Trump Administration: Sex Discrimination Does Not Include Gender Identity – IOTW Report

Trump Administration: Sex Discrimination Does Not Include Gender Identity

Epoch Times:

WASHINGTON—Civil rights laws don’t protect transgenderemployees from being fired because of their gender identity, the Trump administration argued in a new filing with the Supreme Court.

The legal brief was filed Aug. 16 in R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, a lawsuit involving a transgender person, Aimee Stephens, formerly known as Anthony Stephens, who was fired by a Michigan funeral home.

In 2013, Stephens declared a desire to begin dressing as a woman while at work and was fired by Thomas Rost, the Christian owner of the business, who said he was merely upholding a sex-appropriate dress code. Rost made it clear he wouldn’t have fired Stephens for dressing as a woman outside of work. Stephens refused to comply with the sartorial rule and turned down an offer of severance pay.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sued on Stephens’s behalf and lost at the trial level, but then prevailed in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Citing a 1989 Supreme Court precedent known as Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the appeals court found that Stephens was fired unlawfully for failing “to conform to sex stereotypes.”

While the case was working its way through the judicial system, in October 2017, the Trump administration announced that going forward the Department of Justice would take the position that the law’s “prohibition on sex discrimination encompasses discrimination between men and women but does not encompass discrimination based on gender identity per se.”

The decision undid a December 2014 directive issued by the Obama administration that took the opposite position.
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10 Comments on Trump Administration: Sex Discrimination Does Not Include Gender Identity

  1. Agree. If you are hired as a male employee that is how I’d expect you to present at work. Over the last few years the transexuals I’ve seen in public don’t even present as one gender over the other. Usually it is some bizarre mishmash, a biological male with longer unkept hair, lipstick, pealing nail polish carrying some kind of hideous purse no real woman would be caught dead with wearing some odd hybrid of male/female clothing including a skirt over pants and hiking boots. I don’t care what you do on your own time but when you represent someone’s business they have a right to expect you to present the way you interviewed and were hired.

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  2. I was just thinking about this in general earlier this morning. When we talk about dogs and cats they are male and female, and their sex doesn’t change. Nobody disputes this. We know that there are certain animal species that can change sex, or which are more likely to be male if the environment is warmer, etc. That is science.
    And when it comes to humans, like dogs and cats they are born male or female. Surgeries can be done, hormones taken, but scientifically speaking we are still the sex we are born with. (Yes, there is a very small percentage who have chromosomes that don’t exactly fit male/female, as is the case with all species)
    The science of psychology says that people can have a variety of mental issues, including things like believing your arm is not there or that you are not the sex that you actually are. It also says that is a mental issue and not a physical one. To say otherwise is in fact to harm that person who has mental issues which require proper treatment.

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  3. LCD @ 12:41,

    Exactly right. I have often likened it to anorexia. It is a sad and difficult mental issue to treat. The best treatments are often failures for the patient.

    It seems these issues both begin with a disappointment with who you are, and are difficult for others to aid.

    Because one of them involves sex, though, we have been told it is normal, and OK, and “just do it!”. Started in the 60’s and continues to this day to the destruction of many lives.

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  4. Doesn’t anyone at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission even bother doing a smell test on these complaints? Maybe it’s time to have a look at the way they operate and determine whether a tribunal (made up not of Commission staff but of skilled and educated outsiders) to determine the validity and probability of success of each case before the EEOC throws it’s full weight behind it. One look at a case where an employee after knowing full well what the dress guidelines suddenly decided to dress inappropriately at a place where such behavior is grossly offensive (a funeral home) and likely to cause undue mental anguish among clients.

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  5. Well, apparently gender identity can change from day to day, hour to hour. Once you allow them to start that crap, you’ll never know what’s going to walk through the door in the morning.

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