By Ann Rostow–
Straight Talk!
You may have seen headlines recently proclaiming that the Supreme Court sided with a heterosexual woman who claimed she suffered workplace discrimination based on her sexual orientation in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Well, yes and no. The Court said nothing about the woman’s actual claim, which sounds to me like a pity party even though I know next to nothing about the details. (I’m bad! Cue Michael Jackson.) Instead, the unanimous Court ruled that when an employer is accused of discriminating against a majority, like a man or a white staff member, the employer is not required to produce background evidence in its defense. Prior to this opinion, by Justice Jackson, some appellate courts did hold these types of cases to a tougher standard.
The decision is a narrow one, but yet again the justices managed to strike another teeny tiny blow against minority civil rights, making it somewhat easier to complain that, say, Black females get all the good jobs, or gay transwomen make more money. You get the drift. In this case, which will now be tried at a lower court under the new rules, the straight woman wanted a promotion, which went to a lesbian with lesser credentials. Tough luck, sistah!
Legal eagle Chris Geidner, writing in his Law Dork column, noted that Justice Jackson took pains to cite Bostock v Clayton County, a 6–3 decision written by Justice Gorsuch that effectively added sexual orientation and gender identity to the protections of Title VII back in 2020. Justice Gorsuch wrote that sexual orientation and gender were subsets of “sex,” which is a protected category under Title VII (and many other civil rights laws), leading some of us naive court watchers to believe that our community might now be covered under Title IX and other bans on sex discrimination throughout federal law. We’ve had no such luck, however, as conservative courts have bent over backwards to make distinctions between Bostock and other cases. Yet, we can hope that Jackson’s citations to Bostock in her nine-page unanimous opinion here will add weight to our future arguments. Maybe.
Geidner also made the point that the liberal justices, when assigned the opinions for unanimous decisions, were managing to narrow the reasoning and avoid adding much to bad precedent, even as the conservative side comes out on top. An opinion by Sotomayor in favor of our frequent legal foe, Catholic Charities, for example, emphasized the First Amendment’s dictate that the state may not favor one religion over another. Even as the social services group won the right to avoid Wisconsin’s unemployment taxes, Sotomayor’s comments advanced a neutrality argument on which we all agree—particularly those of us of the Pastafarian faith who follow the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
We still await the likely horrible ruling on whether Tennessee, and other states, have the constitutional right to outlaw medical treatment for transgender youth. As you no doubt recall from years past, the Court issues all its opinions prior to July 4, usually at the end of June, so we don’t have much longer to wait.
A Little Learning
I just reviewed some of my recent columns in search of news about Polish elections. I see here that a right-wing Trump type edged out a moderate candidate in the presidential runoff June 2. Running on an anti-gay platform, Karol Nawrocki outdrew his opponent 50 to 49 percent, leaving the current centrist Prime Minister in a political mess that I can’t untangle without excessive effort. I was particularly confused by the feeling that I had just read that a good guy won this same runoff, but after checking, I realized that a good guy won in Romania last month, not Poland. I’ve been sipping lightly from the Pierian Spring when it comes to Eastern Europe. Again.
Oh, and before we continue, I just read that an expert in baby names is telling parents to stop calling their kids “Olivia” and “Liam,” which have been the number one names for six years running. Really? Six years? How does that happen? “Noah” and “Emma” have been the number two names for six years as well.
What are these parents thinking? These poor kids are going to be “Liam H.,” and “Emma P.,” and “Olivia S.,” all though school. And when they finally get into the workforce, they’ll probably change their names to John, Kate, and Mary in order to stand out from the crowd.
Mixed Messages
Meanwhile, I was all set to write my column last week when I discovered to my delight that our publication schedule had changed to this week. Yay! I was on a family beach vacation so I tossed aside responsibilities and lounged by the sea. However, I did do quite a bit of research earlier, which is now meaningless because days have gone by and I’ve forgotten the underlying contexts.
My useless notes include: “orange cats,” “Utah report on trans health,” “Pope said something bad back in the day,” and “Which lesbian scent are you Le Labo Santal 33.” That’s just for starters!
Well, it wasn’t too hard to google “Le Labo,” a perfume company based in Grasse and New York, the former, of course, being the famed center of scent in the hills of Provence behind Cannes (or Nice or wherever). SANTAL 33 will set you back $235 for 50 ml, and I’m not sure where the lesbian angle comes into play.
“Imagine sitting in solitude on the rugged, wide plains of the American West, firelight on your face, indigo-blue night skies above,” a marketing pitch suggests. “There is nothing around save for the soft, desert wind. You. Are. Free.”
This image, we learn, was the inspiration for SANTAL 33, “a perfume that touches the vast and wild universality of this dream … that intoxicates.” SANTAL 33 is “an open fire … . The soft drift of smoke … . Where sensuality rises after the light has gone.”
Hey, I’m sold! A manifesto under the “About Us” rubric contains a dozen or so beliefs, ending with, “We believe that we are only young once, but we can be immature forever,” and, “We believe that explanation kills art. Therefore, forget about all of this!” I’m a big fan of both notions.
As for the Pope, I’m skipping this item, and if I’m not mistaken, the orange cats have an unusual genetic makeup that gives them their color. Surely that’s true of all cats, both common and rare, but I think I had the idea that I’d use the orange cats as a springboard to a discussion of, what? Transgender girls? Middle-aged gay men? I can’t recall.
As for Utah, I guess Republican lawmakers arranged for a study on transgender youth healthcare, which was designed to guide future policy. The 1,000-page study of thousands of transgender people was organized in 2023, and was just published by Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services. It concluded that gender care produced “positive mental health and psychosocial functioning outcomes.” Ooops. That’s not what the representatives wanted to hear.
Class Action Status Certified for Transgender Inmates
On June 3, D.C. Judge Royce Lamberth, the last active Reagan nominee on the federal bench, ruled in favor of transgender inmates who seek to maintain their hormones and other healthcare while in federal prison. Judge Lamberth certified over 1,000 inmates in the class action suit that challenges Trump’s anti-trans executive orders on constitutional and other grounds. The suit argues that the sudden denial of medication and care violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But before reaching the Eighth Amendment claim, Judge Lamberth agreed that discontinuing treatment likely breached the Administrative Procedure Act.
The Act forbids the Bureau of Prisons from “arbitrarily [depriving] inmates of medications or other lifestyle accommodations that its own medical staff have deemed to be medically appropriate without considering the implications of that decision,” Lamberth wrote. As such, the judge concluded, the plaintiffs were likely to win their challenge and the Bureau of Prisons was enjoined from fussing with everyone’s drugs until after the underlying litigation was concluded.
I have long since lost track of the number of transgender civil rights cases now in the courts, the status of these cases, the specific challenges or rights at stake, and the preliminary injunctions either granted or not. I have lost track of the number of anti-transgender state laws under consideration around the country, although I think there are around 600 such proposals, and maybe 50 or more have even enacted. I’ve lost track of book bans, drag show prohibitions, sports bans, bathroom laws, and attacks on health. I know the High Court just allowed the military to oust transgender soldiers, heroes who have stood ready to die for the United States and who are now rewarded with disdainful dismissal.
And I’m sure you saw that the Trump Defense Department is planning to rename the USS Harvey Milk, removing the honor from the nation’s first openly gay elected politician, a Korean War veteran who volunteered for the Navy, and was booted in 1955 for being gay. Milk was assassinated in his office in 1978.
Shameful.
Meow
I read the other day that a GOP state legislator in Texas has proposed a bill making it illegal to supply cat litter to public school kids, as if that’s a thing. But there’s more! The F.U.R.R.I.E.S. (Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education) Act bans “non-human behavior,” including “barking, meowing, wearing a leash, licking oneself or others for the purpose of grooming, and wearing a fur suit or anything else that is inconsistent with behaviors or accessories typically displayed by a member of the Homo sapiens species.” The idea is based on the nonsensical theory that some schools allow kids to pretend to be animals and cater to their stated “identities” by providing pet products. It’s not clear where this originated, and obviously it’s been repeatedly debunked. And yet here we are.
There is also a pending bill in the Lone Star State that simply gets rid of anything DEI in public education including student clubs that offend the powers that be. Writing in The Houston Chronicle, law professor Dale Carpenter noted that forcing LGBT clubs to close would be a flat violation of the First Amendment, and would also be illegal under the Equal Access Act, which protects student clubs against viewpoint discrimination. The Chronicle paywall snapped into place and severed my connection to the handsome professor, but not before I got the gist of his remarks.
Let me just say that this is not the Texas envisioned by the makers of SANTAL 33.
And finally, while we’re on the subject of outrageous, illegal, nasty posturing by small-dicked Republican men, the attorney general of Florida, James Uthmeier, has strong-armed a private fitness club, Life Time, into banning transgender women from its locker rooms in Palm Beach, even though anti-trans state bathroom laws only apply to public facilities. At first, the gym stuck to its guns, but after a few days, the company reversed itself when it seemed clear that Uthmeier was willing to drain the situation for publicity. The gym became a target after a woman, Sonja Horton, claimed she saw a man in the locker room and did not feel safe.
I couldn’t dig up any more information on Sonja’s revelation, but the last time I saw a story like this, the “man” was a transwoman who had transitioned with surgery over a decade earlier. She was a regular at the pool, where some young girl saw her backside naked, had a conniption, and went crying to the press. I’m not sure what exactly Sonja did or did not see, and I’ll just leave it at that.
arostow@aol.com
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on June 12, 2025
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