The New York Times is reporting that President Obama's lawyers are drafting new workplace guidelines and rules that will add transgendered individuals to the list of groups protected from firing and other disciplinary actions due to their minority status:
The guidelines will be in an updated federal handbook for managers and supervisors to be distributed and posted online in the next couple of months, and they could also be included in other materials for managers. They will list transgender people — those who identify their gender differently from the information on their birth certificates — as among several groups protected by antidiscrimination laws.
This move signals to the LGBT community that President Obama's administration has not forgot about them and will move to better the situation in ways they can unilaterally, without having to wait on a hamstrung congress seemingly impotent to pass repeals of DOMA and DADT.
These new workplace guidelines are based partly on a presidential executive order, coordinated through the Department of Labor, headed by a true progressive and supporter of labor Hilda Solis:
Executive Order 11246 prohibits covered federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and requires affirmative action to ensure equal employment opportunity without regard to those factors. E.O. 11246 is enforced by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP).
This new updated set of rules and regulations will allow transgendered individuals who have reason to believe that actions against them were due to bigotry against their gender orientation to use federal resources to seek restitution.
President Obama has been taking a lot of flack recently (deservedly) for his administration's perceived inaction when it comes to progress for the LGBT community, so I feel we should give him the credit he's due in this instance.
UPDATE: Just for clarification on how many businesses this will impact due to its application to federal contractors, here is a list of the Top 200 contractors as of 2007. They include:
-Lockheed Martin
-Boeing
-General Electric
-FedEx
-IBM
(h/t to Elise for the idea!)