Not that it matters for those in a panic over a tiny handful of people who’ve caused no detectable problem in schools (except in their own persecution) and who likely few of the complainers have ever knowingly encountered. The New York Times today has an op-ed from a lawyer explaining the evolution — in court precedent, including one opinion written by St. Antonin Scalia — of federal civil rights law protection for sex, including gender identification. Excerpt:

Ann Hopkins’s successful lawsuit against Price Waterhouse in 1989 became the template on which later gender identity (not to mention sexual orientation) lawsuits have been based. Ms. Hopkins claimed that the accounting firm refused to promote her to partner because she was “macho,” “overcompensated for being a woman” and didn’t look or act stereotypically feminine.

The court ruled, in effect, that punishing a woman for failing to conform to her employer’s notion of “womanhood” was just as discriminatory as treating her poorly because she was a woman. The punishment a transgender person faces for violating sex stereotypes is just as much discrimination because of sex as it was for Ms. Hopkins.

Earlier this week, when Attorney General Loretta Lynch compared today’s bathroom bans on trans employees to “white” and “colored” bathroom signs of the past, she placed trans rights on a historical spectrum.

North Carolina’s supporters don’t get that sex is about more than just anatomy. It also includes family roles, romantic desires, cultural expectations and ideas of masculinity and femininity. The courts get that. In its fight with North Carolina, the Justice Department asks for something quite simple: that Title VII be allowed to mean what it says

I know. Reason doesn’t matter. The terribly sad thing is that the bathroom habits of a tiny sliver of the population — mostly unnoticed by the rest of the world — is the handhold on which the right-wing intends to set back the entire movement for equal treatment of LGBT people, a much larger segment of the population. The good news continues to be that younger people are far less hysterical. 

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