Vermont Potentially to Add Transgendered Status to Anti-Discrimination Laws

Posted on | February 27, 2006

I am very pleased with the state of Vermont for taking up a bill that would make it the eighth state to outlaw bias against transgendered individuals. If passed, the bill would add the language of "gender identity or expression" to existing laws relating to employment, housing, and other such items that gender, race, and others enjoy. Personally this is long overdue because in my opinion transgendered individuals should already be covered by pre-existing gender discrimination laws.

As a gay man I get screwed over but I think transgendered people get it worse. I remember talking with one transsexual I knew in my home town who was born a hermaphrodite and was physically sexed a boy while psychologically was born a girl. She posed the question "What is my sexuality?" because of the way society will lump them in to their "born" gender in some instances and their real gender in others all for the purposes of discrimination. For example in some states men who transition to women are told they cannot marry men because they were born men so that would make it a "same sex marriage" and they are told they cannot marry women because they became a woman.