Still plenty of hate left
People who don’t conform to traditional views of gender confront enduring discrimination, and prominent national voices encourage it.
It’s at once disheartening and unsurprising that people who don’t reflect conventional views of gender are widely discriminated against in the workplace.
Disheartening, because people deserve to be paid equitably for the work they do, and to be treated with respect, at work and everywhere. Unsurprising, because hostility toward transgender people remains one of the last bastions of bigotry for people in search of some “other” to hate openly.
The finding on career discrimination comes from the Transgender Employment Study, a year-and-ahalf-long look are how transgender, gender nonconforming and nonbinary people are treated in the workplace. As the Times Union’s Molly Burke reports, the study, done by the state Department of Labor, found “pervasive” discrimination, with transgender workers getting lower pay than cisgender people with similar demodern grees, and higher rates of unemployment. That’s despite a 2019 law, the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, which prohibits discrimination in employment, as well as housing, on the basis of gender identity and expression. While LGBTQ rights have in some significant ways advanced considerably in recent decades — most notably the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015 — America is hardly united in that progress towards tolerance and stronger human and civil rights. One has only to look at the local controversies over transgender story hours at libraries to see how open and bitter the sentiments are. One firestorm in Lake Luzerne grew so heated that the Rockwell Falls Public Library has been shuttered since the director, along with three trustees, resigned in the fall after enduring harassment for a planned drag queen story time that never even took place.
Across the country, that fury’s being eagerly stoked by culture warriors who enjoy the limelight at the expense of a small fraction of the population. A 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 1.5 percent of adults in the U.S. are trans or non-binary; among adults under 30, it was about 5 percent.
So U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, scoffs at a 2022 conference held by Turning Point USA that his pronouns are “Kiss my ass,” and he wastes public time with a bill that would prohibit entities using federal funds from requiring that people be referred to by pronouns other than those reflecting the gender assigned to them at birth. An X account saturated in antiLGBTQ, anti-immigrant, anti-government rhetoric and conspiracy theories declares that a deadly school shooting in Iowa, by a 17-year-old who may or may not have been transgender, showed that “the LGBTQ movement is radicalizing our youth into becoming violent extremists” — and Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr., son of the former president, heartily endorsed that claim. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, campaigning in Iowa, makes the shooter’s alleged gender identity part of his anti-“woke” message.
Because in their minds, it seems, it’s gender identity — not the bigotry, the bullying, the discrimination and the otherwise heartless treatment of trans and other nonconforming individuals — that’s the problem.
It’s encouraging that New York state has collected some clearer data on this discrimination, and that it has signaled it will look for strategies to combat it. But New Yorkers of good conscience should have no illusions about how long that road is likely to be. Regulations and legislation can only go so far when so many cling so publicly to whatever last hatreds they can.