On Wednesday, January 15, Maine scheduled a working session on a bill titled “An Act to Safeguard Gender-affirming Healthcare,” a bill that would declare the state a refuge for transgender people fleeing hostile states. In the past two years, similar measures have been enacted or issued through executive orders in 14 states and the District of Columbia. These laws have proven effective…
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The Human Rights Campaign has declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States over a wave of discriminatory laws passed in states across the country. There have been more than 70 anti-LGBTQ+ bills signed into law so far in 2023 — more than double last year’s number, which was previously the worst year for discriminatory legislation. These laws have primarily targeted the…
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As the baby boom generation enters its golden years and average lifespans increase, the U.S. is becoming home to more older adults. In 2019, there were over 74.6 million Americans over the age of 60, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS). The agency projects that there will be 80.8 million seniors in the U.S. by 2040, a demographic trend that has…
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Transgender and gender-nonconforming people are among the lowest paid LGBTQ+ people working full time in the United States, according to a snapshot poll by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation and a California-based market research firm.
The HRC found that trans men and nonbinary or gender-nonconforming people earn 70 cents for every dollar the typical worker earns, while trans women earn 60 cents to that dollar, based on responses from roughly 6,800 LGBTQ+ workers last spring.
“If that’s across the entire population, those dollars and cents add up,” said Spencer Watson, executive director at the Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research.
The HRC believes the actual pay gap for trans and LGBTQ+ people is bigger because part-time jobs and work in underground economies were not considered. But the survey still offers a unique look at wage disparities that experts say have not been adequately researched.
Trans people experience widespread unemployment and poverty at higher rates compared to the rest of the U.S. population. Even if a trans person does get a job outside of the underground economy, discrimination can still take its toll and stunt economic advancement, said Josie Caballero, survey project manager of the U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS).
More than 77 percent of respondents to the 2015 USTS — the most comprehensive survey of trans life and the latest data available ahead of the survey’s planned 2022 release — described taking multiple steps to avoid discrimination at work, like hiding their gender identity, delaying their transition and being misgendered without correcting their employer.
“If you’re just trying to avoid discrimination, you’re not you’re not asking for promotions,” Caballero said. “You’re not trying to seek quality of life. You’re just trying to survive and keep your head down.”
The wage gaps, Caballero said, “kind of confirm what we already know.”
As researchers investigate the economic disparities faced by trans people, they should be focused on what kind of wage gap trans women of color experience in the United States, said Lourdes Ashley Hunter, executive director of the Trans Women of Color Collective. Researchers also need to account for underground economies and sex work in order to gain a full picture of the economic disparities that most sharply harm trans women of color, who also face disproportionate violence and multiple forms of discrimination, Hunter said.
In the formal economy, how a company is structured to support Black trans women and other women of color is also key to their economic opportunities, Hunter said. Are managers hiring only one or a few trans people? Are there trans people of color in leadership? Is the company paying a living wage? And even if a Black trans person is making a living wage — how long were they in poverty before that?
The HRC’s polling analyzed the reported wages of LGBTQ+ women of color, though a wage gap for trans men and trans women of color was not measured due to a lack of data. The organization hopes to release another report focused on Black and Latinx trans people from the same data used in this report, Shoshana Goldberg, the organization’s director of public education and research, said.
“We’re only just now being able to start to uncover a lot of these economic disparities,” she said.
Although trans women in HRC’s poll were the lowest paid of any group, cisgender queer women who responded to the survey also shared gaps in pay. However, data from the UCLA’s Williams Institute indicates a more complicated financial picture for cisgender bisexual and lesbian women. Cisgender lesbian and bisexual women face significant discrimination and economic stress, and queer women of color are significantly more likely to have very low household incomes compared to White women, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
But, comparing cisgender queer women’s wages to straight women’s wages is more complicated, said M.V. Lee Badgett, economics professor and distinguished scholar at the Williams Institute.
Cisgender lesbian and bisexual women on average make more money than straight women, Badgett said, for a variety of reasons, including working more hours and working more weeks of the year — which can be influenced by relationship structure and a lack of child care. However, they make less on average than bisexual and gay cisgender men, she added. Recent data from the Hamilton Project also found that married women couples tend to bring home lower wages than an opposite-gender married couple.
Sixteen percent of trans people surveyed by USTS were either making less than $10,000 per year in 2014 or had no income. As the census’ Household Pulse Survey gathers information on how Americans are faring during the pandemic — recently including LGBTQ+ people in the count — researchers are learning that trans people are currently still more likely to have household incomes that put them below the federal poverty line, said Kitt Carpenter, labor economist and founder of the Vanderbilt LGBT Policy Lab.
Investigating a potential trans wage gap presents a new area for researchers to articulate the day-to-day economic disparities of trans people, in line with discussions on the racial wage gap and gender wage gap in the United States, Watson said.
And at the end of the day, researchers are “only beginning to scratch the surface” of the experiences of trans people and other gender minorities, and that understanding is much further behind research on LGBTQ+ people as a whole, Carpenter said.
“But thankfully, we’re moving in the right direction,” he said.
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Two federal judges made separate rulings on Wednesday blocking restrictions that Republican lawmakers had put in place regarding trans youth’s access to health care and their participation in sports.
In Arkansas, a law that would have banned gender-affirming care for transgender children in the state was halted by federal Judge James M. Moody Jr., who issued a preliminary injunction against it until a full ruling on its legality can be assessed. The law was set to be enforced later this month.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing four transgender children in the state that would have been negatively impacted by the statute, as well as two doctors that provide such care, filed a lawsuit against the law earlier this year. In response to the ruling from Moody, Republican state Attorney General Leslie Rutledge claimed the ACLU was using children from Arkansas “as pawns for their own social agenda.”
But in a statement praising Moody’s injunction, the ACLU of Arkansas pointed out that this type of care was critical for transgender children.
“This ruling sends a clear message to states across the country that gender affirming care is life-saving care, and we won’t let politicians in Arkansas — or anywhere else — take it away,” said Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas.
In its lawsuit, the ACLU had argued that the law would prevent transgender children from being able “to obtain medical care that their doctors and parents agree they need.” Denying this care, lawyers for the organization said, as well as interrupting gender-affirming treatment for children already receiving it, “could have serious and potentially life-threatening consequences.”
Moody agreed with those arguments in his ruling. “To pull this care midstream from these patients, or minors, would cause irreparable harm,” he wrote.
On the same day, a ruling in West Virginia also temporarily halted a ban that would have prevented transgender students from participating in sports on teams corresponding to their gender identities. Federal Judge Joseph R. Goodwin blocked a statute in that state passed earlier this year, placing a preliminary injunction on its enforcement while he considers more evidence from the case.
The block allows an 11-year-old transgender student who had sued the state over the law to take part in try-outs for her school’s sports.
“I am excited to know that I will be able to try out for the girls cross-country team and follow in the running shoes of my family,” Becky Pepper-Jackson, the student who filed the lawsuit over the law, said in a statement, as reported by Politico. “It hurt that the State of West Virginia would try to block me from pursuing my dreams. I just want to play.”
In his decision, Goodwin said there was “scant evidence that this law addresses any problem at all, let alone an important one.” The federal judge also said that the suit against the West Virginia statute has a “likelihood of success” in proving that it’s unconstitutional, citing Title IX protections that exist for children participating in school-based sports across the country.
The legal argument follows what the Department of Education asserted last month, when Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that statutes which exclude transgender students from school activities were clear violations of federal law.
“Students cannot be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation or their gender identity,” Cardona said in June, adding that protections upheld by the Supreme Court for LGBTQ individuals in the workplace existed for schoolchildren as well.
Several more challenges to discriminatory laws are likely to make their way through the courts in the near future, due to the soaring numbers of anti-trans proposals introduced in GOP-led state legislatures across the country, some of which have already passed into law. Since the start of the year, at least 33 states have seen the introduction of more than 100 pieces of legislation designed to restrict the rights of transgender students.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.