Legislature OKS LGBTQ protections
Measure would shield trans individuals from employment, housing discrimination
The state Legislature on Tuesday passed measures that would establish the strongest human rights protections for LGBTQ individuals since the state legalized gay marriage in 2011.
One bill enshrines gender expression as a protected class in the state’s human rights and hate crimes laws, protecting trans individuals from employment and housing discrimination, and the second prohibits mental health professionals from practicing conversion therapy — a discredited practice that attempts to change someone’s sexual orientation — on minors.
The Gender Expression Non-discrimination Act, or GENDA, has passed the Assembly for 11 consecutive years, but was repeatedly blocked in the Gop-controlled Senate.
Senate Democrats, who reclaimed the Senate by a healthy margin in November’s election, made strengthening LGBTQ protections a legislative priority and moved the bills through the committee process on the first official day of the legislative session.
“It’s a new day,” Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-cousins, D-yonkers, said as the votes were being taken. “We were
proud when we were able to pass marriage equality eight years ago. None of us thought it would take eight years to get to this place.”
Sen. Brad Hoylman, D-manhattan, the Senate’s only openly gay member and the bill’s longtime sponsor, recalled how in 2002, lawmakers voted to exclude trans individuals from protections afforded to gay and lesbian New Yorkers by the Sexual Orientation Non-discrimination Act.
“There was and remains
unfinished business in the civil rights movement,” Hoylman said on the Senate f loor.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo took executive action interpreting human rights law to include trans and gender nonconforming individuals in 2015. But without the protections codified in state law, they could be subject to judicial interpretation or scaled back by a future governor.
The federal government’s recent efforts to ban transgender individuals from serving in the military, and to roll back protection for trans children in schools, has
amplified the issue in New York.
“An act of law sends a message to families and to kids that they are perfect just the way they were born, and this is such a crucial message when the White House and other federal officials are sending just the opposite signal,” Hoylman said outside the chamber.
The conversion therapy ban, which in past years was held up by the Republican-controlled Senate, passed both houses overwhelmingly.
“Conversion therapy is a dangerous and discredited practice,” said the bill’s
Assembly sponsor, Assemblywoman Deborah Glick. “It is built on the denial of LGBTQ people’s basic humanity, jeopardizes young people’s mental health, and is a perversion of mental health professionals’ mission to help.”
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia currently ban the practice on minors. Numerous cities and counties recently enacted local bans, including the city and county of Albany, which banned conversion therapy last year.
Cuomo in 2016 took executive action to prohibit insurers, health plans and Medicaid from covering and reimbursing conversion therapy, and banned its practice on minors in mental health facilities funded by the state.
The Senate chamber was filled with LGBTQ activists and prominent figures, including New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and Sarah Mcbride, a well-known transgender-rights activist who currently serves as national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign. Applause broke out in the Senate chamber as the bill passed.
Mental health associations also praised the move in a statement Tuesday.
“Recognizing there is no scientific or empirical evidence that conversion therapies work and, in fact, there is evidence of harm, every major medical and professional organization has repudiated the efficacy of ‘conversion therapy,’” said Jack Drescher, a physician who drafted the American Psychiatric Association’s 2002 position on sexual orientation conversion efforts.
Both bills are expected to be signed into law by the governor.