News & Commentary

The verdict is in, it seems: LGBT co-parents can have their kids unilaterally taken away from them by their former partner (the legal parent) - and the highest court in Michigan has essentially said it doesn't give a damn.

It isn’t really about bathrooms, is it?

The number of Americans who say they know a transgender person is on the rise but, “knowing” a transgender person and being familiar with their lives and the challenges transgender people face every day are two vastly different things. To make that difference tangible to non-transgender people and especially to those who make policy and report about us in the news, transgender people must effectively engage with lawmakers, the media and the public around them.

UPDATE: On July 5, 2016, the Michigan Court of Appeals officially made it more difficult for same-sex co-parents to have parental rights with their children after a break-up. The Court reversed a favorable decision in Lake v Putnam, where our client Michelle Lake co-parented her son with her former partner, Kerri Putnam prior to marriage equality being available in Michigan.  After the parties broke up, Putnam took their son away and refused to allow Michelle to have any contact.  She filed a petition for parenting time arguing that she was an equitable parent and had legal standing to do so.  The trial court agreed and Putnam appealed.  Without even considering the best interests of their son, the Court of Appeals majority stated that because the parties were not married (even though Michigan law unconstitutionally prohibited them from doing so), Michelle had no parental rights nor legal standing to be able to see her son. 

It was Monday, May 9, 2016 and the week began with a press conference. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Vanita Gupta, head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, were to announce a legal challenge to North Carolina’s anti-transgender House Bill 2. Lynch in her remarks compared laws like HB2 to Jim Crow laws of the past and as the nation’s first female, African-American woman attorney general her words directly confronting discrimination against the transgender community held special weight.

For decades transgender people have been fired or turned away from jobs just because of who they are. Courts and federal agencies are finally starting to recognize this for what it is — illegal sex discrimination — and they’re holding employers accountable.But now, a Michigan funeral home is trying to turn back the clock by claiming that this country’s religious freedom protections give it a license to discriminate against transgender employees. As we explain in our recently filed friend-of-the-court brief, religious freedom doesn’t give employers a free pass to evade our civil rights laws, whether those laws are being used to remedy discrimination against women, people of color, or transgender individuals.

Near the end of March, legislators and the governor of North Carolina jammed through the now infamous HB2 “bathroom bill” mandating that transgender people use only those restrooms that match their assigned sex at birth.  Immediately, there was uproar from business, LGBTQ advocates, constitutional law scholars and everyday ordinary people, who saw through the ridiculous idea that transgender people are somehow dangerous and need to be swept into segregated spaces.

Does religious freedom include the right to discriminate? The first amendment says you and your religious exercise are protected rights. But practicing your faith can’t come at the expense of other people’s well-being, public safety, and taxpayer dollars.

When I began writing a series of stories chronicling the lives of transgender people, my goal was to help educate the public. Yet I’m learning just as much in the process.