NYS and especially NYC have already recognized trans-discrimination. High courts have held repeatedly that we deserve respect and equal protection under the law (however much of a farce the reality of that phrase might be).

I am a transsexual man (female to male) who is not in favour of this new law. Given that GENDA would not grant any additional protections to us, there is no point. Some say it would help in creating dialogue, or making a statement, by showing that the state feels a certain way — but the state has already shown that more times than I can count. Further, I feel that legislation for such a law would only serve to open a dialogue that would allow transphobes to say hurtful things in public settings and force people to listen to them.

I can’t expand much upon what Holly said about sentence enhancements (although thank you for the link– I’m a New Yorker, and I hadn’t heard that there was a hate crimes element to GENDA). Sentence enhancements aside, hate crimes legislation has the potential to be useful when allows the federal government to investigate and prosecute crimes ignored (or committed) by local authorities. This still requires the existence of federal authorities that are actually willing to enforce the law, though.

As for employment non-discrimination, I’ve been fired for a job because I was trans, and it was in a jurisdiction with trans-inclusive non-discrimination ordinance. I’ve also had some pretty iffy experiences on the job market. However, as Thomas suggests, it’s next to impossible to enforce non-discrimination ordinances, particularly given privileged classes’ willingness to not understand discrimination. All the trans folks I’ve talked to agreed with my assessment of my situation, but I don’t have the smoking gun that a cissexist legal system requires. I’m not aware of a single case where a trans person has successfully used trans-inclusive non-discrimination statutes to address employment discrimination (there’s a very spotty record with Title VII).

Employment non-discrimination legislation is worth fighting for because it’s good for the law to be ethical. It’s good to see the government attempt to discourage discrimination. However, it’s nuts to think that GENDA will change much. Just as there are massive inequalities despite the existence of gender and race as protected classes, GENDA will not end discrimination against trans people. What we really need is a sea change in society. Maybe having the governments recognizing the unjust employment situation that trans people face will be a teeny-tiny step in this direction. While all the dudez in Albany are arguing about this, it’d be good to see folks do things that actually do have a difference in the lives of trans people (say, continuing to fight for access to health care, social services, housing, and an end to state-sponsored violence against us).

i guess my question is, how do we, as a society, express that committing a hate crime against a marginalized person is unacceptable? it’s not that i think the legislation is the only way, but that i just don’t know how else to express it.

Well, one answer is to support hate crimes legislation that does not include sentence enhancements. I know that one of the main groups fighting for the federal ENDA and hate crimes laws to include trans people, NCTE, has been talking for a while about how they wanted versions that did not involve sentence enhancement, for the reasons we’ve been talking about. They actually had someone on a fellowship, if I’m remembering correctly, who did a lot of very eye-opening research about hate crime laws and their effectiveness (or lack thereof). However, I don’t know what ended up happening with federal hate crimes laws, because I don’t totally understand how they’re tied into sentence enhancement and whether that happens automatically for all “protected classes.” It’s kind of a tangle of laws. It’s possible to recognize a crime as being particularly bad without increasing prison sentences — which honestly, does very little to help anyone, may actually increase repeated crimes, doesn’t deter at all, etc. What NCTE was proposing, if I recall correctly, was some sort of package that provided funding for increased tracking, investigation, and follow-up on crimes classified as hate crimes — trying to bolster the responsibility of law enforcement for dealing with hate crimes, but not making the “hammer of the law” even bigger.

if such legislation were (re)written so the sentencing enhancements would be applied only if a person with a privilege made a hate-based attack against a person without that privilege (e.g. a white person could get a sentence enhancement from attacking a poc, but not the other way around), do you think that would help? i could still see scenarios where law enforcement could worm their way past that one.

I’m sure that would probably help people from being charged with “anti-heterosexual” hate crimes (yes, it happens every year, across the country) and keep hate crimes laws from being used so disproportionately against people of color, for instance. But given our society’s current understanding of privilege and prejudice and racism — I can’t possibly see a legislature being able to pass that. It would be like all the arguments about affirmative action, on steroids, to try and assert that hate crimes are prejudice + institutional & social power, and not just prejudice. In fact, I’m sure that the “equal” nature of hate crimes (which translates into racist enforcement in reality) is part of how most of these laws got passed in the first place. Some republicans probably voted for them, as well as moderate & conservative democrats. Also, what Cara said. This kind of law is kind of problematic to begin with, especially when it has to do with dishing out punitive measures unequally — which is what happens anyway, even when you try to make it “equal.”

What I’m suggesting is that if, for example, discrimination against women is civilly actionable, it hands the people around the conference table whose heads are in the right place a weapon. They can say, “that sounds like you have a problem with her because she’s a woman, and you can’t do that, and you can’t even say that, because that will get us sued.”

And of course this is really smart and really is a good thing for people to be able to say in a work environment where decisions (say, hiring decisions) are being made. It’s part of what I meant by, changing the ethical framework of what’s considered “right and wrong.” Unfortunately, I think what happens is that company cultures (ones that aren’t purely run by a silencing old-boy network) just become more tight-lipped. In other words, people will tell a privileged asshole shooting his mouth off that “uh hey… you can’t say that, we could get sued” but that just drives the same behaviors underground, between people who won’t “rat” or who can exercise power over each other, etc. It may be one of those things that can’t be solved purely through legal punishment; of course mechanisms evolve to protect companies and corporations from legal punishment!

Another way to put it: the words “gender expression,” particularly, have nothing to do with identity, as I understand it. Nobody identifies as “having a gender expression.” That term is an attempt to describe something that everyone does have: a set of decisions and qualities that, when interpreted in a social setting, constitute their position within the system of gender. (Which we may very well call out as an artificial and oppressive system, but it’s one that exists and is nigh impossible to simply escape from without being a hermit.) Those two words have been associated with trans people, since a lot of trans people are discriminated against for their gender expression (although many are not) — but many people who aren’t trans are ALSO discriminated against due to gender expression. So if we’re using the term correctly, it shouldn’t matter whether you identify closely with the term “gender expression” or not; it’s not a term of identity, it’s a descriptor of the way a social phenomenon works. You can propose calling it something else if you want and if you think it would be more accurate, but it’s not exactly something you can “opt out of,” unfortunately. (As much as I’d like to be able to opt out of gender in general.)

yeah, emma, let’s throw trans people under the bus so that some one-in-a-hundred-billion scenario you’ve cooked up in your head won’t happen. better to let thousands of trans people freeze in the dark that let one cis person feel a threat to their speshulness, right?

Typically these bills, unlike other anti-discrimination laws, protect behavior, i.e. “gender expression”, rather than classes of people, i.e. women, gays/lesbians, transgendered. It creates a catch-22 for women and gays/lesbians who may NOT consider anything they do or are as part of some “gender expression” or “gender identity”. But, because of the overbroad writing of these statutes, there’s a very real possiblity that women and gays/lesbians will be forced to seek protection under laws that don’t apply to them, like these statutes, instead of laws that do apply to them, like Title VII. Don’t support these statutes as they will do more harm than good in the long run.