ENDA fallout constricts Title VII claims

December 27, 2007 in Social Justice by Rebecca | 2 comments

First, the good news. As reported at the CCH Internet Research Network,

A federal district court in the District of Columbia concluded that a male-to-female- transsexual job applicant could proceed with her Title VII sex bias claim against the Library of Congress, which allegedly withdrew its job offer for a terrorism research analyst position with the Congressional Research Service after the applicant disclosed that she was under a doctor’s treatment for gender dysphoria and would be transitioning to a female before beginning work with the agency.

That is great news as it helps to shore up job protections for transgender people.

Now the not so good news. Earlier we had posted alot about ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This act was to have employment protections for all of us in the GLBTIQ alphabet. However, the trasngender piece was pulled out in order to create a bill that had better chances of passing in Congress. That made alot of us pretty unhappy. But it appears that removing the transgender protections from ENDA may have even more far reaching consequences. Again, as reported in the same article at CCH Internet Research Network,

the court also noted that the House recently passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (H.R. 3685), which would ban discrimination only on the basis of sexual orientation, not gender identity, suggesting that as a result, the applicant’s definition of sex under Title VII might be too expansive.

The result may be that Title VII cannot be used in a way that allows protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender because ENDA had the transgender portion removed.

  1. Brenda Smith’s avatar

    Brenda Smith on December 29, 2007 at 12:26 pm

    This can get ugly pretty quickly, I think.

    I was greatly disappointed when our “representatives” in Congress decided to remove the coverage for trans-folk from ENDA. It only opens the door for people who believe transgender issues to be completely “fetish” in origin.

    This also will cause people to re-examine who they are, and how they think of themselves. For example, though the world sees a male, I think of myself as a woman. I also consider myself hetero (when DRAB) or something very close to Lesbian (when I’m able to express myself as a woman). If I were to come out on the job and get fired, would that be a violation of the law, because I would be a Lesbian-in-the-making? From what I have read, I would think it would not, simply because the workplace could posit that who I am is defined by what is (or is not) between my legs.

    It is this whole subject that has caused my own journal to be rather “dark”.

    Society as a whole really needs to get past this twisted, perverted need it has to persecute people just because they are “different”.

  2. Rebecca’s avatar

    Rebecca on December 30, 2007 at 11:17 am

    Hi Brenda:

    Thank you for your very important insights in your comments. The ENDA fallout, like in all things complex, is much larger than HRC or Barney Frank could have imagined.