The case has already made legal history
The news media just lie to us about this.
A 79-year-old woman has reasonable grounds to claim that a Maine assisted-living facility discriminated against her for being transgender when it rejected her as a potential resident, the Maine Human Rights Commission found.
In other words a 79-year-old man wants to force himself on a women-only assisted living facility.
The commission’s 3-2 vote on Monday sets in motion a process that could result in a lawsuit being filed against Sunrise Assisted Living in the town of Jonesport on a claim of violating state nondiscrimination law by denying Marie King’s application for residency.
King’s attorneys say the case has already made legal history as the nation’s first known discrimination complaint filed by a transgender person against a long-term care facility.
Fun for the lawyers then. A first! Fame! Glory! Not so fun for the woman who has to share a room with King.
“This kind of discrimination against transgender people needing long-term care is far from an isolated incident, but it is also plainly illegal,” said Karen L. Loewy, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, which is not involved in the case.
Quisling. What about the discrimination against women who don’t want to share living spaces with random men?
Nearly half of U.S. states, including Maine, have laws explicitly forbidding discrimination based on gender identity in both housing and public accommodation, legal categories that apply to homes caring for the elderly.
But how are we defining discrimination here? Women are allowed to have spaces away from men, so in what sense is it “discrimination” for women to want spaces away from men including men who call themselves women? Women who need spaces away from men don’t care what the men call themselves, they care what the men are, which is men. Why does this law “forbidding discrimination” ignore the reality in favor of the saying? Just saying usually is not enough as a matter of law.
In July 2021, a California appellate court struck down a portion of a 2017 state law that made it a misdemeanor for nursing home staff to deliberately and repeatedly misgender residents or use their former name — known in the trans community as “deadnaming.” The court found that this part of the law violated staff members’ right to free speech under the First Amendment. The California Supreme Court is reviewing the decision and may ultimately reverse it.
The California law has stood at the vanguard of a nascent movement in Democratic-controlled states to establish explicit legal protections against discrimination for LGBTQ seniors in nursing homes.
Which sounds nice if you don’t pause to think about it, but in reality what it means is that women will be forced to have men around whether they want to or not.
“Long-term care facilities need to understand that they’re going to have lesbian, gay and transgender residents or applicants,” said Chris Erchull, a staff attorney at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders in Boston, the nonprofit firm representing King.
But those are not the same thing. Lesbian and gay, no problem, but transgender means forcing women to share bedrooms with men. This is not as progressive as they’re pretending it is.
The human rights commission’s decision, Erchull said, “is a reminder to all assisted-living homes and other long-term care facilities that they have to treat people with respect, compassion and understanding.”
Where’s the respect, compassion and understanding for women who don’t want to share bedrooms with men?
It’s deliberate, willful ignorance. It’s not that they don’t know this, it’s that they do know it and are ignoring the implications of their position. They “know” their position is the only right one, so they don’t have to think of the real world impact on anyone outside of the “most marginalized” group whose cause they are championing. They’re Champions! Allies! Heroes! Suggesting that they might need to rethink things knocks leaves off their laurels. But saying “rethin” suggests there was thought involved in the first place, which is likely not the case. Thought-terminating mantras are not likely to lead you anywhere you want to be. It might take a few law suits, any number of assaults, and maybe even a death or two, but thought will happen. Reality bats last.
Following the Tribunal Tweets of Maya Forstater’s employment tribunal procedure has been most enlightening in this regard. This is in a much less dangerous context, and much earlier along the path that self-ID will inevitably lead, but most instructive. Not to take anything from Maya Forstater’s strength and courage for following this through, but it will likely be another warning that is ignored. Here we can see the fall of leaves from self-awarded laurel wreaths in real time. Witness after witness for Forstater’s erstwhile employers have confessed ignorance of UK law, ignorance of the culture of lively debate in the UK office, and a complete unwillingness to look at or engage the vital points that Forstater was bringing up and their impact on the company’s operation in the UK. Her views were simply deemed “transphobic” and beyond the pale. When asked, they have admitted that they didn’t understand the points she was making up, but whatever they were, what she was saying was making them “uncomfortable.” They just shut down and refused to examine and evaluate her position at all in the face of its obvious wrongness, to the point where they believed there was absolutely no way she could express it without causing “offence.” It would seem, from their perspective, that no good faith, charitable appreciation of her views was even possible. Thus absolved, they must have felt it uneccesary to perform the due diligence demanded by their positions, felt fully justified in the decision they had already made to terminate her fellowship at CGD. They must have been ecstatic when the first ruling determined that Forstater’s views were “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” Now that they have to explain themselves and justify their actions, now that they are confronted with a questioner who does not share their view that Forstater’s beliefs are inherently unworthy, a questioner who must be answered, they’re completely lost. Outside the hothouse world of social media activism, having to walk through the flawed, prejudicial “process” to which they subjected Forstater, they demonstrate just how shallow, poorly thought out, and indefensible their position is. Now that they have to think, they are left floundering, with nothing but their prejudice and bias to fall back on. If it weren’t for the fact that they’ve blithely fucked around with someone’s life, I could almost feel sorry for them. It’s like watching repeated slow motion footage of crash test dummies, as their nice, shiny certainties plow headlong at full speed into the consequences of their short-sighted self-righteousness. Congratulations to Maya’s lawyer, Ben Cooper. Wow.
YNnB, your synopsis of the Forstater/CGD tribunal is apropos to Ophelia’s post above, and your synopsis is deep, wide, and accurate. My favorite part is,
And my favorite part of that is,
I point and rage-laugh at that. But this is rare, that we get to see the actual individual thinking and social dynamics inside an organization treating Maya the way they did.
The first known discrimination complaint… filed by a man claiming to be a woman… against an assisted living facility. The lawyers are basically manufacturing that first, just look at those qualifiers. Next it will be the first discrimination complaint, filed by a trans person, against an assisted living facility, on a Wednesday.