Over specificity in establishing rights and protections is how we end to with trans people being denied rights and how we have to argue semantics about who is actually protected by the law.
This isn’t true. It’s the vague generic protections that are easy for courts to warp. Discrimination against trans people is a plain violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause and is a form of illegal sex discrimination. Yet courts have found ways around those. You need to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.
Discrimination against trans people is a plain violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause and is a form of illegal sex discrimination.
You’re kind of making my point. The right would argue that they’re not discriminating on sex because sex differs from gender identity (and frankly, they’d be correct about that even by the definition of transgenderism). Had the law not been written to protect discrimination based on “sex”, among other traits and categories, we wouldn’t be arguing over what “sex” means in terms of the law and gender identity. That’s what I’m saying about over specificity.
Like you said, it should already be covered under current sex based discrimination, but it’s not. And so “You need to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.” If the language had been more broad to begin with and not set such narrow areas of protection, they could already be covered by default if not explicitly excluded, so we wouldn’t need to add more protections in the first place.
I’m not saying that adding explicit protections is bad in itself though, but it shouldn’t JUST include the protections that are relevant now and leave open discrimination where we can’t even predict in the future. It will just move the goal post and we’ll keep playing constitutional whack a mole with bigots for generations.
Sex discrimination is already fairly generic. The only way to get more generic is the Equal Protection Clause, and that’s proven completely toothless. Generally the less specific a protection is, the less real impact it has.
This isn’t true. It’s the vague generic protections that are easy for courts to warp. Discrimination against trans people is a plain violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause and is a form of illegal sex discrimination. Yet courts have found ways around those. You need to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.
You’re kind of making my point. The right would argue that they’re not discriminating on sex because sex differs from gender identity (and frankly, they’d be correct about that even by the definition of transgenderism). Had the law not been written to protect discrimination based on “sex”, among other traits and categories, we wouldn’t be arguing over what “sex” means in terms of the law and gender identity. That’s what I’m saying about over specificity.
Like you said, it should already be covered under current sex based discrimination, but it’s not. And so “You need to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.” If the language had been more broad to begin with and not set such narrow areas of protection, they could already be covered by default if not explicitly excluded, so we wouldn’t need to add more protections in the first place.
I’m not saying that adding explicit protections is bad in itself though, but it shouldn’t JUST include the protections that are relevant now and leave open discrimination where we can’t even predict in the future. It will just move the goal post and we’ll keep playing constitutional whack a mole with bigots for generations.
Sex discrimination is already fairly generic. The only way to get more generic is the Equal Protection Clause, and that’s proven completely toothless. Generally the less specific a protection is, the less real impact it has.