This opinion regards HR 2015, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). It is a proposed U.S. federal law that would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The bill provides employment protections similar to those of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (also known as "Title VII"), but specifically directed to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees. Ed.

As Benjamin Franklin rather pithily said while signing the Declaration of Independence, "we must all hang together, for surely we will all hang separately."

While I can certainly understand Congressman Frank's position, I for one am not willing to jettison the trans community simply to pass a bill protecting three other letters in our community. Would we be willing to drop lesbians from the bill? What if it was gay men who were being dropped, in order to get protection for lesbians? We should be fighting ever harder for the transfolk than we are--because if ANY part of our community needs these protections, it is the transfolk. And I am speaking as one whose partner was the victim of a brutal hate crime. Turning our back on the transfolk, to me, would be one of the darkest hours of our struggle to obtain out Constitutionally guaranteed rights as American citizens, and something that would set a dangerous precedent for the future. To make another analogy, cutting the transfolk loose is no different than the way the poor, the elderly, and the infirm were abandoned in the wake of the failure of the federal levees in New Orleans.

As for the argument about excluding the transfolk on the basis of confusion and misunderstanding (how do we explain to seven year old Timmy how Mr. Smith because Miss Smith over summer vacation?), well, that argument is almost not even worth countering. Children are more accepting and open-minded than adults, and this has never been about the children, but rather the discomfort of the adults who have to answer their questions...and the proper response to this question should really be, "so you advocate denying a segment of the American population their constitutional rights simply because another segment of the population doesn't understand them? That's the kind of slippery slope the Germans were on in 1933...and so you also advocate footnoting the Constitution to exclude certain Americans, a Constitution that millions have died defending since 1787?"