Equality, Law, and the Trans Community

In this episode, host Rose Campbell is joined by Cary Franklin to discuss nationwide efforts to erode the rights of transgender people. While the recent Supreme Court decisions allowing states to ban transgender girls from participating in sports at publicly funded schools have garnered attention, this is only the latest attack by the Trump administration.  Beyond barring transgender people from receiving medical care or serving in the military, the Trump administration has sought to give the government control over how, where, and when transgender people can express their gender identity. At the heart of this struggle is the search for equality under the law. Drawing from the history of anti-discrimination and suffragette movements, Cary considers what equality means in a legal sense, and explores how equal standing is created under the law. While the Supreme Court has historically considered discrimination based on gender stereotypes to be illegal, in recent years the Court has shifted away from this inclusive precedent. In the current political climate, the idea of biological sex is being wielded in much the same way earlier administrations treated different genders or races as "separate but equal," an attitude that appears to create equality while actually perpetuating and reifying hierarchical categories under the law. In this climate of constant attacks on the rights of the transgender community, Cary considers recent legislation and speculates about what the future may hold.

Transcript

Narrator 0:11

Welcome to the History Politics Podcast, putting the past to work from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

Rose Campbell 0:40

Welcome to the History Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work. I'm Rose Campbell, Assistant Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, which hosts this podcast. On June 30th, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that states could ban transgender girls from participating in sports at publicly funded schools. This decision is the latest in a long line of both state and federal court decisions legislating the rights of transgender individuals in the United States, particularly under the Trump administration. A 2025 federal ruling upheld certain state laws that made it illegal to provide gender-affirming care for minors. Over half of the states now have such laws in place. And in early 2026, a new law in Kansas prohibited transgender people from updating their state IDs to match their gender, effectively invalidating thousands of state-issued IDs and driver's licenses overnight. These laws are part of a concerted nationwide effort to curtail transgender people's rights, to obtain medical care, to be called by the right names, to serve in the military, and to be free from discrimination in a variety of public spaces. At the heart of this issue is whether transgender people have the right to express their gender identity, or whether the government and other decision makers can classify transgender people according to the sex they were labeled at birth and discriminate against them if they fail to conform. Joining me today to discuss this new ruling and the overall attitude of the U.S. government towards transgender individuals is Dr. Cary Franklin. Cary is the McDonald Wright Chair of Law at UCLA, the faculty director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy, and the Faculty Director of the Williams Institute. Her work focuses on the historical development of conceptions of equality in American law and how this history influences contemporary legal protections in the context of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and race. She's also been a guest on this podcast several times before, so we're delighted to have her back with us. Cary, thank you so much for joining us today.

Cary Franklin 2:55

Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to more conversation.

Rose Campbell 2:58

Awesome. Well, let's dive right in. I want to orient us first with a brief look at your own work on development of ideas of equality within American law. What does equality mean? Who does it apply to? And how have conceptions of equality under the law changed over time?

Cary Franklin 3:16

I think I want to go back to 1868 and start there because that's when the United States amended its constitution after the Civil War to add protections for equality into our central governing document. And what that provision in the Constitution means when it says that everybody is entitled to equal protection is that nobody will be subordinated, nobody will be made second class, nobody will be made into, no one will be forced into a caste system. So is there is this anti-subordination, anti-caste idea that we are going to come out of slavery and we are going to have full and equal inclusion of all peoples in the polity. Now, there's an ongoing debate about what this kind of equality entails. How do we stop the kind of subjugation that the framers were worried about when they wrote the 14th Amendment after the Civil War? And it's interesting. Sometimes this goal of equality can be achieved by treating people the same. So men and women should have the same right to vote. All we need for equality is that they have the same right to vote. Or maybe with respect to marriage, different sex couples and same-sex couples both need the right to marry and then they're being treated equally. But sometimes equality requires different treatment. So if you think of students with disabilities, they meet, they might need specialized forms of support in order to have equal educational opportunity. You might need sex-segregated basketball teams at UCLA in order for men and women to have equal athletic opportunity. It's not always easy to figure out what this equality requires, but the North Star is what produces equal membership and inclusion in the policy. What ensures that there's not a caste system or a subordination or second-class status that some people have. So in my own work, I'm interested in the ideological constructs that have been used over time to deny people this equality. And if you think about separate but equal, that was one of those conceptions that denied people equality or full membership. So the idea was you could have separate pools, separate rail cars, separate water fountains, separate schools, but they were equal. They were just different. And that was a for a very long time, that was a construct that prevented people from the full inclusion that I would consider equality. Similarly, in the context of sex, there was a separate spheres ideology that was often applied to white people anyway, that said men and women have different spheres. They're equal. Women are in the home, men are in the public sphere, but those are equal. And we worked over decades and centuries in this country to overcome those constructs and to understand why they were not consistent with full inclusion. And when I think about the nation's 250th birthday, which we are now celebrating, that's what makes me think I'm proud of this country. That's the best part of our tradition, is all of the people who marched, who debated, who worked tirelessly in a million small and big ways to overcome those constructs that were preventing people from being included and spread this idea of equality to more and more people. To me, that's the best story one could tell about America.

Rose Campbell 6:44

I love that. A very, a very positive approach, I think. So let's a lot of your work has focused on LGBTQ rights broadly, you know, within this context of equality. So I'd be curious how you've seen attitudes and laws change over time, especially under the first and now second Trump administration, but just in general throughout your practice. What trend what are the trends that you see?

Cary Franklin 7:09

Okay. If you thought I was positive, we're gonna now shift in another direction from what I have just been describing. Uh it doesn't take, yeah, it doesn't take an expert to see that we've been moving further away from equality and inclusion in recent years where LGBT people are uh involved. There were, I I should preface this by saying there's been a lot of progress over the last decades for the LGBTQ movement. In 2015, the Supreme Court said that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, and there have been some other victories we can talk about later. But recently, there's been a violent reversal of this progress. And in part, that's because President Trump and the movement that he's part of really have made transgender people a central part of their campaign. There have been blistering attacks, endless repeated attacks on this vulnerable group. You may remember the Kamala is for they-them ads that uh that were on the airwaves uh consistently before the November election. And as soon as the president took office this time, Project 2025 started to be implementing. There were executive orders, and many of the first executive orders that President Trump put into place were aimed at excluding transgender people. So there were executive orders excluding transgender people from the military, people who had spent their whole lives serving their country honorably. There are efforts, laws to uh remove correct gender markers from passports, to transfer transgender women into men's prisons, to stop funding and ban gender-affirming care, to stop transgender girls and women from playing sports, to prevent transgender people from using bathrooms that accord with their gender identity. I could go on. There's a record number of state laws being proposed and passed limiting transgender rights. And I don't see this slowing. The president talks about transgender people most weeks. He was just talking recently about, quote, the mutilation of our children, which uh is a neologism, I guess, referring to gender-affirming care. There's been uh a lot of talk in Texas, including from the White House, about James Tallerico, the Democrats nominated, called him the first transgender Senate candidate. He's not transgender. Transgender is just serving as an insult. It's just serving as a way of trying to degrade people. You mentioned Kansas's law and validating transgender people's licenses. Idaho recently passed a law prohibiting transgender people from using public restrooms. And the the onslaught continues. The trends are negative.

Rose Campbell 9:53

And I'm sure you're familiar with this, but for our listeners, there is actually a website, uh, translegislation.com, where you can track how many anti-trans bills have been uh introduced across the country in just this past year. It is not an encouraging number, I'm afraid, um, along with what you were saying. So, um, but that that is a way to track the bills that have introduced and those that have passed or failed. So you brought up a lot of these different rulings and things like that that uh the court has issued or that President Trump has issued. And in many of these rulings and decisions that we're discussing, the court focuses on the concept of quote, biological sex, end quote, right? So what does the court mean by biological sex and how is this concept driving its rulings? So, in this legal sense, what's at stake for the court and the inter-transgender movement in defining sex in this way in cases where specifically transgender people's rights are at stake?

Cary Franklin 10:50

Yeah, that's a great and important question. And I want to focus here on biological sex from a legal perspective. So I'm not talking uh from the perspective of a doctor here or a scientist. I am speaking in the legal context. What is happening is that, quote, biological sex is one of those constructs that I was talking about earlier, like separate but equal or separate spheres. Now, biological sex is being invoked by courts to deny people rights. And I'm gonna get a little bit into legal doctrine to try to explain how that's happening. So let me back up and say, starting basically in the 1970s, American law, both constitutional law and statutory law, began to ban discrimination based on sex. So it was no longer legal to discriminate on the basis of sex. And so conservatives, people defending the status quo, people who didn't like these new protections, started to argue that this was a very narrow protection. And it just protected against discrimination based on, quote, biological sex, which means the only things that violated these prohibitions on sex discrimination were things that treated all men differently from all women. Like if you said no woman could vote, okay, that's based on biological sex, and that is discrimination. But if you fired all the mothers, or if you fired all the pregnant women in your workplace, or if you did what some airlines did and you placed weight restrictions on women, but not on men, so they could be fit stewardesses. These are all cases that I'm citing. Um, the argument was that's not sex discrimination because that's not based on biological sex. Women who aren't pregnant or women who are thin are allowed to work here. So it's based on something other than biological sex. You can see the way this construct was used to try to narrow the meaning of sex discrimination and what got covered and to continue to allow a lot of discrimination and only get at the very narrow range of things where you were just saying women can't do X. Ruth Bader-Ginsburg and other rights advocates in the 1970s attacked this concept. And they said, no, discrimination on the basis of sex is broader than that. Discrimination on the basis of sex means anytime people are being forced to conform to traditional sex roles, to traditional sex stereotypes, that too is discrimination on the basis of sex. You don't have to discriminate against all women in order to be discriminating on the basis of sex or all men. You can discriminate if you are forcing people to conform to traditional notions of sex. And there's a whole long decades worth of precedent saying that. She won. That became how we understood sex discrimination in American law. And that attempt to use biological sex to really curtail what this concept uh protected got overcome. And that is that is one of the great victories. I would say that's probably the great victory in legal sex discrimination doctrine. Now, more recently, LGBT people have started to benefit from that way of thinking about sex discrimination because they've started to say, hey, one of the ways you're discriminating against us is on the basis of sex. You're requiring us to conform to traditional notions of how we should behave based on the gender you're labeling us or how we how we were labeled at birth. If we were labeled male at birth, you think we should marry a woman, but that's con that's forcing conformity to sex notions of how people should behave on the basis of sex. Or if you think I'm labeled male at birth, you think I should wear these kinds of clothes or have this kind of gender expression or identify in masculine. But I but I don't want to, and you can't make me conform to those. The law says so. And there were a number of victories that LGBT people won on the basis of this understanding of sex discrimination. Now, what we're seeing is the radical reassertion of this notion of biological sex, meaning it's just if you say no women or no men, and that's the only thing that counts as sex discrimination. And transgender people are starting to be bitten by this in a very significant way because the courts are starting to say when you discriminate against a transgender person, you're not discriminating on the basis of sex, you're not discriminating against men as a group or women as a group, you're discriminating against this particular group of people, and that's fine, and that gets no protection in the law. And I guess I just want to end by saying it's particularly interesting to me that the anti-trans movement tries to pit transgender people against women and argue that transgender people are undermining women's rights when actually what's going on is the reassertion of all these doctrines to try to hurt transgender people, especially biological sex, are really undermining everybody's right to be protected against sex discrimination. And so I just, it is very important, I think, to understand that a lot of the utterances that courts are now making to deny transgender rights are really curtailing the rights we all have against sex discrimination and allowing more state action that might force us to conform in various ways to traditional sex stereotypes.

Rose Campbell 16:22

So you've mentioned some of these landmark decisions over the years, but I wonder if you could specifically highlight some of the both high and low points. What are some of the major wins and losses that we've seen over the years and perhaps recently? Hopefully not more losses than wins, but maybe in recent times.

Cary Franklin 16:42

Yeah, I would not say the ratio looks good recently, but um let me talk a little bit about what happened before that uh when courts began recognizing discrimination on the basis of gender identity as a legal problem. I'll just highlight a couple of cases. There was a 2008 case in Washington, D.C. A highly decorated US Army colonel applied for a job. It was a terrorism analyst position at the Library of Congress. And this Army colonel got the job. And when she began the job, her name was Diane Schroer, and she had transitioned. And she was now a transgender woman, Diane Schroer. And the Congressional Research Service fired her and said, No, we we were happy with you before, but we are not gonna let you work here now. We don't think a transgender woman is suited to a terrorism analyst position. Members of Congress are gonna come to you, we don't know if they'll trust you, etc. And she sued and she challenged that firing, and she won. She won a landmark case, and the court said, this is sex discrimination. This is sex discrimination, prohibited discrimination on in various ways. You were happy with her when you thought she was a man, but you're not happy with her now that she's a woman. So that's just the, you know, can't kindergarten level sex discrimination uh theory. But also there's sex stereotyping going on here. You think she's labeled male at birth, she should act and dress and present and identify in various ways, and you don't like the way she's acting and identifying on sex grounds. That's also sex discrimination on a sex stereotyping theory that I was applying earlier. So across the board, any of the ways we're talking about sex discrimination, she wins. And transgender people faced with this kind of situation should win under existing law. In fact, the court in that case said it is well established as a legal concept that sex used in federal law refers to much more than which chromosomes a person has. It is the whole construct of what sex is, including gender identity. So she wins. So then there's a major victory at the Supreme Court in 2020 in a case called Bostok, where the Supreme Court held that for purposes of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is the main federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in employment, under that law, if people are discriminated against on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, they have been discriminated against on the basis of sex, and that discrimination is prohibited. If you are fine with an employee, Jane, who dates John, but you're not fine with an employee, James, who dates John, you are discriminating on the basis of sex. Because dating John is not a problem for a woman, but dating John is a problem for a man, that's sex discrimination, said the court. And similarly, if you have a problem with somebody who has a female gender identity, if they were labeled male at birth, but not if they were labeled female at birth, that also is sex discrimination, and you're not allowed to do it. And so the prohibition in this major federal law, barring discrimination and employment on the basis of sex, also protects people who are discriminated against on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. A major, major victory for gay people and for transgender people at the Supreme Court of the United States. So recently, I can barely believe it. That was 2020. Now, when the Trump administration both times started passing laws and states followed on, passing laws discriminating against transgender people, there were quite a few victories for transgender people in bathroom cases, sports cases, employment cases, gender-affirming care cases. A lot of those early attempts were knocked down by prominent federal courts. Transgender people racked up a fair number of victories. But that has really changed. The trajectory is completely in the opposite direction. There have been major losses recently at the Supreme Court. I'll just highlight last year there was a case called Scrometti, in which Tennessee and Kentucky passed laws banning gender-affirming care for minors, and the Supreme Court upheld those laws and said they do not violate the Constitution. In fact, said unbelievably implausibly that they don't even discriminate against transgender people or on the basis of transgender status. They only ban one kind of medical care, gender-affirming care, and that nobody can get gender affirming care. Cis kids can't get it, trans kids can't get it. That's not discriminating against anybody on the basis of gender identity. It just means all kids are treated equally. No one can get gender affirming care. That's what the Supreme Court uh is asking us to swallow. That's what they said last year in upholding quite uh draconian bans on gender identity. Gender affirming care in those states. And now about half the states have those laws. And then just recently, the court upheld Idaho and West Virginia's law banning transgender girls and women from playing girls and women's sports. That case is called HECOX and BPJ. I think we'll talk a little bit more about that. But that is, I would say, an indication of where we are today.

Rose Campbell 22:24

Yeah, that leads perfectly into my next question, which is about these Hecox and BPJ cases, both of which were focused on transgender girls playing sports at public schools. And a common argument from proponents of these bans is that transgender girls were born as boys, and thus they have an unfair advantage when playing sports against cis girls. But you don't tend to see the same argument made about transgender boys, or at least not as frequently, it seems. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what do you think is going on here and why does this attitude persist? Why is this such a sticking point here?

Cary Franklin 23:02

Yeah, that's interesting. And I think a good question because in the sports context in particular, you do see asymmetrical laws. You see laws that say transgender girls and women cannot play in girls and women's sports, and they don't say anything about transgender boys and men. And I think what's going on here is an attempt to frame this anti-trans movement as not a discriminatory movement against anybody, but a positive, maybe even feminist movement to save and protect women. So if you look at the names of these laws in the case that was just at the Supreme Court, uh West Virginia and Idaho passed laws just banning transgender girls and women from girls in women's sports. They were called the Save Women's Sports Act and the Fairness in Women's Sports Act. Those are what the laws are called. They're bathroom bills that follow the same way of thinking. States are coming after transgender girls and women. Now, on one hand, you might say, why are they doing this? Because this highlights a kind of sex discriminatory aspect of these laws. They're only discriminating against one sex and not the other, and they they're applied asymmetrically. That's normally a problem for sex discrimination law. But I think they think the advantage is that you can really try to whitewash these laws by portraying them as helping people, as helping women, and make them much more appealing in that way. And one thing that's very maddening to me about that is the crowd passing these laws, the movement passing these laws, by and large does nothing to protect women's sports. Many of these politicians and parties oppose and fight Title IX, equal funding, equal opportunity, facilities, locker room, pay, right? They were not out there on the front lines for the U.S. women's soccer team trying to get pay equality as the people who support the transgender movement who were trying to do those things. The only thing these people are trying to do to promote women's sports is discriminate against a very small number of transgender girls who want to play competitive sports. And I'll tell you, there have been some states where there weren't really, there weren't actually any known transgender girl athletes when these laws were being passed. Like legislatures were taking time and debating and using valuable resources at the legislature to pass laws when there wasn't even anyone known to be wanting to do this. So that tells you that there's something going on here other than a sincere concern that the girls of America are not going to be able to play sports anymore. Let me just say one more thing legally about how I think this movement is not really to protect women and doesn't actually protect women. So I'll just say a little bit about this Heacock's BPJ case that the court just decided. That case was interesting because the plaintiff, the central plaintiff in the case, BPJ, she didn't challenge sex segregation in sports. In other words, she's not saying it's illegal to have girls' teams and boys' teams. This is what she was saying. I started taking puberty blockers when I was in elementary school. And now I'm 15 and I'm taking hormones. I never went through male puberty. I have no advantages that you think accrue to boys. All the advantages you think accrue to cis boys in sports, they're on average taller, stronger, faster, they have more upper body strength. That does not apply to me because I blocked that from happening to my body. So when the state comes forward and offers in a constitutional lawsuit its interests in passing these bans on transgender girls and women, the two interests that they're citing are safety and fairness. They say it's dangerous for cis girls to play with transgender girls because they're gonna be uh they're gonna be stronger and injure the girls. And then they say it's not fair because they'll take off with all the opportunities, they have advantages, they'll win the scholarships and the playing time. But BPJ is claiming, but that's not true of me. So the interests you're citing do nothing to support the law when I when I and all the transgender girls in my situation are being being concerned. And what was really true, one of the many things that was troubling to me in the recent decision that the Supreme Court issued is that the Supreme Court said, no, you know what? Sex discriminatory laws just have to be good enough. If the fit is not perfect, that's okay. There can be some collateral damage, as long as a general matter it's true that boys are stronger, faster, et cetera, than girls, that's good enough. That is a real change. That is a real degradation of the sex discrimination protections that we all have enjoyed, that the court is now not going to require a very close fit at all. And it's gonna say some people, even if even if we if the state cannot prove that there's any benefit to discriminating against this subset of people, uh, it's allowed to do that because the court's just gonna ask very little from states now in this respect when they're discriminating on the basis of sex. So it is stunning to me the extent to which this anti-transgender movement portrays itself as woman protective and saving women when there's no evidence that it's doing that on the ground, and in law, they're doing the exact opposite.

Rose Campbell 29:04

Well, and I think related to that, one of the many, many issues with these recent court rulings that restrict the rights of transgender people is the idea of enforcement. How is the government going to enforce their legal version of supposedly immutable binary sex? And and to follow up with that, how did the government even get involved with social issues like this in the first place? You've kind of touched on it throughout the episode, but I'd love to hear kind of uh your your take on this.

Cary Franklin 29:36

Yeah, I mean, I would say the government has always been involved in policing sex and gender. I mean, there's always been regulations enforcing traditional stereotypes conceptions of how men and women are supposed to be. I think it's important to recognize the continuum between, say, prohibitions on women voting and discrimination against transgender athletes. And I'll just say women were prevented from voting, from serving in the military, from doing various occupations, from using contraception and making other choices about their reproductive lives. And men also faced a lot of constraints with respect to their gender. They weren't allowed to do various jobs like preschool teacher. They were also forced to conform in various ways. I would say laws restricting marriage to different sex couples reinforce these traditional sex stereotypes. Laws preventing gay people from serving openly in the military, preventing transgender people from obtaining health care, equal employment, sports in the military, all of these laws and policies to me form a continuum of laws and regulations that enforce traditional sex roles. So I think it's important to see the continuity there. And what is dismaying, and I'm I'll just hit it again because I think from the 1970s onward, so many people worked so hard to explain the inequality that this kind of discrimination perpetuates, and to get policymakers and judges to disallow these forms of exclusion and subordination, and to bar the government from enforcing this whole range of traditional sex stereotypes. And now the court is loosening those restraints and allowing more in. And I don't know where that stops. You know, how far does this go along the continuum of allowing the government to enforce traditional sex roles? If you read the Secretary of Defense Pete Heggsis' book called War on Warriors, he argues transgender people, gay people, and women have no place in the military. The military is for warriors. The military is for strong people, honorable people who will defend our country. And then although people I just named have no business being there, right? It is a pretty sweeping gender ideology that I think starts the opening wedge is transgender people. And then you move further and further. And you already start to see some of that happening in the current administration. Now, you ask a very good question about enforcing these laws. And oh my, that is something that I don't get think gets talked about enough. Let's just take these recent sports cases. So the idea is that transgender girls and women are not going to be allowed to play girls' and women's sports. But what does that mean in practice? Well, the Idaho law says what that means is that if any girl, any girl playing sports is accused of not being, quote, a biological girl, that dispute will be resolved by a state-mandated medical exam of her. And her biological sex will be determined, I'm quoting here, as part of a physical examination that relies on one or more of the following. Her reproductive anatomy, so she's going to have to pull down her pants and they're going to examine her genitals, her genetic makeup or her normally normal endogenously produced testosterone level. So now any girl in Idaho playing sports who is challenged as not being girl enough, if she wants to keep playing, this is how we resolve it. The state will examine her reproductive anatomy or her blood to determine if she's really a girl. Two things I want to say about this. One, it is amazing for people who keep saying biological sex as if it's so obvious and so clear what it is, because states have different definitions of how you're going to determine what a girl is. And even in Idaho, they say you look at the reproductive anatomy or the genetic makeup or the testosterone levels, one will suffice. But sometimes those are not going to come out the same way. And in other states, there are different tests for what a girl is. And if you look at the history of sex testing in sports, like just in the Olympics alone over the last hundred years, you cannot come out of that history having the view that there's just a clear biological sex. We know what a girl is. They shift all the time. There's been a million different tests. There are currently many different tests operative, and they don't all come out the same way in different jurisdictions. In one jurisdiction, you could be a biological girl in another, you might not be. But so that's there's a theoretical point. But let me just focus on the practical point of what the reality of this is. If you are a girl in Idaho playing sports, one thing I want to say is we know from our experiencing that there's a huge disparate impact on girls and women of color. They are accused of not being girls at much higher rates. If you look at the Olympic athletes of Castor Sameenya, Dati Chand, Imman Khalif, uh, there's even accusations that uh Michelle Obama is a man called Michael. This is big in MAGA conspiracy world. Black girls and girls and women of color are accused more often of not really being girls. Uh, and that worries me. And just the idea that now all girls in Idaho are subject to genital inspection by the state. Uh, no one should support this. Uh, and uh, particularly not people who purport to be for small government, because I can't imagine a more invasive, humiliating, horrifying um set of state mandates than this. And I really think that doesn't get enough attention in the media that what you what it means to say transgender girls and women can't play sports is that we're gonna have to test for that somehow. And that can include the state removing your your your daughter's clothes.

Rose Campbell 35:48

It doesn't get much more invasive than that, and these are children we're talking about. That's just yeah, truly horrifying. Well, this probably isn't a very positive question either, but if you could put on your speculative hat for a moment, what are some other important legislations or court decisions that you think we might see in the next few years? And what impact will the rulings so far have on the transgender people, the LGBTQ community, just broadly rights for everyone as we move forward? I mean, we've still got a few more years under this administration, so it may not be very uplifting, but what should we prepare ourselves for, do you think?

Cary Franklin 36:31

Yeah, gosh, I so wish I could be bringing the good news here, but I don't think I'm bringing the good news. Um but I guess it's important to see it clearly. I I think there are very tangible effects on this community, transgender community in particular. I think there has been a license for a lot of discrimination. And sometimes I just think about how difficult it becomes for some people just to put one foot in front of the other and get through the day. So your license, your driver's license has now been revoked. You're facing discrimination in employment, you're not being called by the right name or pronoun. Every time you step outside the door, there are so many ways you're facing discrimination, degrading. Even if you stay home and just go on the internet, it is a relentless onslaught of discrimination and messages that you are not equal and that you do not belong. And I want to say there's all of these specific legal, regulatory policy implications of the rulings that we've been talking about. I want to spend a couple seconds also on the rhetoric, on the language, because I think it matters. I really noticed in this Heacock's BPJ sports decision, the Supreme Court just released, throughout the entire decision, Justice Kavanaugh, who wrote the majority, refers to trans girls and women as biological males who identify as female. He refers to them throughout as biological males, and that's a change. In some of these earlier positive decisions that I was referring to, there was much more respectful language, even from the Supreme Court and from other federal courts. Now, in the majority opinion, these are biological males throughout. I also want to highlight Justice Thomas. He wrote a separate, very short concurrence in the case saying, yeah, it's okay to exclude transgender girls and women. But he he seemed to write specifically because he just wanted to say the following. Speaking of transgender people, he said to use language to obscure reality, to show indifference regarding the truth, is to lie to the public and to cease to treat our fellow citizens as equal. Just to be clear, he's saying transgender people are mendacious, they're lying, and they're discriminating or treating other people as lesser than by their perform, their lying performance of their gender. And that really was the bulk of his concurrency. He just wanted to add to let us know his thoughts on that. I will say this echoes President Trump's recent executive order banning transgender people from the military. He said in that quote, that the adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with individuals' sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle. A man's assertion that he's a woman and his requirement that others honor this falsehood is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member. So we have gone beyond discriminating against transgender people to saying that transgender people are mendacious, dishonorable, bad people who are treating the rest of us like garbage. They're treating cisgender people like garbage. That is where we are. And this relentless rhetorical attack and disrespect, we know the effects that it's having. I work at the Williams Institute. It's LGBTQ policy law think tank at UCLA. You can go on the Williams Institute website and you'll find all the studies about the reports of suicide thoughts, depression, anger, the harassment, the effects that this has on transgender communities. It is very stark. It is very sobering data. And of course it does. If you're living in a world that is constantly telling you you are lesser than, you don't deserve, we don't like you, and you don't belong, and your fundamental self is not something we respect, of course you start to see the numbers that uh people are people are suffering. So I guess I would say uh I think in terms of law and regulation, I'm not wildly optimistic. I think we're I think we're seeing downward trends. Uh I think at the Supreme Court in particular, we've now seen last year upholding bans on gender-affirming care earlier this term, which I haven't yet mentioned, the court upheld uh or it struck down bans on conversion therapy. So about half the states had passed bans on conversion therapy, which is a fake discredited therapy where you try to talk people out of being gay or transgender. Uh, and the Supreme Court said states cannot ban conversion therapy, and then states can ban transgender girls and women from playing sports. And this has emboldened the anti-trans movement. So I think that we've seen record numbers of bills in recent years, and that'll keep going. But I just want to say I cannot end this these remarks on this emotionally shattering note. So I just want to say one thing, which is that um we're in the thick of it. This is not the end of it. This is a challenging time. This is a nadir, this is tough, but there are also so many people fighting this and trying to stop it uh and challenging it. And many of the issues that we've discussed are being litigated in court right now. Uh there are states like California, just passed a state budget with $26 million in funding to protect access to health care for transgender youth. There are there are points of light out there and positive signs and people working hard against these efforts. Uh and I actually, despite everything I've said and the general tenor of my remarks in this conversation, I don't think this brutal anti-transgender campaign will prevail ultimately and in the end. I think if you look at the data, younger people are just far, far better and kinder and more and understands better than older people. And over time, that inclusive, uh generous view will prevail. And I just want to say I am so glad for your listeners. Anyone who's a historian out there, anyone who reads history, anyone who saves documents, anybody who cares about the past, I'm very grateful because I think it's so important to tell the story and know the history of what is happening here so that we document this and we learn from it and work to stop it from happening again in the future. And so I just thank you to everybody who is following this story, documenting this story, um, keeping this story in their mind and in their heart, because I think that's really important for a better future.

Rose Campbell 44:04

Well, I could not have possibly have said that better myself. So thank you for joining us for this very sobering but also very important conversation. I really appreciate you um sharing all your insights today.

Cary Franklin 44:17

Thanks so much for having me.

Rose Campbell 44:19

I also want to thank you, our audience for listening in. If you did enjoy this podcast, please be sure to like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find full episodes as well as curated playlists on our YouTube channel at Luskin Center for History Policy. And don't forget to check us out on TikTok at UCLA History Policy, where we post short video summaries of every new podcast episode. Thank you so much for listening.

Narrator 44:55

Thank you for listening to the History Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work, from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, luskincenter.history.edu. Our show is produced by Roselyn Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichmann. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening to the first time.