The first-ever federal hearing on workplace protection for transgender people took place June 26 before the education and labor subcommittee of the House of Representatives.

Subcommittee chairman Robert Andrews (D-New Jersey) said that under federal law it is permissible to fire persons, or refuse to hire them, because they are transgender or are perceived to be gender non-conforming.

"To me, this makes no sense whatsoever," he said, adding that employment should depend only upon how well one does the job. "We don't measure our duty by the quantity of those who are aggrieved, we measure it by the depth of the grievance of those who are being discriminated against."

Last year the House passed a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, but it was stripped of protections based on gender identity. Since then, transgender organizations and their allies have been working to educate members of Congress and the public.

Representative Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), the only out lesbian serving in the House, pushed for an inclusive ENDA last year. On Thursday, she testified that the fact that Wisconsin had enacted legal protections made it easier for her to be honest and public about her sexual orientation from the start of her political career.

"The importance of non-discrimination laws cannot be overstated," she said. "Substantively, they provide real remedies and a chance to seek justice. Symbolically, they say to America, judge your fellow citizens by their integrity, character, and talents, not their sexual orientation, or gender identity, or their race or religion. These laws also say that irrational hate or fear have no place in our workplace."

Openly gay Representative Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) acknowledged that people often are uncomfortable with what is new and unfamiliar to them. "New and different sometimes make us nervous," he admitted. "When I first realized I was gay, it made me uncomfortable. But we do get used to each other."

"Every bill that I have ever been involved with, where we try to ban discrimination, has met the same argument – we have nothing against those people, they are okay, but it will be disruptive," Frank said. That excuse has been trotted out for race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. "People always say it is going to be disruptive, and it never is."

Frank pointed to one of the scheduled witnesses whose job offer was withdrawn when she revealed that she would be transitioning from male to female. This was at "the Library of Congress, our intellectual and cultural center." She was told, "Members of Congress won't respect you. I resent that," said Frank. He said that if discrimination can happen there, it can happen anywhere across the country.

"We are talking about responding as a compassionate society, knowing that fighting discrimination has worked well for this country, to extend it to a group that may be new, that may be disturbing for a few people, but there is no more reason to deny them that than to deny it to anybody else," he said.

Trans stories

David Schroer rose to the rank of colonel over a 25-year career in the U.S. Army, becoming a special forces officer, leading a top secret anti-terrorist unit, and regularly briefing the White House, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

He retired from the military in 2004, applied for and was hired as a counterterrorism expert with the Library of Congress. At the last meeting with a library official prior to starting the new job, he mentioned that he was in the process of transitioning and would be reporting to work as Diane. The job offer was withdrawn the next day.

"I had gone from a welcome addition to the staff to someone who was 'not a good fit' because I was a woman. Hero to zero in 24 hours," Schroer told the committee. She has pursued administrative and legal action to regain the job.

Diego Miguel Sanchez recounted his transition from female to male, which began at the age of 5 when he told his parents, "I felt like a boy inside. My mother showed me a magazine with Christine Jorgensen on the cover," the first widely publicized story of a male to female transition. "From that time on my parents gently, privately, dually socialized me, but it was our secret of sorts."

He was able to cope through the skills that his parents helped instill. He experienced the glass ceiling of working as a female in corporate America, saving up the money to make the desired transition.

Sanchez said his current identity is not questioned "because I have had the luxury of personally paying to transition to male and aligning my IDs and myself. But I have friends whose licenses and passports' gender doesn't match their identity, so they are disclosed as transgender the minute they show an ID, including when they try to get a job."

Sabrina Marcus Taraboletti was working "a dream come true" for 20 years as an engineer with the space shuttle program at the Kennedy Space Center. "In 2003 I was summarily fired six weeks after announcing that I would be changing my sex from male to female."

She was the fourth person to be fired from the space center while making such a transition. "They had no policies because no laws at the state or federal level required them to. My future, therefore, was left up to the interpretation of people who have no education in transgender issues or needs. Worse yet, no one really cared or wanted to learn, even though I made a diligent effort to educate them," she said.

It was simply easier for them to fire her.

Since then she has gone through savings and even been fired from a low-paying-job on a road crew fixing sidewalks because of her gender identity. She lost her wife and home to divorce but is still close to her college-age kids. "When I face discrimination, they face it, too. Why shouldn't there be a federal law?"

"Believe me, no one wakes up one morning and thinks, 'Hey, I think I'm going to change my sex today.' No one says, 'You know, living with all that discrimination and hatred won't be that bad after all.' Being transgender is something you are born with and simply have to deal with the best way you can," said Taraboletti.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and a transgender man, said, "We need more than a patchwork of state and local laws and employer policies. The brutal reality is, in most places in this country, a transgender worker who is fired or harassed for being transgender has no means of protection."

Opposition

Glen Lavy, an attorney with the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, asserted that protecting transgender persons in the workplace would impinge upon the deeply held religious beliefs of some people. He said, "Federal law should not make a moral judgment for all employers."

Andrews raised the hypothetical case of whether the deeply held beliefs of a pacifist employer should give him the right to deny hiring a Marine combat veteran on those grounds. Lavy said, "The employer should have the right to do that."

Representative Phil Hare (D-Illinois) referred to Jesus, but not by name, saying, "He was close to people that nobody else wanted to associate themselves with. I think we should remember that." He called it "a moral obligation for Congress to act" with legislation to protect those least able to protect themselves.

Lavy also showed a preoccupation with restroom issues as grounds for not hiring transgender persons. Minter countered under questioning, "We have a lot of experience with this issue now [from places where protections are in place] ... Any discomfort with co-workers will very quickly dissipate."

"Americans face energy crisis while House of Representatives holds a she-male hearing," screamed the headline of a statement distributed by the Traditional Values Coalition at the hearing. "These are deeply disturbed individuals who need therapy not coddling and affirmation," asserted Andrea Lafferty.

Other voices

"The hearing went wonderfully," Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said after its conclusion. "It's historic. Those of us who have doing this for a while are really amazed."

"Shannon Minter has done so much for people who want to be in same-sex marriages," brilliantly arguing the appeal before the California Supreme Court, Keisling said. "And now here he is, coming in afterwards, about rights for him. That is a particularly poignant thing for me. Seeing him here and finally getting to ask for something for him."

Minter was practically giddy after the hearing. "So much work went into making this day possible. So many people have worked for such a long time. Having a congressional hearing on this issue is a major milestone. It could possibly be the tipping point for us."

Keisling acknowledged that legislation is highly unlikely to move this year, but "I'm really hopeful that in the next Congress we are going to get all LGBT people protected. I think it has become pretty clear that a stand alone bill [ENDA excluding transpersons] is absolutely unacceptable to almost everybody in the LGBT community."