In one of the surest signs the U.S. government’s discrimination against LGBTQ Americans has hit a breaking point, advocates have begun asking the international community to step in.
The nation’s top queer advocacy organizations have submitted a 54-page letter to the United Nations stating that the U.S. is antagonistic toward its own queer citizens. The letter was submitted for the UN’s Universal Periodic Review, an assessment every five years of how each of its member countries are fulfilling their Human Rights Obligations. The 50 organizations cite a laundry list of cases demonstrating discrimination against LGBTQ workers and a government that turns its back on them.
“Now that the United States government is increasingly hostile to the rights of LGBTQ people—refusing to acknowledge even their basic dignity—we, the fifty undersigned legal experts and advocates, implore the United Nations to devote focus and attention to LGBTQ people’s experiences with discrimination and inequality,” the groups soberly ask.
Signers include Lambda Legal, the Transgender Law Center, Trans Lifeline, Equality California, The National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the National Black Justice Coalition, among others. However, advocates say the letter does not mean they have given up battling the Trump administration on LGBTQ rights at home.
Reporting on the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Individuals in the Changing World of Work
Dear Working Group Members,
We, the undersigned, write to share the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in workplaces in the United States for consideration in the Working Group’s study and report on Women’s Human Rights In The Changing World Of Work. This submission draws upon our collective expertise to highlight a group that faces significant obstacles to obtain employment, but whose experiences are frequently overlooked.
Consistent with the Working Group’s prompt, this submission devotes considerable focus to the experiences of LGBTQ women. However, our reporting also highlights the ways that transgender and gender non-conforming people of all genders—including transgender men and non-binary individuals—face bias, discrimination, and even violence in the workplace for reasons including (but not limited to) their gender identity and gender expression. Biases such as these are not isolated issues: they are derivative and reflective of systemic gender-based inequity and deprive already marginalized communities of enjoyment of even basic human rights—too often to life-threatening ends.
We made the conscious choice to broaden the scope of our reporting because we wanted to highlight the ways in which the gender-based injustices that inhibit and harm women— misogyny, sex stereotypes, and patriarchal policing of gender—are intrinsically linked to mechanisms that cause analogous harm to LGBTQ people including non-binary and genderqueer individuals, and transgender men. Rooting out the systems of discrimination that serve to deny LGBTQ people of all genders basic economic and social rights will also remove key barriers to the advancement of all women in American workplaces.
Our sincere hope is that learning about the experiences of LGBTQ women and transgender and gender non-conforming people of all genders will assist the Working Group with its current study and inform the scope of future projects to come.