Coronavirus – Day #93

Today has mostly been spent putting together this week’s radio show. I have a great interview with Rebecca Manson Jones, the Health Spokesperson for the Women’s Equality Party, that I’m eager to share with you. We talked about the care industry, how it is now more vital than ever to the economy, and how government still doesn’t value it, or the people who work in it.

In the news the anti-trans lobby is busily reconfiguring its arguments to explain how rights, that only last week they were still insisting trans people didn’t have, are now an urgent and present danger that must be removed.

But there is good news. The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS to its friends) has ruled that discrimination in employment against LGBT+ people is against the law. That in itself is remarkable. Everyone I know was expecting us to lose that fight. But the way in which the judgement was framed is truly astonishing.

It has long been an argument of the anti-trans lobby that the existence of trans people infringes on the sex-based rights of cisgender women. That is, they claim that there are only two sexes: male and female, and that allowing people to cross from one to the other, or exist outside them, is a direct danger to cisgender women and an infringement of their civil rights.

The SCOTUS judgement, in contrast, accepts that sex/gender is a social construct, and that people may express sex/gender in a variety of ways. (It doesn’t actual use the word “gender”, probably because the more conservative judges would have had a heart attack if forced to utter it, but the word is clearly meant by what they say.) The judgement argues that discrimination against LGBT+ folks happens because we fail to perform sex/gender in narrowly defined ways, but that Title VII, the US law which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sex, must protect all forms of sex/gender, not just cis straight male and cis straight female.

And this judgement was carried 6-3, despite the *Unpresident stacking the court with his personal appointees.

I am gobsmacked and delighted. Now I am going to bed, and hoping that I don’t wake up and find it was all a dream.