This is not directly a Title IX issue, but it's good news during prom season when we seem to only hear stories about how students who are gender non-conforming have their proms marred by administrators, parents, and other students who are apparently very concerned with who gets to wear tuxes and who gets to wear dresses.
This week the first transgender student (MTF) in an American public school was crowned Prom Queen. Andii Viveros was voted Prom Queen at McFatter High School in Florida after beating out 14 other young women for the title. There was a movement to remove Viveros from the ballot, but Viveros, president of the school's GSA, wrote a speech to explain her* position.
* The article refers to Viveros with male pronouns, I chose to use female pronouns because the article mentioned that Viveros has been living as a woman for two years.
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Tampilkan postingan dengan label transgender. Tampilkan semua postingan
Kamis, 02 Juni 2011
Sabtu, 23 April 2011
Article Seeks Title IX's Application to Transgender Student Harassment
A law student's article in the Texas Review of Law and Politics Journal seeks to leverage Title IX's prohibition on sex discrimination to offer fully protection against harassment to transgender students. Citing statistics from GLSEN, the author, Tina Sohaili, points out that transgender are the targeted for bullying and harassment more frequently than any other student group. Such harassment frequently target the students' personal characteristics, such as appearance, clothes, and voice, as not matching the masculine or feminine stereotypes associated with the transgender students' assigned sex.
Drawing on analogous employment discrimination law, Sohaili argues that the liability Title IX imposes on school districts that ignore sexual harassment between peers covers peer harassment motivated by transgender students' gender nonconformity. She supports this argument by pointing out that some lower courts have already recognized harassment on the basis of gender nonconformity a subset of sex discrimination in cases that do not involve transgender students.
Importantly, while Sohaili argues that courts should construe Title IX to afford this protection to transgender students, she recognizes that courts have not universally recognized sex discrimination law's application to gender nonconformity in the employment context. Therefore, while this interpretation affords the best protection to transgender students under federal law, even stronger protection would result from changes to the law -- such as that proposed in the Student Nondiscrimination Act -- which expressly prohibit discrimination on the basis of not only sex, but actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.
Citation: Tina Sohaili, Securing Safe Schools: Using Title IX Liability to Address Peer Harassment of Transgender Students, 20 Tex. Rev. L & Politics 79 (2011).
Drawing on analogous employment discrimination law, Sohaili argues that the liability Title IX imposes on school districts that ignore sexual harassment between peers covers peer harassment motivated by transgender students' gender nonconformity. She supports this argument by pointing out that some lower courts have already recognized harassment on the basis of gender nonconformity a subset of sex discrimination in cases that do not involve transgender students.
Importantly, while Sohaili argues that courts should construe Title IX to afford this protection to transgender students, she recognizes that courts have not universally recognized sex discrimination law's application to gender nonconformity in the employment context. Therefore, while this interpretation affords the best protection to transgender students under federal law, even stronger protection would result from changes to the law -- such as that proposed in the Student Nondiscrimination Act -- which expressly prohibit discrimination on the basis of not only sex, but actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.
Citation: Tina Sohaili, Securing Safe Schools: Using Title IX Liability to Address Peer Harassment of Transgender Students, 20 Tex. Rev. L & Politics 79 (2011).
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