AFT President Randi Weingarten Condemns Trump Attack on Transgender People

WASHINGTON—In response to the Trump administration’s leaked plan to exclude transgender people from civil rights law by changing the legal definition of “sex,” AFT President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement:

“Just days before the midterm elections, the Trump administration is throwing red meat to its political base with yet another egregious attack on civil rights in our country. The president has once against chosen to target certain communities with hateful political stunts, instead of focusing on bringing people together around the economy, healthcare and public education.

“The slow and thoughtful evolution about what it means to identify with a gender different from the one you’re assigned at birth is based on science, and on listening to the experiences of the transgender community. Yet this administration favors ignoring that research and those experiences in an attempt to unilaterally redefine gender identity, thereby telling the 2 million transgender people across the United States: You are invisible. 

“By legally changing the definition of sex as strictly male or female, this plan would exclude trans people from critical civil rights protections in the places where people expect and need their government to protect them—public schools, hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters. Instead of looking after our most vulnerable, this proposal would enshrine hate and intolerance into law, and ignore decades of legal precedent that establishes transgender discrimination as a form of sex discrimination. 

“Donald Trump and his administration believe his political agenda is more important than the rights of everyday Americans. Their insistence on putting cruelty over decency should make clear to voters whose side the GOP is on.”