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A-to Discrimination Advantage

Frontline

1NC Frontline vs. Trans- Discrimination Advantage

Social trends emerging now – bottom-up change is already transforming the Law to be more pro—trans- .

Weiss ‘14

Dr. Jillian T. Weiss has a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Law, Policy & Society. Currently Professor of Law and Society at Ramapo College of New Jersey, her research area is gender identity and law. She has authored over 50 academic publications, presentations and other scholarly works, as well as approximately 40 articles an d interviews for media organizations including The New York Times and Associated Press. Dr. Weiss provides legal representation to transgender employees in cases involving gender identity and gender expression discrimination. She also consults with private and public organizations regarding gender identity policy and employee gender transitions, including Harvard University, Boeing and New York City. Her volunteer work includes serving as a member of the Board of Directors of Lambda Legal, the oldest and la rgest U.S. national legal organization whose mission is to safeguard and advance the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and those with HIV through impact litigation, education and policy work. She is also Chair of the annual Transgender Law Institute, currently held at the National LGBT Bar Association’s annual Conference. “The Transgender Tipping Point: An Overview for the Advocate” - November 2014 - https://www.acslaw.org/sites/default/files/Weiss_-_The_Transgender_Tipping_Point.pdf

There has been a change in the social understanding of sex over the past sixty years, and this has led to transgender people receiving increased legal protection. Early judicial opinions from the 1970s and 1980s said that transgender people did not receive protection from sex discrimination because sex discrimination then referred only to discrimination based on being a male or female, which was distinguished from a change in sex. For example, in Ulane v. Eastern Airlines? the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held, on this basis, that an airline pilot who alleged that she was fired because of transsexual status had no cause of action under the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 (often referred to as "Title VII"). However, over time, the meaning of the term sex has been increasingly interpreted to include gender and gender identity.6

In 1989, in the case of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the U.S. Supreme Court held that penalizing an individual for failing to conform to gendered norms of behavior constitutes a form of sex-based discrimination. This development was first recognized by an appellate court in 2000, in the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Schwenkv. Hartford There, a transsexual prisoner filed a civil rights suit against a male prison guard, seeking damages as a result of the guard's alleged attempted rape of the plaintiff under the federal Gender Motivated Violence Act.9 The Court noted that "Ulane has been overtaken by the 'logic and language of Price Waterhouse' and that Title VII prohibits discrimination based on 'sexual identity,' not just based on biological sex." In its 2008 decision in Schroer v. Billington, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the spurious distinction between sex and change of sex.10 The Court noted that Title VII also included protection from religious discrimination, and that "no court would take seriously the notion that 'converts' are not covered by the statute. Discrimination 'because of religion' easily encompasses discrimination because of a change of religion." This developing understanding of sex as a term of art has opened the door to transgender people claiming rights based on laws referring to sex. Because the case law regarding many of the areas discussed below is less developed, the voluminous case law under Title VII should be referenced as analogous.

II. Substantive Issues

A. Civil Rights

1. Employment

Laws protecting transgender people from employment discrimination based on gender identity or expression have been passed in 18 states at the time of this writing.11 A few other states have court rulings holding that transgender employees are included in other protected categories, such as sex or disability.12 Over 140 municipalities have laws prohibiting employment discrimination based on gender identity. Examples of cities with strong laws include New York City, San Francisco and D.C.

Grimm case is not key – status quo will solve now through equal protection rulings.

Gersen ‘17

Jeannie Suk Gersen is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and a professor at Harvard Law School. “A New Phase of Chaos on Transgender Rights” – New Yorker – March 13^th - http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-new-phase-of-chaos-on-transgender-rights

With a one-sentence order last week, the Supreme Court dashed hopes of a big transgender-rights decision this term. The Court was supposed to review the case of Gavin Grimm, a transgender teen-age boy who sued the Gloucester County School Board for the right to use the boys’ bathroom and won, in the Fourth Circuit. But the basis of the Fourth Circuit’s decision was the Obama Administration’s view that Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits schools that receive federal funding from discriminating “on the basis of sex,” requires schools to treat transgender students in a way consistent with their gender identity. Last month, the Trump Administration retracted that position. Both Grimm and the school board urged the Supreme Court to review the case as planned, arguing that the government’s shift made it no less urgent for the Court to declare Title IX’s meaning. But the Supreme Court decided to vacate the lower court’s decision and send the case back for reconsideration. Grimm’s victory in the lower court was tethered to the Obama guidance, and disappeared along with it.

That leaves the Fourth Circuit to directly confront what Title IX means for schools and transgender students. Given that a 1975 federal regulation implementing Title IX permits “separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex,” can schools keep transgender students out of facilities that correspond to their gender identity? The losing party in that decision will surely ask the Supreme Court for review, but, in the meantime, the transgender-rights fight resumes in lower courts and states, in a landscape greatly altered by the government’s change of position. When a divisive social issue plays out in courts, legislatures, and communities, the process is normally messy, and filled with pain and struggle for the people involved—in this instance, schoolchildren. But the combination of the sharply conflicting Obama and Trump guidances, the Supreme Court’s refusal to review a case it had already agreed to hear, and the elimination of an important lower-court transgender win has escalated the confusion to an unusual degree.

The Trump Administration’s guidance does not require schools to bar transgender students from gender-corresponding bathrooms. But one state has done so, and gone even further. Last March, North Carolina passed a law mandating that all public schools and public agencies “must require” that bathrooms and changing facilities be used based on a person’s sex on his or her birth certificate. The Obama Administration issued its guidance on transgender students in May, and Obama’s Justice Department sued North Carolina that month, claiming that the state had violated federal civil-rights laws. But that suit looks as though it will soon be abandoned by Trump’s Justice Department, which indicated in a motion this month that it needs time to rethink its position on the North Carolina law. If the suit is deserted, any state could follow North Carolina’s lead without facing repercussions from the federal government.

No appellate court has considered the question that is before the Fourth Circuit in Grimm’s case—what “sex” means for transgender students in the phrase “on the basis of sex” in Title IX and its regulations. But in a lawsuit filed by thirteen states challenging Obama’s transgender guidance, a Texas federal district court stated last fall that “sex” unambiguously means sex assigned at birth, not gender identity. That court blocked enforcement of the guidance nationwide while the suit was ongoing, and the Obama Administration appealed in the Fifth Circuit. But after the Trump Administration announced that it would not defend the Obama guidance and dropped the appeal, the states agreed to drop the suit altogether.

While the federal government abandons its positions defending transgender bathroom access, a challenge to North Carolina’s bathroom law, brought on behalf of transgender North Carolinians by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, and the firm of Jenner & Block, will proceed in federal district court. Last summer, a North Carolina federal district court temporarily blocked enforcement of the law against student plaintiffs, adopting the rationale of Grimm’s Fourth Circuit case, which deferred to Obama’s Title IX guidance. Now that the Supreme Court has vacated the Fourth Circuit case, that injunction could be challenged by North Carolina, too. The district court also said that the plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed in their constitutional claim: that the North Carolina law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The transgender plaintiffs’ appeal of that decision will be argued in the Fourth Circuit, in May.

Meanwhile, three transgender high-school students in suburban Pittsburgh (including the sister of Jackie Evancho, who sang at President Trump’s Inauguration) brought a suit challenging their school district’s policy excluding transgender students from gender-corresponding bathrooms. Last month, a Pennsylvania federal district court temporarily enjoined enforcement of the policy, saying that the students were likely to succeed at trial on their constitutional equal-protection claim. But the new Trump guidance caused the court also to say that the students’ Title IX claim was unlikely to succeed. This win on equal protection, but not on Title IX, represents the reverse of the outcomes of the North Carolina case, indicating that, as the Title IX arguments grow weaker without the federal government’s supporting interpretation, constitutional arguments may well rise up to accomplish the same protection for transgender people.

Boycotts will solve anti-trans- bathroom policy in the status quo

Gordon ‘16

Nalani. The author is completing a JD from the University of Miami Law School and is a member of the American Bar Association. The author holds a BA and MA – specifically including a BA in Criminal Justice. The author has served as an Adjunct Instructor for Palm Beach State College.“ Injustice Boycott: Civil Rights Activist Says Put Your Money Where your Mouth Is” - RACE & SOCIAL JUSTICE LAW REVIEW: UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI SCHOOL OF LAW - Oct 24, 2016 - http://race-and-social-justice-review.law.miami.edu/injustice-boycott-civil-rights-activist-put-money-mouth/

1. Boycotts have worked in the past.

Let's be clear: the boycott is not a new idea. Civil rights protesters have long used their economic power to provoke social justice reforms.f2] Buses in Montgomery, Alabama were desegregated after the iconic boycottOJ, and an NAACP-led boycott in Claiborne County. Mississippi ultimately led the Supreme Court to holdJ4J that nonviolent, politically motivated boycotts are protected under the First Amendment. Money talks.

2. Boycotts are working right now.

North Carolina (NC) House Bill 2, which affects the rights of lesbian, gay. bisexual, and transgen-der (LGBT) people, has caused significant backlash for the state: Major companies have halted expansion plans: celebrities refuse to perform: and the real knockout punch for NC may be the loss of popular sporting events, such as the 2017 NBA all-star game and the NCAA and ACC championship games.15] Because a large-scale boycott of a state like NC could negatively impact a state's economy, a state may be inclined to address calls for reform. King states that he and his team will be "building a coalition" of organizations, businesses, and leaders who will participate in the boycott.£6] King's boycott needs the support of companies like Apple, Wal-Mart, and IBM, which have all denounced several states' legislation regarding anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people.!!]

Utilitarianism comes first – approaches can only be ethical when they consider externalities.

Chandler ‘14

(David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster – “Beyond good and evil: Ethics in a world of complexity” – International Politics, Vol. 51, No. 4 (2014), pp.441-457 Available at: http://www.davidchandler.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/International-Politics-Evil-PUBLISHED-2.pdf)

Self-reflexive ethics redistribute responsibility and emphasize the indirect, unintended and relational networks of complex causation. Collective problems are reconceived ontologically: as constitutive of communities and of political purpose. This is why many radical and critical voices in the West are drawn to the problems of 'side effects', of 'second-order' consequences - of a lack of knowledge of the emergent causality at play in the complex interconnections of the global world. The more these interconnections are revealed, though the work of self-reflexivity and self-reflection, the more ethical authority can be regained by governments and other agents of governance. We learn and learn again that we are responsible for the world, not because of our conscious choices or because our actions lacked the right ethical intention, but because the world's complexity is beyond our capacity to know and understand in advance. The unknowability of the outcomes of our action does not remove our ethical responsibility for our actions, it, in fact, heightens our responsibility for these second-order consequences or side effects. In a complex and interconnected world, few events or problems evade appropriation within this framing, providing an opportunity for recasting responsibility in these ways. The new ethics of indirect responsibility for market consequences can be seen (observed) clearly in the idea of environmental taxation, both state-enforced through interventions in the market and as taken up by both firms and individuals. The idea that we should pay a carbon tax on air travel is a leading example of this, in terms of governmental intervention, passing the burden of such problems on to 'unethical' consumers who are not reflexive enough to consider the impact of package holidays on the environment. At a broader level, the personalized ethico-political understanding that individuals should be responsible for and measure their own 'carbon footprint' shifts the emphasis from an understanding of broader inter-relations between modernity, the market and the environment to a much narrower understanding of personal indirect responsibility, linking all aspects of everyday decision making to the problems of global warming (see, for example, Marres, 2012). The shared responsibility for the Breivik murders is not different -ontologically - from the societally shared responsibility for global warming or other problematic appearances in the world. Through our actions and inactions we collectively constitute the frameworks in which others act and make decisions -failing to raise our voice against 'borderline racism' or extremism in a bar makes us indirectly responsible for acts of racism or extremism in the same way that failing to save water or minimize air travel makes us indirectly responsible for the melting polar ice caps.

History proves Anti-Discrimination laws will fail. Scope is too narrow and few can afford to sue anyway.

***note to students - the next two card also appear in the 1NC shell for the Trans- Pessimism – watch for overlap.

Spade ‘12

Dean Spade is a lawyer, writer, and Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law – This article is originally from a book chapter of the same title called :"What's Wrong with Trans Rights?" – It originally appeared in the book: Transfeminist Perspectives: In and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012) – edited by Anne Enke – The chapter was made available at: https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/_file/Justice_for_All/CLE_Professor_Dean_Spade.pdf

As the concept of trans rights has gained more currency in the last two decades, a seeming consensus has emerged about which law reforms should be sought to better the lives of trans people.' Advocates of trans equality have primarily pursued two law reform interventions: anti-discrimination laws that list gender identity and/or expression as a category of non-discrimination, and hate crime laws that include crimes motivated by the gender identity and/or expression of the victim as triggering the application of a jurisdiction's hate crime statute. Organizations like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) have supported state and local organizations around the country in legislative campaigns to pass such laws. Thirteen states (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington) and the District of Columbia currently have laws that include gender identity and/or expression as a category of anti-discrimination, and 108 counties and cities have such laws. NGLTF estimates that 39 percent of people in the United States live in a jurisdiction where such laws are on the books.'' Seven states now have hate crime laws that include gender identity and/or expression.'1' In 2009 a federal law, the Matthew Shepard and Tames Byrd. Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, added gender identity and/or expression to federal hate crime law. An ongoing battle regarding if and how gender identity and/or expression will be included in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a federal law that would prohibit discrimination the basis of sexual orientation, continues to be fought between the conservative national gay and lesbian organization, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), legislators, and a variety of organizations and activists seeking to push an inclusive bill through Congress. These two legal reforms, anti-discrimination bills and hate crime laws, have come to define the idea of "trans rights" in the United States and are presently the most visible efforts made by nonprofit organizations and activists working under this rubric.

The logic behind this law reform strategy is not mysterious. Proponents argue that passing these laws does a number of important things. First, the passage of antidiscrimination laws can create a basis for legal claims against discriminating employers, housing providers, restaurants, hotels, stores, and the like. Trans people's legal claims when facing exclusion in such contexts have often failed in the past, with courts saying that the exclusion is a legitimate preference on the part of the employer, landlord, or business owner.iv Laws that make gender identity/expression-based exclusion illegal have the potential to influence courts to punish discriminators and provide certain remedies (e.g., back pay or damages) to injured trans people. There is also a hope that such laws, and their enforcement by courts, would send a preventative message to potential discriminators, letting them know that such exclusions will not be tolerated; these laws would ultimately increase access to jobs, housing, and other necessities for trans people.

Hate crime laws are promoted under a related logic. Proponents point out that trans people have a very high murder rate and are subject to a great deal of violences In many instances, trans people's lives are so devalued by police and prosecutors that trans murders are not investigated or trans people's murderers are given less punishment than is typical in murder sentencing. Proponents believe that hate crime laws will intervene in these situations, making law enforcement take this violence seriously. There is also a symbolic element to the passage of these laws: a statement that trans lives are meaningful, often described by proponents as an assertion that trans people are human. Additionally, both proponents of anti-discrimination laws and hate crime laws argue that the processes of advocating the passage of such laws, including media advocacy representing the lives and concerns of trans people and meetings with legislators to tell them about trans people's experiences, increases positive trans visibility and advances the struggle for trans equality. The data-collection element of hate crime statutes, through which certain government agencies keep count of crimes that fall into this category, is touted by proponents as a chance to make the quantity and severity of trans people's struggles more visible.

The logic of visibility and inclusion surrounding anti-discrimination and hate crime laws campaigns is very popular, yet there are many troubling limitations to the idea that these two reforms comprise a proper approach to problems trans people face in both criminal and civil law contexts. One concern is whether these laws actually improve the life chances of those who are purportedly protected by them. Looking at categories of identity that have been included in these kinds of laws over the last several decades indicates that these kinds of reforms have not eliminated bias, exclusion, or marginalization. Discrimination and violence against people of color have persisted despite law changes that declared it illegal. The persistent and growing racial wealth divide in the United States suggests that these law changes have not had their promised effects, and that the structure of systemic racism is not addressed by the work of these laws." Similarly, the twenty-year history of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) demonstrates disappointing results. Courts have limited the enforcement potential of this law with narrow interpretations of its impact, and people with disabilities remain economically and politically marginalized by systemic ableism. Similar arguments can be made about the persistence of national origin discrimination, sex discrimination, and other forms of pervasive discrimination despite decades of official prohibitions of such behavior. The persistence of wage gaps, illegal terminations, hostile work environments, hiring/firing disparities, and bias-motivated violence for groups whose struggles have supposedly been addressed by antidiscrimination and hate crime laws invites caution when assuming the effectiveness of these measures.

Hate crime laws do not have a deterrent effect. They focus on punishment and cannot be argued to actually prevent bias-motivated violence. In addition to their failure to prevent harm, they must be considered in the context of the failures of our legal systems and, specifically, the violence of our criminal punishment system. Anti-discrimination laws are not adequately enforced. Most people who experience discrimination cannot afford to access legal help, so their experiences never make it to court. Additionally, the Supreme Court has severely narrowed the enforceability of these laws over the last 30 years, making it extremely difficult to prove discrimination short of a signed letter from a boss or landlord stating, "I am taking this negative action against you because of your [insert characteristic]." Even in cases that seem as obvious as that, people experiencing discrimination often lose. Proving discriminatory intent has become central, making it almost impossible to win these cases when they are brought to court. These laws also have such narrow scopes that they often do not include action taken by some of the most common discriminators against marginalized people: prison guards, welfare bureaucrats, workfare supervisors, immigration officers, child welfare workers, and others who have significant control over the lives of marginalized people in the United States. In a neoliberal era characterized by abandonment (reduction of social safety net and infrastructure, especially in poor and people of color communities) and imprisonment (increased immigration and criminal law enforcement), anti-discrimination laws provide little relief to the most vulnerable people.

Anti-Discrimination Laws are worse than nothing. They boost oppression by obscuring structural factors that create ongoing disparate outcomes.

Spade ‘12

Dean Spade is a lawyer, writer, and Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law – This article is originally from a book chapter of the same title called :"What's Wrong with Trans Rights?" – It originally appeared in the book: Transfeminist Perspectives: In and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012) – edited by Anne Enke – Modified for language that may offend -The chapter was made available at: https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/_file/Justice_for_All/CLE_Professor_Dean_Spade.pdf

Critical race theorists have developed analyses about the limitations of antidiscrimination law that are useful in understanding the ways these law reforms have and will continue to fail to deliver meaningful change to trans people. Alan Freeman's critique of what he terms the "perpetrator perspective" in discrimination law is particularly helpful in conceptualizing the limits of the common trans rights strategies.xi Freeman's work looks at laws that prohibit discrimination based on race. He exposes how and why antidiscrimination and hate crime statutes do not achieve their promises of equality and freedom for people targeted by discrimination and violence. Freeman argues that discrimination law misunderstands how racism works, which makes it fail to effectively address it.

Discrimination law primarily conceptualizes the harm of racism through the perpetrator/victim dyad, imagining that the fundamental scene is that of a perpetrator who irrationally hates people on the basis of their race and fires or denies service to or beats or kills the victim based on that hatred. The law's adoption of this conception of racism does several things that make it ineffective at eradicating racism and help it contribute to obscuring the actual operations of racism. First, it individualizes racism. It says that racism is about bad individuals who intentionally make discriminatory choices and must be punished. In this (mis)understanding, structural or systemic racism is rendered invisible (less apparent). Through this function, the law can only attend to disparities that come from the behavior of a perpetrator who intentionally considered the category that must not be considered (e.g., race, gender, disability) in the decision she was making (e.g., hiring, firing, admission, expulsion). Conditions like living in a district with underfunded schools that "happens to be" 96 percent students of color,xii or having to take an admissions test that has been proven to predict race better than academic success*11' or any of a number of disparities in life conditions (access to adequate food, healthcare, employment, housing, clean air and water) that we know stem from and reflect long-term patterns of exclusion and exploitation cannot be understood as "violations" under the discrimination principle, and thus remedies cannot be won. This narrow reading of what constitutes a violation and can be recognized as discrimination serves to naturalize and affirm the status quo of maldistribution. Anti-discrimination law seeks out aberrant individuals with overtly biased intentions.xlv Meanwhile, all the daily disparities in life chances that shape our world along lines of race, class, indigeneity, disability, national origin, sex, and gender remain untouchable and affirmed as non-discriminatory or even as fair.

The perpetrator perspective also obscures the historical context of racism. Discrimination is understood as the act of taking into account the identity that discrimination law forbids us to take into account (e.g., race, sex, disability) when making a decision, and it does not regard whether the decision-maker is favoring or harming a traditionally excluded group. In this way, the discrimination principle has been used to eviscerate affirmative action and desegregation programs.^' This erroneously conceptualized "colorblindness" undermines the possibility of remedying the severe racial disparities in the United States that are rooted in slavery, genocide, land theft, internment, and immigration exclusion, as well as racially explicit policies that historically and presently exclude people of color from the benefits of wealth-building programs for US citizens like Social Security, land grants, and credit and other homeownership support.'™ The conditions that created and continue to reproduce such immense disparities are made invisible by the perpetrator perspective's insistence that any consideration of the prohibited category is equally damaging. This model pretends the playing field is equal, and thus any loss or gain in opportunity based on the category is harmful and creates inequality, again serving to declare the racial status quo neutral. This justification for systemic racism masquerading as a logic of equal opportunity gives rise to the myth of "reverse racism," a concept that misunderstands racism to suggest parallel meanings when white people lose opportunities or access through programs aiming to ameliorate impacts of racism and when people of color lose opportunities due to racism.

Discrimination law’s reliance on the perpetrator perspective also creates the false impression that the previously excluded or marginalized group is now equal, that fairness has been imposed, and the legitimacy of the distribution of life chances restored. This declaration of equality and fairness papers over the inequalities and disparities that constitute business as usual and allows them to continue. Narrowing political resistance strategies to seeking inclusion in anti-discrimination law makes the mistaken assumption that gaining recognition and inclusion in this way will equalize our life chances and allow us to compete in the (assumed fair) system. This often constitutes a forfeiture of other critiques, as if the economic system is fair but for the fact that bad discriminators are sometimes allowed to fire trans people for being trans.3"™ Constituting the problem of oppression so narrowly that an anti-discrimination law could solve it erases the complexity and breadth of the systemic, life-threatening harm that trans resistance seeks to end. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric accompanying these quests for inclusion often casts "deserving workers" —people whose other characteristics (race, ability, education, class) would have entitled them to a good chance in the workforce were it not for the illegitimate exclusion that happened.xviii Using as examples the least marginalized of the marginalized, so to speak, becomes necessary when issues are framed so narrowly that a person who faces intersecting vectors of harm would be unlikely to benefit from anti-discrimination law. This framing permits—and even necessitates—that efforts for inclusion in the discrimination regime rely on rhetoric that affirms the legitimacy and fairness of the status quo. The inclusion-focus of anti-discrimination law and hate crime law campaigns relies on a strategy of simile, essentially arguing "we are just like you; we do not deserve this different treatment because of this one characteristic." To make that argument, advocates cling to the imagined norms of the US social body and choose poster people who are symbolic of US standards of normalcy, whose lives are easily framed by sound bites that resound in shared notions of injustice. "Perfect plaintiffs" for these cases are white people with high-level jobs and lawful immigration status. The thorny issues facing undocumented immigrants, people experiencing simultaneous discrimination through, for example, race, disability and gender identity, or people in low-wage jobs where it is particularly hard to prove discrimination, are not addressed by anti-discrimination law. Laws created from such strategies, not surprisingly, routinely fail to protect people with more complicated relationships to marginality. These people, who face the worst economic vulnerability, are not lifted up as the "deserving workers" that anti-discrimination law advocates rally to protect.

Target proves no solvency for social norms. Aff solvency’s overstated – culture shifting is difficult and fraught with backlash.

Chung ‘17

Frank Chung is a finance reporter for news.com.au. He previously worked for media publication AdNews and has also written for The Canberra Times, The Courier-Mail, The Queensland Times and the Ipswich Advertiser. - “Transgender bathroom policy still hurting Target” – The News (Australia) – news.com.au – April 8^th - http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/transgender-bathroom-policy-still-hurting-target/news-story/1bcaf62ebd5d8ea9a0f01677b239d877

Last year, the company sparked a massive boycott after publishing a seemingly innocuous blog post welcoming transgender shoppers to use bathrooms and fitting rooms corresponding with their “gender identities”.

Nearly a year later, and Target is still feeling the effects of the backlash.

The irony for Target is that many retailers and businesses have similar policies — they just don’t advertise them publicly. “Transgender-inclusive policies are not a safety risk,” the National Center for Transgender Equality writes. “If they were, we would know by now, as transgender people have been using public bathrooms and locker rooms for decades.”

It came amid a heated debate over a move by the state of North Carolina to introduce legislation requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding with the sex on their birth certificates, one of a number of so-called “bathroom bills” fuelling debates about equal rights and privacy.

“Recent debate around proposed laws in several states has reignited a national conversation around inclusivity,” the blog post on April 19 read. “So earlier this week, we reiterated with our team members where Target stands and how our beliefs are brought to life in how we serve our guests.

“Inclusivity is a core belief at Target. It’s something we celebrate. We stand for equality and equity, and strive to make our guests and team members feel accepted, respected and welcomed in our stores and workplaces every day.

“We believe that everyone — every team member, every guest, and every community — deserves to be protected from discrimination, and treated equally. Consistent with this belief, Target supports the federal Equality Act, which provides protections to LGBT individuals, and opposes action that enables discrimination.

“In our stores, we demonstrate our commitment to an inclusive experience in many ways. Most relevant for the conversations currently underway, we welcome transgender team members and guests to use the rest room or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.

“We regularly assess issues and consider many factors such as impact to our business, guests and team members. Given the specific questions these legislative proposals raised about how we manage our fitting rooms and rest rooms, we felt it was important to state our position. Everyone deserves to feel like they belong. And you’ll always be accepted, respected and welcomed at Target.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, the post was sparked after a number of staff requested their bosses to clarify the company’s stance. After an internal memo to managers reiterated the policy, some in the company sent an email to executives informing them of a plan to announce it publicly.

Target’s chief executive, Brian Cornell, reportedly did not receive that email, and so never approved the blog post — which, within hours, prompted a customer backlash and condemnation from Christian groups.

A petition to boycott the retailer, launched by the American Family Association, has attracted more than one million signatures. Foot traffic to a number of stores, particularly in the conservative southern states, declined considerably.

“Target didn’t adequately assess the risk, and the ensuing backlash [AFA boycott] was self-inflicted,” Mr Cornell told staff, according to the Journal.

While Target has said on a number of occasions the boycott had “no material impact on the business”, one analyst said it “seemed to matter”. In February, the company reported falling sales for three quarters in a row.

“Since the boycott started, Target’s stock has lost 35 per cent of its value, and [it has] shuttered plans for major expansion projects,” said AFA senior vice president Buddy Smith.