Shay Olmstead, UMass Amherst PhD candidate in history, published an article in the Washington Post on April 21 titled, “Visible activism is key to protecting trans people from bigoted laws.”
Olmstead uses the recent introduction of hundreds of bills in state legislatures across the country — that prevent trans youth from medically transitioning and from using bathrooms or locker rooms that align with their gender identity — to examine how LGBTQ activists have historically attempted to fight against discrimination by using laws designed to protect disabled Americans.
In the 1950s, it was not irregular to segregate disabled people from abled society. Doing so bolstered a narrative that disabled people were naturally inferior to abled people and therefore unable to care for themselves. Come the 1960s, activists began to coalesce around the demand for change.
“They argued that their limited participation in society resulted not from biological inferiority but rather from deliberate segregation — in the forms of institutionalization, prejudice, inaccessible architecture and infrastructure, discriminatory government policies and unfair employment practices,” writes Olmstead.
Advocate groups turned to the Civil Rights Movement for ways to demonstrate, including sit-ins, civil disobedience, lobbying, and other publicly visible campaigns. These actions helped shed the stigma attached to the disabled community and wrought the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which required federally funded institutions to become accessible and for employers to provide accommodations to disabled workers; workers in the trans community also sought the protections provided in the Rehabilitation Act.
“Between 1980 and 1990, at least five trans women used legislation that protected the disabled to resist the employment discrimination they faced,” writes Olmstead. “While these women were able to make a stand within the legal system (occasionally with support from national civil rights groups, such as the ACLU), their cases were not accompanied by organized mass protests, acts of civil disobedience or other orchestrated activist efforts.”
With no national organizational network to help reshape public opinion, “only two out of the five women found success in court.” Congress then amended the 1988 Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) so that trans people could not use use the ADA to challenge discrimination in the workplace. After years of AIDS activism and increased public pressure to protect medical and employment rights of people with HIV or AIDs, the ADA was passed in 1990. But without the foundation of a national network, trans people were excluded from the protections of the ADA.
Today, notes Olmstead, “trans people in the United States are far more visible and better organized than they were in the 1970s and 1980s” but to counter continuous conservative ideology that seeks to portray trans people as dangerous to women and children “LGBTQ activists need to sustain visible public pressure, while also working through the legal system.”
Olmstead’s article is available to read here via the Washington Post. Please note that this content may appear behind a paywall.