LGBT issues thread (was Supreme Court to hear same-sex marriage cases)

[Alefroth]

I wouldn't have expected this to be a consequence of the Chevron ruling-

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/03/politics ... index.html

The Biden administration cannot enforce new anti-discrimination rules in health care for transgender Americans, a federal judge in Mississippi ruled Wednesday, citing a recent landmark Supreme Court ruling that weakened the power of federal agencies.

The preliminary injunction from US District Judge Louis Guirola comes just two days before the new protections were set to take effect. The George W. Bush appointee said his block on the federal protections will apply nationwide.

I'm sure that was teed up and ready to go, waiting on Chevron. Expected more unexpected rulings like this.

Such as these- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... eme-court/

[GreenGoo]

Iran is a helluva role model.

[Smoove_B]

Not sure if we should pin this thread or start a dedicated one on bathrooms, but if you were betting on OHIO, collect your prize:

Republicans in the Ohio Senate have passed a bill to make changes to the state’s College Credit Plus program. The bill was approved with an added requirement that trans students use bathrooms that match the gender on their birth certificates.

Senate Bill 104 is headed to Gov. Mike DeWine after this vote, which happened in the first legislative session following the election. DeWine suggested earlier this year that he’s likely to sign it.

The bill makes operational changes in the College Credit Plus program, which allows students in grades 7-12 to receive high school and college credit. When SB 104 passed the House in a late night session in June, Republicans added a provision that requires primary and secondary education – both public and private schools – to designate bathrooms and facilities for the exclusive use of one gender.

“It revolves around the safety, security, and I think common sense,” said Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), one of the two sponsors of the bill in the Senate’s floor debate. “It protects our children and grandchildren in private spaces where they are most vulnerable. It is us using our legislative authority to ensure schools are, in fact, safe environments. After all, bathrooms, showers, changing rooms should all be safe places for our students.”

Note:

Eleven states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah – have some form of a bathroom ban. All of those states, along with Ohio, voted Republican in last week’s election.

It's going to get worse.

[Unagi]

[Alefroth]

Hopefully blue state governments and companies will stop doing business in those states.

[Blackhawk]

[GreenGoo]

After all, bathrooms, showers, changing rooms should all be safe places for our students.”

But not our trans students, of course. Fuck those students. Hard.

Also, I recognize the character and thus the show, but not the scene.

Ah. The list. Got it.

[Blackhawk]

But not our trans students, of course. Fuck those students. Hard.

Nonsense. There won't be any trans students anymore once we get rid of vaccines, fluoride, 'toxins' in food, serve raw milk in little cartons in the cafeteria, and make prayer mandatory.

[Smoove_B]

Oh, hey look at that:

Rep. Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, said on Monday that she will be introducing a measure to ban transgender women from using biological women’s restrooms at the U.S. Capitol.

Her announcement comes as Rep.-elect Sarah McBride prepares to take office as the first transgender person elected to Congress.

In her own words:

"The sanctity of protecting women and standing up against the Left’s systematic erasure of biological women starts here in the nation’s Capitol,” Mace wrote in a statement.

“We are standing up for women, protecting their spaces, and restoring a bit of sanity to Capitol Hill," the statement continued.

Referencing the controversial acronym for a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, Mace also wrote, "The Left screams TERF politics, we call it putting women first.”

[Daehawk]

I call it being assholes.

[LawBeefaroni]

They feel safe on the floor with Matt Gaetz but they won't in a bathroom with Sarah McBride? Do not like their risk analysis.

[Max Peck]

I don't think that Mace understands that she'd have to be a feminist before anyone would call her a TERF. It's built right into the label.

[Max Peck]

They feel safe on the floor with Matt Gaetz but they won't in a bathroom with Sarah McBride? Do not like their risk analysis.

To be fair, if you're young enough for Gaetz then you're not old enough to run for office.

[Smoove_B]

As expected:

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Wednesday he is banning transgender individuals from accessing bathrooms on the House side of the Capitol complex that correspond to their gender identity.

Why it matters: The move comes in response to an effort by GOP firebrands to restrict Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.), who is set to be the first transgender member of Congress, from using women's restrooms.

What he's saying: "All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings (like restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms) are reserved only for individuals of that biological sex," Johnson said in a statement.

Johnson told reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday: "Like all policies, it's enforceable. We have single-sex facilities for a reason. Women deserve women's only spaces."

"We're not anti-anyone. We're pro-woman. I think it's an important policy for us to continue. It's always been, I guess, an unwritten policy, but now it's in writing," he added.

The legislation that Nancy Mace has floated would extend this to all federal property. So as a reminder, must make sure no one is ever forced to wear masks on federal property, but bathroom use? We are now the bathroom police.

I know for some this isn't even on their radar, but unless the Democrats push back on this aggressively, it's going to get worse. I know there's so much stuff happening right now and (currently) this is about ~1% of the population and (apparently) a single member in Congress but the implications with doing nothing are rather serious.

[LawBeefaroni]

I assume unisex facilities are off the table?

[Zarathud]

Congress has dealt with bathroom issues before. When women were first elected. Men were asshats back then too.

[Smoove_B]

I assume unisex facilities are off the table?

I had no idea this was a thing in 1976:

By 1976, 34 states had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. Just four more states needed to approve the amendment that would guarantee simply that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

But opponents of the proposed Constitutional amendment started warning of dire consequences, including women being drafted into the military and everyone being forced to use unisex public restrooms.

The ERA never became part of the Constitution.

DIRE CONSEQUENCES!!! Everything old is new again.

We have a group of people that don't believe in bathroom access but we're supposed to have deep, meaningful discussions with them about improving American society and reducing our negative impact locally and globally as a species? Our society is being dragged down by cultural and social troglodytes and we're collectively worse off for it.

EDIT: More here:

Once gender equality had been guaranteed under the Constitution, Schlafly cautioned, no laws could prevent men from entering women’s bathrooms. Public restrooms could become a dangerous trap.

ERA advocates called her bathroom talk ridiculous. “There's been a lot of distortions about the Equal Rights Amendment,” said President Jimmy Carter. “It doesn't say anything about bathrooms.” But Schlafly’s attack was shrewd, pulling together the different strands of bathroom panics that had excited Americans for decades. Slyly drawing on the loaded language of the prior decade, Schlafly and her allies warned that ERA would “integrate public toilets.” Since most Southern states had yet to vote on the ERA, language that suggested it would follow the recent racial integration of public restrooms with sex integration ensured a spirited Southern opposition to the amendment.

Tapping into the oldest concerns about women’s public restrooms, a pamphlet from Schlafly’s powerful STOP ERA organization claimed that women would lose their “right to privacy based on sex” in “public restrooms and other public facilities.” The ERA, said former Governor Ronald Reagan, could “degrade and defeminize women by forcing them to mingle with men in close, intimate quarters.” As it always had, the notion of privacy carried deeper meanings of safety and protection, which Schlafly now warned would be eliminated. The ERA, its opponents charged, would grant men, including rapists and pedophiles, equal access to women’s restrooms.

I guess things would just be so much easier without gender equality. Good thing there isn't a party that has seemingly made that a plank in their platform.

[Alefroth]

I went to Canada during election week and used a big unisex bathroom on Granville Island. The sink area was common and there were about 20 private stalls. It was so nice and really felt like grown-ups were in charge.

[Max Peck]

I went to Canada ... It was so nice and really felt like grown-ups were in charge.

Until the next federal election, anyway. As time goes by it feels like the Conservatives are becoming more and more like the GOP.

[Alefroth]

I went to Canada ... It was so nice and really felt like grown-ups were in charge.

Until the next federal election, anyway. As time goes by it feels like the Conservatives are becoming more and more like the GOP.

How soon can that happen? I know it has to happen by 10.25.25, but can it be much sooner?

[Max Peck]

I went to Canada ... It was so nice and really felt like grown-ups were in charge.

Until the next federal election, anyway. As time goes by it feels like the Conservatives are becoming more and more like the GOP.

How soon can that happen? I know it has to happen by 10.25.25, but can it be much sooner?

It's a minority government, so it can happen any time that someone is able to engineer a successful vote of no confidence in parliament, or any time the PM decides to call an early election (if he's so deep into denial that he thinks he could win).

[GreenGoo]

I went to Canada ... It was so nice and really felt like grown-ups were in charge.

Until the next federal election, anyway. As time goes by it feels like the Conservatives are becoming more and more like the GOP.

I know, right? It's like they have forgotten what conservative means so they are just copying whoever is nearby. It's maddening.

[Smoove_B]

In case you weren't feeling enough dread, here's what's on tap for this Wednesday:

In 2016, when Tennessee OBGYN Susan Lacy learned she would be providing gender-affirming care to transgender patients in her new job at a reproductive health clinic in Memphis, she felt out of her depth. But it didn’t take long to realize that hormone treatments for trans folks weren’t so different from those she’d been providing for years to cisgender patients. She already knew how to use pills, patches, gels, and injections, with their different formulations and side effects, to reduce menopausal night sweats, hot flashes, and brain fog. Patients who took hormones for gender dysphoria told her they felt a similar sense of relief. “It didn’t matter about socioeconomics, age, race, feminizing or masculinizing hormone therapy,” Lacy says. Often the first reaction was, “I finally feel like I can think straight.”

Now a gynecologist in solo practice, Lacy has more than 300 adult trans patients. At one time, her patient list also included trans teenagers with the consent of their parents. But last year, Tennessee prohibited the prescription of certain medications to minors to treat the distress many trans people feel when their bodies do not align with their gender identity. Under the law, cisgender kids could keep receiving the meds: puberty blockers for those who start puberty too early, for instance, or testosterone or estrogen for teens who enter puberty late. But if the purpose was to treat gender dysphoria, those same medications were forbidden.


On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a landmark lawsuit challenging the Tennessee ban, brought by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, Lacy, and three trans minors and their families. United States v. Skrmetti is one of the biggest cases of the term and the first major trans-rights case to be heard by the court since far-right lawmakers and policy groups launched a coordinated campaign inundating statehouses with hundreds of anti-trans bills a few years ago. Legal experts say the Skrmetti case could shape the landscape for trans rights for years to come, while testing how far the Court’s conservative supermajority is willing to extend its 2022 decision allowing states to ban abortion: Will the justices give states free reign to outlaw yet another form of healthcare?

[Isgrimnur]

Is it going to be up for a decision before the change in the Oval Office that ends up with the DOJ just dropping the case?

[Smoove_B]

I'm looking for a summary, but from what I can ascertain based on live-skeets, the usual suspects on the Court are seemingly there to argue whether or not it's effective or acceptable to provide gender affirming care to teenagers whereas Kagan is trying to get them to focus on whether or not withholding care is discriminatory...like you'd expect the Supreme Court to consider.

So no, it's not going great.

[El Guapo]

Is it going to be up for a decision before the change in the Oval Office that ends up with the DOJ just dropping the case?

I wonder whether that might be preferable to this SCOTUS issuing a ruling?

[Smoove_B]

I wonder whether that might be preferable to this SCOTUS issuing a ruling?

Considering Alito is quoting himself in arguments this morning from the Dobbs case to help his argument as to why care shouldn't be provided, I'm guessing...no?

[LawBeefaroni]

Oral arguments were heard on December 4, 2024. ACLU attorney Chase Strangio argued for the plaintiffs, becoming the first known transgender person to make oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States.

At least there's that?

[Smoove_B]

Here's a summary of yesterday's hearing:

When conservatives want to deny rights to whichever group is asking to be given the same constitutional protections that cishetero white men have enjoyed since 1787, they have a number of tricks to get around Constitutional prohibitions against discrimination and legalize bigotry.

Their most common trick is to argue that the discriminatory law at issue is not really discriminatory. Their most insidious trick is to question whether the group appealing for basic rights and justice exists as a cognizable group in the first place, and, if they deem they do not, the Republicans reject the possibility that they can be discriminated against as a threshold constitutional issue.

The trans community received both ends of these demeaning sticks during oral arguments.

In short:

Indeed, Rice gave away the whole game (and the likely argument the justices will make, come June) near the end of the hearing when he argued that, in bringing the case, the trans plaintiffs are asking for a “substantive right to non-conformity.” It was a gross yet revealing admission of his viewpoint: Tennessee should provide kids with hormone treatment if, and only if, they conform to Tennessee’s vision of cisgendered adolescence, but they won’t if the child doesn’t.

The argument against non-conformity is all the anti-trans arguments ever boil down to: Republicans, MAGA lawmakers, and conservative Supreme Court justices hate people who are different. This time, the bigots on the Supreme Court didn’t even try that hard to hide their antipathy to difference behind legal jargon. They just pretended that people who are different don’t really exist.

[Blackhawk]

Conformity is happiness. Be a good citizen.

[LawBeefaroni]

Conformity is happiness. Be a good citizen.

They don't want outliers to conform, they want to deny them opportunity.

[El Guapo]

Yeah, before SCOTUS was willing to extend rights to gay people they treated it as an activity that one might choose to engage in or not. And we wouldn't recognize a constitutional right to play tennis (for example), right?

[Smoove_B]

It's feeling like maybe Trump being re-elected isn't that big of a mystery as the House just passed a defense funding bill that contained anti-trans elements:

“Blanketly denying health care to people who need it — just because of a biased notion against transgender people — is wrong,” Smith said in a statement Tuesday. “The inclusion of this harmful provision puts the lives of children at risk and may force thousands of service members to make the choice of continuing their military service or leaving to ensure their child can get the health care they need.”

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., personally had pushed for the controversial provision to be included in the package. In his statement, Smith accused Johnson of fighting for the ban in order to appease conservatives in his conference ahead of the Jan. 3 vote to keep him as speaker for another two years.

...

The provision in question specifically applies to Tricare, the military’s health care program and would prohibit “medical treatment for military dependents under the age of 18 who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria.”

It passed 281 - 140 with 80 Democrats voting in support.

[Punisher]

Conformity is happiness. Be a good citizen.

Would you kindly conform.