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Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020). How can we continue to honor her legacy?

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Former MCDS athlete--Game suspended for wearing BLM shirt playing for American Heritage. As this is a constant battle for the Black community, all we ask is for our voices to be heard, but as things usually go, we aren't heard and are punished for it. MCDS is not a place for hate or discrimination, as this is a place for unity and integration. With hate speech policies implemented this year and allies to confide in, this community is a place of empowerment and allyship. Do you think MCDS is a place where you are able to freely express your beliefs and in what ways, besides verbally, do you think you're able to express yourself?

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Remembering Vanessa Guillén (murdered on April 22, 2020)

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US-Mexico border: Parents of 545 separated children still not found (Oct 21 2020)

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Mexican Femicide Protests 2020, protesting rise of violence against women and missing women the government will not acknowledge

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Puerto Rican Femicide Protests 2020, protesting rise of domestic violence and murdering of women

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Morocco Joins List of Arab Nations to Begin Normalizing Relations With Israel

Jonathan Sacks, the U.K.’s Inclusive Former Chief Rabbi, Dies at 72

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Christianity is growing at 5 times the rate as atheism and the percentage of the world that remains unevangelized continues to fall.

It is growing at a 1.19% rate annually.

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Since the outbreak of coronavirus, several accounts of racism and xenophobia have been reported and documented on social media. Asian communities had to grapple with racism and discrimination because of the stigma surrounding the virus.

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The CROWN Act, a law that prohibits discrimination based on hairstyle and texture, was passed by the House of Representatives and moved to be approved by the Senate as of September 2020.

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The Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ+ workers from workforce discrimination with a 6-to-3 ruling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/gay-transgender-workers-supreme-court.html

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The court said the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination, applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

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Tiffany Munroe on Sunday in Brooklyn during a rally to call attention to violence against transgender people of color. Credit... Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for L.G.B.T. equality a long-sought and unexpected victory.

"An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law," Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling.

That opinion and two dissents, spanning 168 pages, touched on a host of flash points in the culture wars involving the L.G.B.T. community - bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, pronouns and religious objections to same-sex marriage. The decision, the first major case on transgender rights, came amid widespread demonstrations, some protesting violence aimed at transgender people of color.

Until Monday's decision, it was legal in more than half of the states to fire workers for being gay, bisexual or transgender. The vastly consequential decision thus extended workplace protections to millions of people across the nation, continuing a series of Supreme Court victories for gay rights even after President Trump transformed the court with his two appointments.

The decision achieved a decades-long goal of gay rights proponents, one they had initially considered much easier to achieve than a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. But even as the Supreme Court established that right in 2015, workplace discrimination remained lawful in most of the country. An employee who married a same-sex partner in the morning could be fired that afternoon for being gay.

Monday's lopsided ruling, coming from a fundamentally conservative court, was a surprise. Justice Gorsuch, who was Mr. Trump's first appointment to the court, was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Supporters of L.G.B.T. rights were elated by the ruling, which they said was long overdue.

"This is a simple and profound victory for L.G.B.T. civil rights," said Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia. "Many of us feared that the court was poised to gut sex discrimination protections and allow employers to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity, yet it declined the federal government's invitation to take that damaging path."

In remarks to reporters, Mr. Trump said he accepted the ruling. "I've read the decision," he said, "and some people were surprised, but they've ruled and we live with their decision." He added that it was a "very powerful decision, actually."

The Trump administration had urged the court to rule against gay and transgender workers, and it has barred most transgender people from serving in the military. The Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation on Friday that undid protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies.

Those actions involved different laws from the one at issue on Monday, and the Supreme Court has allowed the military ban to go into effect while lawsuits challenging it proceed. Still, the court's ruling suggested that a new era in transgender rights has arrived.

The decision, covering two sets of cases, was the court's first on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in all four of the court's major gay rights decisions. Proponents of those rights had worried that his departure would halt the progress of the movement toward equality.

Listen to 'The Daily': A Landmark Supreme Court Ruling

A surprise majority of judges ruled that the Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination.

Back to The Daily

transcript

Listen to 'The Daily': A Landmark Supreme Court Ruling

Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Annie Brown, Luke Vander Ploeg, Asthaa Chaturvedi and Sydney Harper, and edited by M.J. Davis Lin and Lisa Chow

A surprise majority of judges ruled that the Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination.

aimee stephens

My name is Aimee Stephens. I'm 58 years old, and I live in Redford, Mich.

michael barbaro

Aimee, I wonder if you could read from the letter that you handed your boss.

aimee stephens

Sure.

"Dear friends and co-workers. I have known many of you for some time now, and I count you all as my friends. What I must tell you is very difficult for me and is taking all the courage I can muster. I am writing this both to inform you of a significant change in my life and to ask for your patience, understanding, and support, which I would treasure greatly. I have a gender identity disorder that I have struggled with my entire life. I have felt imprisoned in a body that does not match my mind, and this has caused me great despair and loneliness. With the support of my loving wife, I have decided to become the person that my mind already is. At the end of my vacation, on Aug. 26, 2013, I will return to work as my true self, Aimee Australia Stephens, in appropriate business attire. I realize that some of you may have trouble understanding this. In truth, I have had to live with it every day of my life, and even I do not fully understand it myself. It is my wish that I can continue my work at R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes doing what I have always done, which is my best."

[music]

aimee stephens

I gave it to the boss. And then two weeks later, he came back with his own letter, which was my letter of dismissal. Basically, his letter to me was that, your services are no longer needed. This is what we're offering. You have 21 days to make up your mind. But if you accept severance package, you will have to agree to keep your mouth shut and not ever talk about this to anyone. And I didn't think I could live with that the rest of my life. At that point, I knew I had to do something. After all, this was not only happening to me, but to thousands of others. And the only thing I knew to do was basically to take it to court. That's what I did.

[music]

[crowd chanting]

archived recording

We're coming on the air because of a major civil rights decision out of the United States Supreme Court.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is "The Daily."

archived recording

The decision now is clear from the Supreme Court -

michael barbaro

Today -

archived recording

- they have issued a ruling that now bans discrimination by employers against transgender individuals and gay individuals.

crowd chanting

Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter!

michael barbaro

Adam Liptak on the surprise majority that decided the case.

It's Tuesday, June 16.

Adam, tell us about this ruling on Monday.

adam liptak

The Supreme Court issued a huge ruling, a very consequential ruling. It said that all across the nation, it's no longer permissible for employers to fire people simply for being gay or transgender. Now, you might think that's already the state of the world. But in 27 states, there's no federal protection for gay and transgender workers. Gay people have a constitutional right to get married. They have since 2015. They can get married on a Monday morning, and when their employer found out about it Monday afternoon, they could be fired without consequence, simply for being gay. Until Monday's ruling from the Supreme Court.

michael barbaro

So in the national debate over the rights for gay and transgender people, this was a kind of untouched area - employment.

adam liptak

Right, it's sort of surprising. I mean, most people I think, think it's unlawful to discriminate against them for being gay or transgender. But until this Supreme Court ruling on Monday, people were without protection in about half the nation.

michael barbaro

And Adam, remind us of the specific cases that are involved in this ruling. I know we've talked about them in the past on the show.

adam liptak

Yeah, so there are actually three separate cases, two of them involving gay men, one involving a transgender woman. The cases involving gay men were a government worker in Georgia and a skydiving instructor, both of whom alleged in their lawsuits that they'd been fired for being gay. And the third was a transgender woman named Aimee Stephens, who, Michael, your listeners may remember, because -

michael barbaro

Right.

adam liptak

- you had a conversation with her and she described how, when she announced she was going to assume the gender identity that she believed was hers, the reaction of the funeral home for whom she worked was to fire her.

michael barbaro

Right, this letter that she had spent years composing in her head and on paper that told her friends and her colleagues and her boss who she was, was actually what ended up getting her fired.

adam liptak

That's right.

michael barbaro

And, Adam, what was the central legal question posed in these three different cases?

adam liptak

The question in the case is whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - a landmark piece of civil rights legislation which prohibits discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, and sex - applies to sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. And drilling down just a little bit more, the key question is whether the phrase "discrimination because of sex" covers sexual orientation and gender identity.

michael barbaro

Right, and as I recall from talking about these oral arguments with you many months ago, the case very much rested, not just on what the entire court thought of the phrase "because of sex" and what it meant, but specifically what the conservative justices on the court, who are now in the majority - what they thought that that phrase meant.

adam liptak

That's right. I mean, you have a court where the four more liberal votes are pretty much locked in. You know what they're going to do, and they have to pick up a conservative vote. And the question with this court was, the conservative vote they would ordinarily be sure of picking up was that of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote all four of the major gay rights decisions before this one. But he retired in 2018, replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. And so the court has a five justice conservative majority. And for the liberals to win, they'd have to pick off at least one of them.

michael barbaro

And it sounds like they did that.

adam liptak

Oh, yeah, in fact they got two, Justice Gorsuch, President Trump's first appointee, and they also picked up Chief Justice John G. Roberts. So you got a 6-3 decision in the end. And, Michael, just to put that in context, this is a very conservative court. This is a court that gay rights advocates were terrified of. So to get a 6-3 victory from this court on a consequential, stunning, vastly important decision is really something.

michael barbaro

So let's talk about these two conservative justices who sided with the liberal justices in this case.

adam liptak

Well, the key justice is Justice Gorsuch. He writes the majority opinion. He's the only one whose language we have in front of us and whose reasoning we know for certain. And he says it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex. Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer's mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague.

michael barbaro

So Gorsuch is arguing, you can't divorce discrimination based on sexual identity, sexual orientation, from gender, and perhaps cultural expectations of gender.

adam liptak

That's right. He says, listen, it may not be the only factor, but it's a factor and that's good enough for this law.

michael barbaro

Right, and therefore, by his logic, that word, that phrase, "because of sex" in 1964, clearly applies to gay and transgender people today.

adam liptak

Exactly right.

michael barbaro

And so what explanation do the other conservative justices who did not join Gorsuch in the majority give for breaking with him, and with Roberts, if Gorsuch and Roberts found a pretty conservative justification for extending these rights to gay and transgender people?

adam liptak

So there are two separate dissents, but the theme that runs through both of them, Michael, is that it's just not a natural way to read this set of words. That in 1964, nobody thought that they were prohibiting discrimination against gay people and transgender people. And Justice Kavanaugh in his dissent says, even today, when you ask people what "because of sex" means to them, they will not typically say oh, that means because of sexual orientation, because of gender identity. Then Alito and Thomas, but not Kavanaugh, go on to talk about what they view as the very pernicious consequences of the majority decision, which they say will have an impact on restrooms and locker rooms and college sports and maybe professional sports and religious employers and freedom of speech. Justice Alito even says it might prohibit people from using anything other than the preferred pronouns of the people to whom they talk.

michael barbaro

Right, but of course in the end, those three justices were outvoted. And two of their conservative allies went in the other direction. And I have to say, and I don't know if this is the case for you, it seems surprising that the majority opinion in this landmark gay and transgender rights case was written by a conservative member of the court.

adam liptak

Oh, yeah. No, I think it's a big surprise to me, big surprise to gay rights advocates, big surprise to the L.G.B.T. community. I will say this, Michael, that if you'd asked me in September what the outcome of this case was going to be, I would have said it's classic 5-4, conservatives against liberals.

michael barbaro

You said that on our show. You said this was -

adam liptak

Right, but once it was argued, once we saw Gorsuch struggling with this textual question at the argument in September, I started to think that there was a live possibility it would be 5-4, the liberals plus Gorsuch. And I guess the chief justice came along for the ride.

michael barbaro

But that makes me wonder, does a ruling like this, and the composition of the majority, does that make you conclude that ultimately, we don't really know this relatively new Supreme Court, this conservative majority court, as well as perhaps, everyone thinks that they do?

adam liptak

That's a really important point. People on the left are very unhappy that President Trump got to appoint two people to the Supreme Court. But those two people don't vote together all that often. Overall, their voting will be conservative. But they're individual people with individual jurisprudential commitments, and they will from time to time surprise you as Justice Gorsuch surprised us in this one.

michael barbaro

We'll be right back.

Adam, how is this ruling being received by those who are champions of religious liberty? Because I have to imagine that they are not looking favorably on a ruling that says every employer, including employers run by people whose religion says that being homosexual is wrong, would welcome this ruling.

adam liptak

Sure, they're nervous about this ruling. And in dissent, Justice Alito said they're right to be nervous, that this ruling can make religious people and religious employers on the hook for employment discrimination if they just follow the dictates of their faith. Justice Gorsuch, who is ordinarily very sympathetic to those kinds of claims of religion said, listen, that's not this case. We'll deal with that case down the line. But he did say, let me tell you, first of all, Title VII itself has an exemption for religious employers. There are other laws and constitutional provisions which can protect religious people and religious employers. So his basic answer is, we'll get back to you on that.

michael barbaro

Hm, so this ruling may leave open the possibility that an employer could bring future cases that could make it all the way up to the Supreme Court challenging this ruling on the grounds of religious liberty, saying this ruling infringes on my right to practice my religion the way I see fit.

adam liptak

Yeah, clashes between religious employers and their employees are commonplace, and we're waiting, even in this term, for a decision on whether employment discrimination laws apply to Catholic school teachers. So that clash is something that's very much on the front burner at the court, but we don't have an answer yet.

michael barbaro

Adam, you've been covering the Supreme Court for The Times for more than a decade. And you have watched this debate over L.G.B.T.Q. rights play out before the justices on many occasions. Where does this decision stack up in that history of the decisions that they have made?

adam liptak

Well, for gay rights, it easily ranks with the top three. It ranks with the decisions in which the court struck down a Texas law making gay sex a crime. It stands with the decision establishing a constitutional right to same sex marriage. And now for gay people, we have this enormously consequential decision protecting them from employment discrimination. And let's not forget, for transgender people, we have the first major transgender rights case from the Supreme Court ever.

michael barbaro

So by definition, this is a historic case when it comes to rights.

adam liptak

Some historic cases are symbolic only. This historic case will have a real-world impact for lots and lots of people.

michael barbaro

It's interesting that this decision comes three and a half years into an administration, the Trump administration, that has repeatedly taken actions to restrict the rights of transgender Americans, in particular. You know, banning them from serving in the military, telling the military to stop paying for gender confirmation surgery. And just about a week ago, narrowing the definition of sex discrimination in the Affordable Care Act to omit protections for transgender people. So how does Monday's decision affect those? Because after all, the United States government is a major employer, right?

adam liptak

Yeah, so as an employer, it's subject to Title VII like other kinds of employers. When it's talking about health care, when it's talking about the military, those are different statutes, and whether it has the power or not to disadvantage transgender people is an open question. This decision of course, gives you some sense that challenges to Trump administration actions would meet with positive reception at the court. But they're different statutes in different settings, and the president gets a lot of deference when it's the military who's involved. We do have a quick sense that President Trump is prepared to accept the Supreme Court's decision on Monday. He was asked about it at a press availability and he said, they ruled, and we live with their decision, a very powerful decision.

michael barbaro

Speaking of that kind of atmospheric change, I have noticed that in the protests that we've been seeing all over the United States for the past few weeks, that in addition to protesting against racism, demonstrators have taken up the issue of trans rights and calling for the protection of black trans people, for example.

adam liptak

Yeah, so society is moving very fast on these issues. The protests reflect that. One thing that struck me that also reflects it is that more than 200 major corporations filed briefs in these cases saying, please subject us to these laws, please make it possible to sue us. Because the commitment among very large parts of society to equality for black people, gay people, trans people is moving quite quickly in the direction of equality. And the Supreme Court, which is seldom very far out of step with the American public, as reflected in this decision, seems to agree.

michael barbaro

Adam, what has been the response from the plaintiffs in this case? I remember speaking with Aimee Stephens after the oral arguments, and she had some real doubts about whether the court was going to ultimately rule in her favor.

adam liptak

Yeah, that's right, Michael. There are three plaintiffs in the three cases, two of them have sadly died, including Aimee Stephens, who died just a few weeks ago. So she didn't see the result of her lawsuit. But she did sketch out some thoughts in anticipation that the court might rule in her favor. So she wrote these words. "Firing me because I'm transgender was discrimination, plain and simple. And I am glad the court recognized that what happened to me is wrong and illegal. I am thankful that the court said my transgender siblings and I have a place in our laws. It made me feel safer and more included in society."

michael barbaro

Thank you, Adam.

adam liptak

Thank you, Michael.

[music]

aimee stephens

They asked me a question. And that question was, are you willing to see this through to the end?

And I told them then that I was raised on a farm, that I was used to hard work, and that I didn't give up so easily. They've had people, I guess, in the past, who started this process, and it can get to you to the point that you just want it to be over. And you say well, I'm done. I'm not going any further. Or perhaps they try to settle out of court.

I had in my mind what I needed to do, and it wasn't to really settle out of court. It wasn't to just give up and walk away. And that yes, I would see this to the end.

michael barbaro

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today.

archived recording (dermot shea)

Good afternoon, everyone. It's been a tough few weeks for the N.Y.P.D., for the city, really, for the whole country.

michael barbaro

In a major reform by the nation's largest police force, New York City is disbanding its anti-crime unit, a team of 600 officers who patrol the city in plain clothes that has been involved in some of the city's most notorious police shootings.

archived recording (dermot shea)

Make no mistake, this is a seismic shift in the culture of how the N.Y.P.D. polices this great city. It will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect.

michael barbaro

The decision makes the N.Y.P.D. one of the first police departments in the country to begin defunding and dismantling its operations in the wake of nationwide protests.

archived recording (dermot shea)

We can do it better. We can do it smarter. And we will.

michael barbaro

And on Monday, the Food and Drug Administration reversed course and revoked its emergency authorization of two malaria drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, as treatments for Covid-19. In March, the F.D.A. allowed the drugs to be used by hospitals treating patients with the coronavirus. But studies since then have shown that the drugs are unlikely to be effective, despite claims by President Trump, who has repeatedly promoted both of them, and who said he had taken one of them himself.

That's it for "The Daily." I'm Michael Barbaro, see you tomorrow.

The Supreme Court is generally not very far out of step with popular opinion, and large majorities of Americans oppose employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and substantial ones oppose it when based on gender identity. More than 200 major corporations filed a brief supporting the gay and transgender employees in the cases before the court.

The decision was both symbolic and consequential, and it followed in the tradition of landmark rulings on discrimination. Unlike Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that said racially segregated public schools violated the Constitution; Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 decision that struck down bans on interracial marriage; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, the new decision did not involve constitutional rights.

Instead, the question for the justices was the meaning of a statute, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex. They had to decide whether that last prohibition - discrimination "because of sex" - applies to many millions of gay and transgender workers.

Justice Gorsuch wrote that it did.

"An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex," he wrote.

"It is impossible," Justice Gorsuch wrote, "to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex."

The decision will allow people who say they were discriminated against in the workplace based on their sexual orientation or gender identity to file lawsuits, just as people claiming race and sex discrimination may. The plaintiffs will have to offer evidence, of course, and employers may respond that they had reasons unrelated to discrimination for their decisions.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the majority had abandoned its judicial role.

"There is only one word for what the court has done today: legislation," Justice Alito wrote. "The document that the court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive."

"A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall," he wrote. "The court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous."

The common understanding of sex discrimination in 1964, Justice Alito wrote, was bias against women or men and did not encompass discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. If Congress wanted to protect gay and transgender workers, he wrote, it could pass a new law.

"Discrimination 'because of sex' was not understood as having anything to do with discrimination because of sexual orientation or transgender status" in 1964, he wrote. "Any such notion would have clashed in spectacular fashion with the societal norms of the day."

Justice Alito added that the majority's decision would have pernicious consequences.

He said the majority left open, for instance, questions about access to restrooms and locker rooms. "For women who have been victimized by sexual assault or abuse," he wrote, "the experience of seeing an unclothed person with the anatomy of a male in a confined and sensitive location such as a bathroom or locker room can cause serious psychological harm."

Nor did the majority address, he said, how its ruling would affect sports, college housing, religious employers, health care or free speech.

"After today's decision," Justice Alito wrote, "plaintiffs may claim that the failure to use their preferred pronoun violates one of the federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination."

"Although the court does not want to think about the consequences of its decision, we will not be able to avoid those issues for long," he wrote. "The entire federal judiciary will be mired for years in disputes about the reach of the court's reasoning."

Justice Gorsuch responded that the court's ruling was narrow. "We do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms or anything else of the kind," he wrote. "Whether other policies and practices might or might not qualify as unlawful discrimination or find justifications under other provisions of Title VII are questions for future cases, not these."

He added that Title VII itself included protections for religious employers and that a separate federal law and the First Amendment also allow religious groups latitude in their employment decisions.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump's other appointment to the court, issued a separate dissent making a point about statutory interpretation. "Courts must follow ordinary meaning, not literal meaning," he wrote, adding that the ordinary meaning of "because of sex" does not cover discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

"Seneca Falls was not Stonewall," he wrote. "The women's rights movement was not (and is not) the gay rights movement, although many people obviously support or participate in both. So to think that sexual orientation discrimination is just a form of sex discrimination is not just a mistake of language and psychology, but also a mistake of history and sociology."

The court considered two sets of cases. The first concerned a pair of lawsuits from gay men who said they were fired because of their sexual orientation: Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., No. 17-1618, and Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda, No. 17-1623.

The first case was filed by Gerald Bostock, who was fired from a government program that helped neglected and abused children in Clayton County, Ga., just south of Atlanta, after he joined a gay softball league.

The second was brought by a skydiving instructor, Donald Zarda, who also said he was fired because he was gay. His dismissal followed a complaint from a female customer who had expressed concerns about being strapped to Mr. Zarda during a tandem dive. Mr. Zarda, hoping to reassure the customer, told her that he was "100 percent gay."

The case on gender identity, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 18-107, was brought by a transgender woman, Aimee Stephens, who was fired from a Michigan funeral home after she announced in 2013 that she was a transgender woman and would start working in women's clothing.

Mr. Zarda died in an accident in 2014, and Ms. Stephens died on May 12. Their estates continued to pursue their cases after their deaths.

Critics sometimes say that the Congress does not hide elephants in mouse holes, Justice Gorsuch wrote on Monday, meaning that lawmakers do not take enormous steps with vague terms or in asides.

"We can't deny that today's holding - that employers are prohibited from firing employees on the basis of homosexuality or transgender status - is an elephant," he wrote. "But where's the mouse hole? Title VII's prohibition of sex discrimination in employment is a major piece of federal civil rights legislation. It is written in starkly broad terms. It has repeatedly produced unexpected applications, at least in the view of those on the receiving end of them."

"This elephant," he wrote, "has never hidden in a mouse hole; it has been standing before us all along."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules (Published 2020)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The court said the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination, applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

# data[].attributes.body
Data collected by Transrespect Versus Transphobia Worldwide states that in between 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2020, at least 350 transgender and gender-diverse people were killed globally.
https://transrespect.org/en/tmm-update-tdor-2020/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
However, the numbers are not comprehensive, as it only includes incidents found online and those reported to TvT by local activists and partner organizations. Many cases of anti-trans murders aren't known to the public because they are unreported or misreported, with many victims being deadnaming and misgendered.

The annual Trans Murder Monitoring update also includes a 90-page index of names and other details about each of the lives lost, chronicled in order of when they were killed. The list includes several recent killings of trans people in the United States, including the cases of Aerrion Burnett and Tracy "Mia" Green, both of whom were Black transgender women and lost their lives in late September.

Burnett, 27, was shot during the late evening hours of September 19 in Independence, Missouri, where her body was found in a grassy knoll on the side of a road. No further details have been released to the public since the initial reports of her death. Green, a 29-year-old Philadelphia resident, was found with a gunshot wound during a police traffic stop and later died from her injuries at a nearby hospital.

After police investigated the latter incident, the driver - Abdullah Ibn El-Amin Jaamia, 28 - was arrested and charged with Green's murder, according to CBS affiliate KYW-TV. Burnett's murder, meanwhile, remains unsolved.

Their lives will be among the hundreds memorialized across the world during Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual observance launched in 1999 by trans advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith as a vigil to honor the memory of Rita Hester, a trans woman who was killed in 1998. According to the Human Rights Campaign, 34 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been killed so far this year in the U.S., marking a record high.

That number notably differs from the TvT data, which has to do, in part, with differences in the time periods calculated. It also underscores the need for better, more consistent reporting on anti-trans violence.

"I am no stranger to the need to fight for our rights, and the right to simply exist is first and foremost," Smith said, according to GLAAD. "With so many seeking to erase transgender people - sometimes in the most brutal ways possible - it is vitally important that those we lose are remembered, and that we continue to fight for justice."

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At Least 350 Transgender People Have Been Killed Globally in 2020

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However, the numbers are not comprehensive, as it only includes incidents found online and those reported to TvT by local activists and partner organizations. Many cases of anti-trans murders aren't known to the public because they are unreported or misreported, with many victims being deadnaming and misgendered.

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Understanding the importance of intersectional feminism during the centennial of the 19th Amendment.

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The impact Black women had on the 2020 presidential election

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People with disabilities have been especially vulnerable to the corona virus, seeing they are more likely to die from the virus.

With now 50 Percent of people with disabilities unable to pay health insurance, a new crisis arises.

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Malawi appoints a new Christian theologian president, Lazarus Chakwera, who hopes his leadership will help restore faith in his country's government and economy. The new president has repeatedly targeted the corruption, nepotism, and injustice that has plagued his country and said he wants to work for economic progress that allows everyone to prosper.

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(Student Comment) Gender & Sexuality Alliance

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(Student Comment) Gender & Sexuality Alliance

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Yeah, it shocks me how many trans men and women were gone missing and killed this year