Washington, D.C. — Following the disclosure to The New York Times of a Trump administration memo taking a radical position on the interpretation of sex discrimination, which will undermine the rights of transgender people and break with years of jurisprudence on the application of sex discrimination law to protect this community, Laura E. Durso, vice president of the LGBT Research and Communications Project, released the following statement:
This memo lays plain that the Trump-Pence administration refuses to see transgender people as people and that they will ignore the law and science to advance their discriminatory agenda. If put into place, this strategy will have deep impacts well beyond education, undermining protections in health care, employment, and other areas, effectively making it unsafe for transgender people everywhere.
While guidance is historically used to ensure agency practices are in line with the law, the Trump-Pence administration is using guidance to instruct agencies to ignore the consensus of courts around the country and decades of progress on civil rights protections. This denigration of the transgender community signals to federal contractors and grantees that they can contribute to the harassment and violence transgender people regularly experience—and the administration will turn a blind eye.
For more information or to speak to an expert, contact Julia Cusick at 202-495-3682 or [email protected].