ENDA and gender identity protections

The following has been clipped from The Bilerico Project Report posted 04 September 2009
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ENDA and gender identity protections

Editors' Note: Guest blogger Tobias Barrington Wolff is Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, the Jesse Climenko Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard, a civil rights lawyer, and the former LGBT policy advisor to presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The re-introduction of ENDA promises to bring with it a renewed discussion about the importance of federal statutory protections for gender identity and expression. In the past, much of that discussion has focused on our trans brothers and sisters. And indeed anti-trans discrimination ought to be enough by itself -- more than enough -- to justify including gender identity and expression within ENDA.

But there is a danger of drawing artificial divisions within our community when we assume that protection against discrimination based upon gender identity or expression is exclusively about trans people. That has never been the case. Those protections are designed to safeguard all of us against being punished because we somehow fail to conform to another persons's expectations about gender.

In the hope of arming people with information to help them make that important case, I'd like to point out a decision that was handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit [PDF] the other week, Prowel v. Wise Business Forms, http://www.bilerico.com/2009/09/Prowel%20v.%20Wise%20Business%20Forms.pdf concerning the harassment and discrimination suffered by a man named Brian Prowel. Prowel was fired from the factory where he had worked for 13 years. He is, as he describes himself, an effeminate gay man. Throughout much of his time at the factory, he was subjected to horrible mistreatment.

http://www.bilerico.com/2009/09/enda_and_gender_identity_protections.php#more

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