The YouTube videos above are there to put a face on transpeople. But this isn’t accurate because the people in the videos are young, white (appearing), and can all pass as the gender they have become. They probably don’t face much discrimination because they are invisible to the rest of the world. They can choose to blend in, unnoticed.
What about those who identify as trans but don’t pass? What about the men who become women but still “look” masculine and the women who transition that look like girls in boys clothes? What about those people who can’t go “stealth?” Stealth is a word trans people use for those who can pass in general society unrecognized as being trans. Sort of how Clarence Thomas goes through life without realizing he’s black but on a larger scale.
Those people frequently face discrimination when looking for employment. In today’s job market where it seems companies are looking for excuses not to hire “sticking out” and “being different” could mean destitution, poverty. It takes a lot of balls for a person who doesn’t easily blend to put on a dress everyday and go look for a job make that a suit and tie if you ” look” female. But it shouldn’t take balls. ?Franklin Delano Roosevelt our greatest President said in his famous speech, The Second Bill of Rights that Americans should have:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation
This is what Americans believe. But it is not what we get. Especially if you are a trans person.
BuzzFeed reported on the Obama administration, Playing Politics with LGBT Workers Rights?,?where they quoted Labor Secretary Thomas Perez on the Senate passing ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would protect the right to work for GLBT people.
?The arc of the moral universe bent a little more toward justice today. Protecting the workplace rights of LGBT workers is a moral imperative that is long overdue.
What Secretary Perez didn’t address however was that the Obama administration is one of the obstacles preventing the “curve toward justice.” In April 2012 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decided that Mia Macy was protected from?sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ms Macy is a trans-woman. It was expected that the Labor Department and the President would issue orders letting government contractors what the rules where and that trans discrimination would no longer be tolerated. Those rules, or the order from the President, have not come.
So BuzzFeed asked Secretary Perez’s office this question after his statement praising the Senate:
Has the Secretary or anyone in the Department taken any action to ensure that OFCCP’s (Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs) enforcement of Executive Order 11246 includes transgender protections in its enforcement of the prohibition of sex discrimination in the order? If not, what are the limits of the Secretary’s understanding of action to be taken in response to a moral imperative?
In short, BuzzFeed called out the administration on saying one thing and doing another. It gets worse.
Tico Almeida a House counsel who worked on ENDA said,
I am told that the Labor Department leadership has been severely controlled by the senior White House staff, which I’m told has forbidden Labor officials from formally adopting the Macy decision.
So I guess the “moral curve” is having to bend its way around the Obama administration?
Edited/Published by: SB
