The Supreme Court is expected to rule by the beginning of June 2020 whether or not the LGBTQ community is protected by the federal civil rights law from job discrimination, specifically from being fired solely based on their sex – a question that has the power to dismantle and incite the LGBTQ population to more discrimination and violence.
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin, but does not specifically refer to gender identity or sexual orientation.
LGBTQ people are searching for basic protection from the government that they should be entitled to, this pivotal decision will initiate immediate dangers to the community if it is decided that it is OK to fire someone because they identify as LGBTQ.
Those who identify as transgender have already been targeted by the Trump administration and this only fuels violence against these marginalized groups to escalate.
The outcomes of this ruling will impact roughly 8.1 million LGBTQ workers across the country, who are not protected from workplace discrimination. An estimated 11.3 million LGBTQ people live in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
It is no secret that prejudice against the LGBTQ community exists, but this does not mean the support cannot start at the very top.
These barriers of stigmatization and prejudice are even higher for Black transgender people, who have double the unemployment rate of all transgender people, and four times that of the U.S. general population. And the unemployment rate among transgender people is 3 times higher than that of the general population, according to the Human Rights Campaign study, “Dismantling a Culture of Violence.”
Although the Trump administration is now in support of amending the civil rights law’s Title 7 to include LGBT people, he has expressed his own discrimination toward the community before.
LGBTQ people are entitled to the same basic protections as everyone else. Discrimination in the workplace based on how someone identifies is unacceptable in a country built on the foundation of being a melting pot of identities and poses a danger to the LGBTQ community.
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Campus Times Editorial Board.