I was scouting the news last night, trying to decide what I would write about to publish on Friday evening. I usually wait until Wednesdays or Thursdays to do that, but this week Thursday and Friday are going to be spent on jury duty.
So I spotted this article in Time magazine by Adam Cohen. Not sure exactly who he was, I did a bit of a background check and discovered that he is not the Adam Cohen who is the musician son of Leonard Cohen, nor is he the Adam Cohen who is Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and of Physics at Harvard. He's not even this Adam Cohen. Nope, he's this Adam Cohen.
Assistant editorial page editor at the New York Times? And before that he was a senior writer for Time Magazine? Before that, it says, he was an education reform lawyer and a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Over at Time they say that he is a "former TIME senior writer" and a former member of the New York Times editorial board and teaches at Yale Law School…and that he publishes a column on legal issues every Monday (oh…and he's the author of Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America. The tell us that a lot.) Apparently I have been missing those legal columns.
Really, I suppose that I shouldn't be giving Adam such a hard time. I mean he has finally noticed that we exist. The Glenn v Brumby decision out of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit case caught his attention and he apparently has decided that we have risen to the heights enough to record the following title: Transgender People: The Next Frontier in Civil Rights.
I need to admit that, as someone who has been working for our rights since the early 90s, I found the title quite deflating.
But I have to give him kudos for linking back to my diary of last Friday evening at the end of the essay. I might presume that he even read it.
So I guess he deserves to have me include a snippet of the essay here:
Meanwhile, things are also changing in the workplace. Last week’s report from the Human Rights Campaign found that 207 of 636 major U.S. companies surveyed, or nearly one-third, covered the cost of gender-reassignment surgery for transgender workers. That number increased from just 85 a year earlier. When HRC began monitoring the issue a decade ago, no corporations covered the surgery. Among the corporations that added coverage this year are Apple, American Airlines and Chevron. In pop culture, transgender people are also becoming more visible and recognized. Chaz Bono, the only child of Sunny Bono and Cher, has put a celebrity face on being transgender — especially after he competed this season on Dancing with the Stars. Last month, Kelly Osborne, the television personality and daughter of rocker Ozzy Osbourne, apologized for her use of the word “tranny” and vowed to speak out against the “injustice” done to transgender individuals.
Transgender people have long been on the margins of society. That has even been true in the LGBT — or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender — community, where debates have raged over how hard and how fast to push for transgender rights, which remain controversial. But that is true of any group that is still in the early stages of its civil rights struggle. If two of the nation’s most powerful institutions, federal courts and major corporations, are increasingly lining up behind transgender people, then change is undoubtedly on the way.