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Maeve Korengold writes about a federal judge's decision to block the Trump administration's rollback on transgender rights. The regulation would have permitted doctors to refuse treatment to LGBTQ+ patients, but Judge Block believes it contradicts a previous Supreme Court ruling. The initial proposition sparked outrage, especially among transgender individuals, who already face high rates of violence.
Despite U.S President Donald Trump’s claim that he would “do everything in [his] power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression,” many perceive the “unprecedented steps” he has made as attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. President Trump has refused to support the Equality Act, appointed anti-LGBTQ+ judges, banned transgender service members from the military, and advocated for the Affordable Care Act to be eliminated. Alphonso David, the President of the Human Rights Campaign, describes the Trump-Pence administration as “the most virulently anti-LGBTQ administration in decades.”
The most recent “step” that the Trump-Pence administration has made is the finalization of a regulation that would roll back the protection of transgender patients from discrimination by healthcare professionals, hospitals, and health insurance companies. (Read Kai Torrie's article about the regulation here.) This rule is part of a more significant effort that encompasses education, housing, employment, and healthcare. It serves to “narrow the legal definition of sex discrimination so that it does not include protections for transgender people.”
According to Katie M. Keith, a professor at Georgetown University, this rule “needed to be seen as part of a broad pattern of regulatory changes that eliminate civil rights protections for transgender people and establishes a definition of sex as being biologically determined at birth.” She says this way of thinking is “is what they are pushing forward on all of these different policy angles across different agencies.” This regulation was announced on June eleventh, 2020. In addition to being in the middle of pride month, this was the four-year anniversary of the shooting at Orlando nightclub Pulse, in which forty-nine people were murdered and fifty-three were injured. Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, the unit responsible for the rule, defended the timing and said it was “purely coincidental".
Others were critical of the fact the announcement came in the middle of a pandemic. Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said: “It’s really, really horrendous to not only gut nondiscrimination protections, but to gut nondiscrimination protections in the middle of a pandemic. This rule opens a door for a medical provider to turn someone away for a COVID-19 test just because they happen to be transgender.”
A statement made by the Human Rights Campaign read: “We will not let this attack on our basic right to be free from discrimination in health care go unchallenged. We will see them in court, and continue to challenge all of our elected officials to rise up against this blatant attempt to erode critical protections people need and sanction discrimination.” In addition to this, the organization planned to sue the Trump-Pence administration.
However, on Monday, August seventeenth, this rule, planned to come into effect the following Tuesday, was blocked by Judge Frederic Block of the United States District Court in Brooklyn. Judge Block established that this regulation was contradictory to a Supreme Court case that was decided soon after the rule’s finalization in June. “When the Supreme Court announces a major decision, it seems a sensible thing to pause and reflect on the decision’s impact,” he wrote. “Since H.H.S. has been unwilling to take that path voluntarily, the court now imposes it.” Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, called this decision “a victory for the L.G.B.T.Q. community and the rule of law.”
Judge Block’s ruling will temporarily obstruct the carrying out of the new rule. He will continue to read briefs and listen to arguments coming from both sides of the issue before he makes a final decision, and that decision will still be subject to evolve in the future.
According to the Trump-Pence administration, this rule was based on the idea that discrimination against transgender individuals shouldn’t be counted as discrimination based on sex. They also claim that their policies concerning the LGBTQ+ community are not motivated by bigotry. “President Trump has never considered L.G.B.T. Americans second-class citizens and has opposed discrimination of any kind against them,” says Judd Deere, a White House spokesman.
However, many transgender Americans who have been affected by changes that the Trump-Pence administration has made feel otherwise. Tiara Kelley, a Black transgender woman who lives in Colorado, says: “The rhetoric that these policy changes promote is that we aren’t people, but some toxic plague trying to destroy America’s family values.” Ari Murphy, a transgender individual who uses gender-neutral pronouns, stopped correcting doctors when they used “alienating or upsetting pronouns” out of fear that it would “negatively impact [their] care.”
As of July, at least twenty-one transgender or gender-nonconforming individuals have been murdered in 2020. At least twenty-six transgender or gender-nonconforming individuals were murdered in 2019, and two-hundred have been murdered since 2013, the majority of which are Black transgender women. The average life expectancy of a Black transgender woman is only thirty-five years old.
Many transgender advocates believe that the changes that have been made under the Trump-Pence administration encourage negative biases against transgender people that put them at higher risk of being treated unfairly.
“I think that there is this false notion that the reason why Black trans women are being murdered is [that] we are somehow tricking people into believing that we’re something that we’re not,” says Ashlee Marie Preston, a Black transgender woman. “So we don’t have protection from our communities. We don’t have protection from law enforcement. We don’t have protection by the systems, and if anything, we see them constantly chipping away at our human rights.”
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