New Radfem Theory

This is a very early reaction to the question, What will be the implications for women as a class over the next ten or twenty years, of the US Supreme Court case holding in Bostock v. Clayton County (June 15, 2010)? Here is the holding of the Bostock case, in its simplest and most devastating form. The Court held:  "...it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex. " The elevation of rights of LGB people to federal protection do not affect the rights of women to safety, privacy, and bodily sovereignty. But the elevation of transgender status to the protective sex category of Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and, by implication and the rule of controlling cases, to all similarly-structured federal protective statutes as well as state statutes) does negatively affect women's rights. The problem with placing both the rights of transgender biological males...

I'm becoming a fan of Pulitzer Prize winner Linda Greenhouse, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. The June 15 Bostock Opinion  written by Justice Neil Gorsuch shocked me for many reasons she touches on in the article below, which I'm pulling from its paywall and posting below. I agree especially with her assessment that Justice Gorsuch was more interested in self-aggrandizement than ideology of left or right; that "textualism" or "originalism" as a method of statutory construction is a sad diminishment of real judging and that the method allows for almost any decision to be made in any case. Neil Gorsuch decided the three associated cases, involving matters of huge moment for a large percentage of the American population, based on parsing the meaning of "because of sex" in the language of Title VII. He decided that phrase means "because of sex or anything necessarily related to sex", including the will o' the wisp...

Right on cue, a proposal in the New York Times that the Religious Right wants to align and work with the LGB and T community now. After all their lawsuits and bombast, all their dire warnings and all their media coverage, all their stuffing the Supreme Court with their majority, resulted in a stunning loss in the Bostock/Harris Supreme Court case on June 15, they're ready to deal. It only took a week to re-group.  The proposed deal is this: the RR will carve out its exception to the mainstream for religious types (to be defined in later cases) to continue to discriminate against LGBT people (and soon, gut reproductive rights for women) in all categories of federal discrimination laws. It will use its existing alternative to the Equality Act Bill to legislatively do that carving and gutting. This alternative is called The Fairness for All Act, and it changes the sex discrimination categories in all major federal laws into something very different from the provisions women have ...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-hands-major-decision-louisiana-abortion-case/story?id=71254751 UPDATE: The Decision in June Medical Services v Russo was published June 29, 2020, upholding women's right to abortion, Roe v Wade, the Women's Whole Health Services case, and the right of abortion clinics and doctors to sue as third parties to protect abortion rights. See a summary of the decision here:  https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-hands-major-decision-louisiana-abortion-case/story?id=71254751 Here's an op-ed in the New York Times finally bringing up the abortion case of June Medical Services v. Russo ,  soon to be decided by the US Supreme Court. When the author writes, "It has been an absolute onslaught," I agree in an even broader sense than just the onslaught against women's reproductive rights. Women have been thoroughly derailed from that struggle by trans extremism. That struggle is more or less over with the ruling in th...

Please note: these Notes express just one radical feminist's opinion. These are very early and informal reactions to the Bostock/Harris decision. There are many other concerned radical feminists who are also commenting on this case and I'm just one of us. My background: I'm a retired California lawyer. I have also served as an investigator in the US Office for Civil Rights for several years, wrote my Harvard Law School thesis on US administrative law relating to Title VII, served as an affirmative action coordinator at a university and a community college, and handled employment discrimination cases in private practice during my career. ____________________________________ In a strongly-written and historic opinion, the US Supreme Court ruled on June 15, 2020 that to discriminate in employment based on transgender status or sexual orientation of an employee violates Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act. You can read it here. The Majority Op...