The Trump Administration Is Fine With Anti-LGBTQ+ Workplace Discrimination

By Mary Emily O’Hara


On Friday, August 23, the Trump administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing that sexual orientation should not be imagined a protected class and that employers should be allowed to fire American workers for being gay or bisexual. The previous Friday, the administration filed a similar brief arguing that transgender workers should not be protected from discrimination, either.


The Trump administration, represented by Solicitor General Noel Francisco, is gearing up for a serious battle over LGBTQ+ equality set to take place this October at the nation’s highest court. In April, the Supreme Court reported it would hear three major cases that analyse whether it should be legal or unlawful to fire workers because they are LGBTQ+. Two of the cases, Altitude Express v. Zarda and Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, involve gay boys who were fired from their respective jobs. The third case, R.G. &Amp; G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, requires a transgender woman named Aimee Stephens who was fired from her longtime job soon after informing her employer that she was transitioning.


all the workers argue that they should be protected under Title VII, the section of the federal Civil Rights Act that bans discrimination on the basis of sex, since they each were fired for not conforming to another person’s advice of how they should look or act. Basically, that indicates if your boss fires you because you’re a gentleman in a relationship with another man, although wouldn’t fire in case you were dating a woman, it’s a form of sex discrimination. However the Trump administration argues that the law was meant only to make sure that girls and males are treated similarly to each other, and that Congress never intended for it to protect people from sex stereotyping.


“The Trump administration’s position defies logic and normal sense,” Ria Tabacco Mar, a senior personnel attorney for the ACLU, mentioned in an email to MTV News. “They concede that employers might not directly penalize workers based on ‘gender norms,’ however assert that discriminating based on moral beliefs about sexual or marital relationships has ‘nothing to do with’ gender norms.”


According to previous courts and the Equal Employment Possibility Commission (EEOC), the Trump administration has it all wrong, as Lambda Legal senior counsel Gregory Nevins pointed out to MTV News. Trump’s Justice Department argued on Friday that Congress never intended for ‘sex’ to include sexual orientation any time it passed the law in 1964, saying in the Supreme Court brief that “the ordinary meaning of ‘sex’ is biologically male or female; it does not include sexual orientation.” This is a frequent refrain from the Trump administration, which has repeatedly asserted that the legal definition of sex should be limited to biological sex in a try to undo Obama-era rules protecting transgender people from gender discrimination. The New York Times first reported on the administration’s attempts to rewrite the definition in October 2018 any time it procured a memo by the Department of Health and Human Services that tried to deny the identities and lived experiences of trans and nonbinary people.


Nevertheless Nevins, who also runs Lambda Legal’s EEOC’s Employment Fairness Project, mentioned numerous courts have since determined that sexual orientation discrimination is a sort of sex discrimination.


“The bipartisan EEOC laid out its positions that Title VII covers discrimination against transgender workers in 2012, and heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, and gay workers in 2015,” Nevins told MTV News on Friday. “Those decisions have been noticed convincing by numerous courts since their issuance.”


Nevins mentioned Trump’s Justice Department first made its stance clear any time it comes to how civil rights law should be interpreted in 2017, once then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a lower court in the Zarda case that Title VII shouldn’t protect “homosexuals.” However no court has agreed with that interpretation — yet.


Trump has stacked the Supreme Court with two conservative justices since taking office, and there really is a chance that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch will tilt the court’s decision by the time it’s expected to rule on the LGBTQ+ workplace discrimination cases next June. Although before that happens, the court’s nine justices will have to read through thousands of pages of arguments. Members of Congress, the nation’s major psychological associations, the hugest American labor unions, and, naturally, most LGBTQ+ advocacy and civil rights groups have all submitted briefs supporting LGBTQ+ workers. Briefs were also filed by anti-LGBTQ+ groups like the National Agency for Marriage, along with by conservative Christians groups like the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association — which claims in its brief that protecting LGBTQ+ workers from being fired would leave ladies subject to assault in restrooms, a seemingly unrelated offer along with a claim frequently brought by anti-trans groups that remains unfounded by any information or evidence. Still, the dozens and dozens of briefs filed on both sides of the distribute show just how far-reaching the court’s final decision could be.


“Today’s filing is unmoored from generic legal principles,” Mar mentioned. “It is simply reverse engineered to reach the result the Trump administration wants: a America where it is correctly lawful to fire workers because they are lesbian, gay, or bisexual, or transgender.”


group in attempt to reach that objective, though, the Trump administration won’t just have to go up against a Democrat-led Congress; it also has to battle the federal EEOC, which officially determined in 2015 that gay and bisexual workers are protected from discrimination — and has filed discrimination complaints on their behalf countless times.


“We conclude that sexual orientation is inherently a ‘sex-based consideration,’ and an allegation of discrimination based on sexual orientation is necessarily an allegation of sex discrimination under Title VII,” the EEOC mentioned in its landmark 2015 decision. The corporation had already ruled in 2012 that transgender workers are protected by the ban on sex discrimination, and despite the Trump administration’s flailing attempts to roll back every trans civil rights protections in place, the EEOC is unlikely to reverse either of its positions that support LGBTQ+ workers.