cross-posted from Bilerico.com. Click here to read more...

Job Discrimination Complaint Pitfalls & Traps

You have had just about enough of this nonsense. Your work environment is positively hostile because of your sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression or whatnot. You've been the subject of jokes, of harassing comments, of prank phone calls, weird things put in your desk or locker, of uncomfortable touching or even punching, threats --veiled or not so veiled -- of physical harm and loss of your job. You have tried to ignore this, hoping that showing you're not rattled and taking the higher ground will make this go away.

 Should you file a complaint with HR? Well, you could, but then there is what happened to Robert Jordan.

"When the news broke in October 2002 that police in Montgomery County, Maryland, had captured two black men suspected of being the snipers who had randomly shot 13 individuals, killing 10, in separate incidents over a period of weeks in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, an IBM employee watching the news on television in one of IBM's Montgomery County offices exclaimed, 'They should put those two black monkeys in a cage with a bunch of black apes and let the apes fuck them.' A fellow employee, Robert Jordan, who is black, was in the room at the time and heard the exclamation. Jordan was offended and discussed the incident with two other coworkers, who told him that the employee had made similar comments before. Jordan then reported the incident to management. A month later Jordan was fired, purportedly because he was 'disruptive,' his position 'had come to an end,' and management personnel 'don't like you and you don't like them.'" Jordan v. Alternative Resources, et al., 458 F.3d 332 (4th Cir. 2006) (expletives undeleted).

 He lost his case.

 Cross-posted from Bilerico.com. Click here to read more...

The Employment Discrimination Lawsuit Blues

Let's say that your troglodyte co-workers call you "faggot" or "Ms. Thing" or "he" when you're a "she" or vice versa, or make some other neanderthal comments. And let's say you are not going to take that kind of treatment, and you want to enforce your rights to be treated with dignity under the law. What do you do?

 Federal law prohibits employment discrimination based on sex, which has been interpreted to mean gender identity or expression, as in transgender identity, or non-standard gender, as in gay stereotyping. If you work for a public employer, sexual orientation is covered by some federal courts under the U.S. Constitution. A number of state and city laws also prohibit employment discrimination on these bases. Most large companies also don't allow that kind of behavior and say so in their policies. But what does it mean to try to enforce these rights?

 I've recently reactivated my law licenses in New York and New Jersey, and undertaken a number of lawsuits for people who have requested my assistance as a lawyer. So I'm seeing a whole different side to things, beyond the academic theories I've been spending time with for the past decade. It's a jungle out there.

Cross-posted from Bilerico.com:  Click Here To Read More

Trans Activism 2013-style

It's been a long time since my last blog, and I am anxious about getting back in the saddle.  A lot has changed since I last blogged in September. At that time, the most important thing was getting pro-equality candidates elected, and we did that.  The re-election of President Obama was the best thing for equality, as was the election of our largest cadre of LGBT Members of the House of Representatives, including my own Sean Patrick Maloney in NY-18 (please like his Facebook page!), and the election of Senator Tammy Baldwin.

But it's not about legislation right now.  The government agencies and the courts are where it's at now. I have moved my activism to those arenas.  And it's time to start blogging again.    

It's been busy, but lately, blogging has been on my mind. It's not enough to go into our various little cubby holes and do our work.  It's important to tell each other what we're up to, providing encouragement to keep going in the face of life's obstacles, and also learning something about what the next challenges are, and where the action is likely to be.  For example, ENDA is so 2000s.  Yes, it will get passed at some point, and yes, we should still continue to ask for it.  But I'm not putting all my eggs in that basket right now, because the House is too dominated by conservatives to make it worthwhile.  Same thing with GENDA in New York State.

Cross-posted from Bilerico.com.  Click here to read more

Black respondents in Nat'l Transgender Discrimination Survey Fared Far Worse

Windy City Times - Injustice at Every Turn: Black respondents in Nat'l Transgender Discrimination Survey - 212: Black transgender and gender non-conforming people face some of the highest levels of discrimination of all transgender people according to a new analysis released today, Injustice at Every Turn: A Look at Black Respondents in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey.

This report by the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) is a supplement to the groundbreaking national study, Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which was published in February and revealed widespread discrimination experienced by transgender and gender non-conforming people across the board.

Discrimination was pervasive for the entire sample, but anti-transgender bias coupled with structural racism meant that transgender people of color experienced particularly devastating levels of discrimination, with Black respondents often faring worse than all others.