I guess it’s not an executive order, which makes the court ruling bizarre since the judge specifically refers to it as an order. Reading this though, it sounds like the Republican’s beloved “legislation by courts” because he cites the Administrative Procedure Act saying the letter contradicted existing laws and didn’t provide notice when the letter specifically cites why the funding would be withheld. It was supposed to go to appeals and then to the Supreme Court.
Obama literally did nothing of note in the letters, title IX has existed for a long fucking time before Obama sends guidance saying “hey, you can’t do this and receive federal funding” which is the entire point of Title IX. Trump’s new letter is actually the federal government circumventing the court system by avoiding what they know to be a losing Supreme Court battle, because the proper constitutional approach is to use the court system.
I mean, I get that you are obsessed with federal overreach but you are one of an army of people complaining about an interpretation of existing law (non-discriminatory clause in federal funding) being a dictator-like decree when it literally was nothing of the sort. Maybe the states can just tell the feds to fuck off and fund their own schools if they value their rights so much, it’s what they did to Obamacare in order to further damage our healthcare system.
I’m 100% in agreement with your position on transgender people, but I would like to speak up for the people who involved themselves in “gotcha” moments. First of all, I think trans issues aren’t just misunderstood by right-wing politicians, they are misunderstood by most people. It is safe to say that almost everyone has interacted with a transgender person without knowing it. Being transgender is still very exoticized, and I think it needs to be normalized a lot for the public. In the ad above in this thread, the fact that people can’t tell the trans from the cis girl is a wake-up call that transgender people aren’t some weird other, they are just ordinary people. [That this shouldn’t be necessary is something I’ll get back to in a second]
Also, I’m impressed by the bravery of people who put themselves out there for ads like this. Like I said above, I don’t think this is a safe thing for trans women especially to do, but the men who tweeted pictures of themselves were also opening themselves up to harassment, stalking, threats and maybe worse. Maybe it’s easier for them to stand up because they feel their gender identity is going to have to be accepted, but I want to give credit to people who had the privilege of passing and actively chose to out themselves to stand up for others. The point, after all, was to show the absurdity of a particular bill that discriminated in a particular way. Women (women who care about gendered bathrooms, that is) don’t want to share bathrooms with men.
The reaction bill you link to that discriminates only against trans women is terrible, but also far easier to crush in the courts since it transparently discriminates on the basis of gender (ignoring the trans issue completely, it sets a totally different standard for men and women).
I’d like to see more acceptance of trans women, and of transgender people for who they are, rather than for their ability to pass as cisgender people, and while I’m not much of an activist, I think I model that every day to people around me. I think that people are still very hung up on and confused by gender issues, and getting it through people’s heads that transgender people are all around them is a stepping stone towards acceptance of people who don’t always pass for cisgender. I think that’s dumb, it’s dumb that people need a stepping stone, and it’s insanely dumb that we’ve been fighting about gay rights for decades and apparently we’ve got a huge swath of the population who is like, “Let’s have all of those exact same conversations all over again!”
It’d a hard road to teach people empathy that they should have learned when they were six. That all people are humans deserving of respect is the equivalent of “1 + 1 = 2” or “dog is spelled d-o-g”. If you meet someone who’s gotten into adulthood without learning that, there’s remedial education and unlearning to do. To me, the battlefront on bathroom bills is painting lawmakers pushing these things are creeps who want to peek over your bathroom stall to look at your crotch. The larger war, I don’t know what to do except await generational churn.
Other BBers may disagree with me on this but I don’t see the legal recognition of the possession, use, and sale of cannabis as a civil rights matter. It’s not something intrinsic to the individual. Gender, however, is.
Civil rights issues must be addressed at the federal level and the obstructionists running Congress had no intention of addressing this emergent issue.
ETA: I understand you’re seeing this as a matter of political process and I respect that. Process is important and we may well agree that this process is broken in between the executive and legislative branches of government. But I disagree with your equation of these two particular issues.
He has strange ideas of what entails fun and why people use rest rooms. Though I’m wondering if English isn’t his first language; which could explain the stilted quality of communication.
