Transgender Rights
Conducted in partnership with the National Center for Transgender Equality, the National LGBTQ Task Force’s 2011 study Injustice at Every Turn found that transgender people are twice as likely to be unemployed and four times more likely to live in poverty when compared to the general population—and these disparities are much greater for Black and Latina transgender women.
For transgender people who are able to find a job, ninety percent of them experience harassment, discrimination or mistreatment at the workplace. One in five transgender people have been homeless. Access to health care is a major issue with 64% of LGBTQ people living in states where healthcare discrimination is legal and 29% of transgender people having been refused medical care. In 2014 alone, 13 transgender women were murdered. That number for 2015 is almost double.
“Religious liberty” laws have a devastating impact on all our lives and particularly trans people. For example, a transgender woman could be fired from her job as a janitor or cafeteria worker at a Catholic hospital and a transgender man could be denied basic emergency care because of the EMT’s beliefs.
The world is still a very dangerous place for the transgender community — and that needs to change.
Today we’re fighting to secure strong and explicit protections in Congress and the administration for trans people in the work place, housing, education, and so many other areas where they face discrimination every day of their lives. This wouldn’t solve every problem facing our community, but it would be an enormous step toward eliminating discrimination at work and at home.
The National LGBTQ Task Force will also be focusing on the issue of access to identification documents for transgender people, and making critical connections between this access, voting rights, applying for jobs and the ability of LGBTQ people and families to access the full range of rights and services in our democratic society.
In the voting rights arena, our unique role will be to ensure that LGBTQ people and allies understand the ways that voter suppression tactics negatively impact LGBTQ people, including drawing attention to: the proliferation of new voter ID laws; increased harassment and violence at the polls; the elimination of same day voter registration, absentee ballots or early voting practices; and the disenfranchisement of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, which is particularly noteworthy given the disproportionate rates of incarceration among transgender people and people of color.
