Why the Transgendered Need Civil Rights Protections

By NORM KENT

The suicide this past weekend of Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner, who for the last few years wrote under the byline of Christine Daniels, leaves me today with a desire to rant and rave over an insane anomaly in American human rights protections.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects all individuals against employment discrimination on the basis of sex as well as age, race, color, national origin, and religion. Many states go further and offer protection against discrimination because of physical or emotional disabilities, marital status, and even pregnancy discrimination.

More and more communities we know have added sexual orientation to the fold, but it seems the new Scarlett letter tearing apart American communities is a debate over whether to protect “gender identity” under civil rights statutes.

Why would anyone fight this? Discrimination is morally wrong and ought to be demonstratively illegal in any form. The very purpose of passing laws against discrimination is to prevent wrongful acts which deny equal opportunities to individuals similarly situated. If we are all presumptively equal under the law, it is correspondingly presumptively illegal if we are treated differently for no rhyme or reason.....

....If it is wrong to discriminate against an individual, that discrimination is inappropriate whether the person you are interacting with is male or female, straight or gay, black or white. Or Transsexual, metrosexual, bisexual, homosexual, or asexual. As long as they are not telling you to drop your pants, get over it.

Even the gay and lesbian community has moved too slowly in accepting the rights of transgendered persons. Within the gay rights movement, there was for too long silent resistance that we were pushing the envelope too far. Timid activists suggested we were ‘rocking the boat.’ Hell, why not? It needed new pilots.....

....Legislators, not voters, need to codify equal rights protections, and they do not need popular approval to do so. What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular. The same way a legislator would vote to strike down a law stating only Caucasians can sit on the front of a bus so too must they strike down a policy that allows a government agency to fire an employee because they do not approve of a transsexual. That person’s status is beyond the scope of their approval.....

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