Checkpoint: LGBTQ+ Community Under Attack In Trump's America
David McNew / Stringer
2020 has, thus far, been a year marred by events going from bad to worse. From threats of World War III to the COVID-19 pandemic, from Australia catching fire to America being invaded by murder hornets, good news has been hard to come by over the last six months. Which makes the recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, declaring that existing federal law protects members of the LGBTQ+ community from discrimination in employment, all the more amazing.
On June 15, the SCOTUS said that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate because of a person's sex, also covers sexual orientation and transgender status. The Justice Department under the Trump administration had attempted to argue that the law did not cover gay and transgender people, stating “The ordinary meaning of 'sex' is biologically make or female; it does not include sexual orientation”. The ruling is a huge boost to LGBTQ+ rights at a time when those rights are under a seemingly constant assault.
According to the FBI, nearly 20% of hate crimes in the U.S. in 2018 were directed towards LGBTQ+ people. A report released on June 12 this year by the Human Rights Campaign, Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, Giffords Law Center and Equality Florida shows that over 10,000 hate crimes against gay or transgender Americans every year involve a gun, and that in 2019 the U.S. saw a 43% increase in the formation of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.
Discrimination against gay people can also be seen in the horrific practice of ‘conversion therapy’. Despite the fact that the consensus among the medical community is that homosexuality is not a disease nor can sexual orientation be changed, too many people reject scientific evidence, usually on religious grounds. Conversion Therapy is psychological, and sometimes physical, torture aimed at changing a person, often a minor, in ways they cannot be changed. As of this year, 29 U.S. States and 4 U.S. territories have no laws against the practice.
This June marks the fourth anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting. In 2016 Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old security guard, opened fire inside the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others. It was one of the worst attacks on the LGBTQ+ community in America’s history, and at the time it was the country’s worst mass shooting.
Aside from arguing against gay and transgender people’s rights in employment, the Trump administration has also chosen the anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub massacre to announce a rollback of an Obama-era regulation prohibiting discrimination in health care against patients who are transgender. Even some Republicans have come out against the move, including Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins.
The decision undermines the health and safety of trans individuals across the U.S., and absolves medical practitioners of their responsibility to treat all their patients equally and allows them to let their personal opinions affect another human being’s healthcare. To discriminate against anyone within a medical practice is beyond immoral and unethical. Trump critics claims that these two words sum up the President’s attitude to the LGBTQ+ community.
Last year the Trump administration banned transgender individuals from serving in the military. The policy allows enlisted trans service members to continue serving as their preferred gender, however any currently serving troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria after April 2019 must serve according to their sex as assigned at birth and are prohibited from seeking transition-related care. Prospective recruits who have received a gender dysphoria diagnosis are barred from enlisting or enrolling in military academies. The decision sparked numerous condemnations and legal challenges from human rights groups.
Across the Atlantic, trans people are also under attack from a much more surprising source. J.K. Rowling, the renowned author of the Harry Potter series, has written a self-published article denouncing the trans rights movement. She claims that transgenderism is erasing rights earned by women and gay people. She also claims that confused young people are being forced to transition. Her article has prompted many of the young stars made famous by the Harry Potter movies, such as Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, to condemn her stance and give their support to the trans community.
Rowling is what has become known as a ‘TERF’, a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. She justifies her transphobia behind a thin veil of feminism, insisting that trans rights are a threat to the gains feminism has made for women in society. Trump, on the other hand, is not a TERF. That would require him to at least pretend to be a feminist first. Critics say the President’s transphobia comes from a place of prejudice: his own and that of the Evangelical voter base he relies on.
However, the recent Black Lives Matter protests across the country, in the face of Trump’s intersectional bigotry, have taken on a new dimension. In Brooklyn on June 14, thousands of people turned out for a Black Trans Lives Matter march, recognizing that black trans people suffer at the hands of the police and other institutions of structural discrimination at an even greater rate than the general black community. This level of intersectional solidarity is an important step in defeating Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ+ people, and transgender people in particular.
Things will not get better for the LGBTQ+ community in America until Trump, and his hardline Christian Vice President Mike Pence, are voted out of office. He has argued against protecting them from discrimination in employment, put bans on their service in the military, taken away their protections in healthcare and done nothing to outlaw the horrific practice of conversion therapy. If given another term in office, the list of transgressions by this administration against gay and transgender Americans will only grow.
The President has tweeted several times this year: “TRANSITION TO GREATNESS!”.
For LGBTQ+ Americans, that means getting Trump out of the White House.