Anti-Transgender Constitutional Law
Katie Eyer | 77 Vand. L. Rev. 1113
Over the course of the last three decades, gender identity anti- discrimination protections and other transgender-supportive government policies have increased, as government entities have sought to protect and support the transgender community. But constitutional litigation by opponents of transgender equality has also proliferated, seeking to limit or eliminate such trans-protective measures. Such litigation has attacked as unconstitutional everything from laws prohibiting anti-transgender employment discrimination to the efforts of individual public school teachers to support transgender teens.
This Article provides the first systematic account of the phenomenon of anti-transgender constitutional litigation. As described herein, such litigation is surprisingly novel: while trans-protective measures date back much further, anti-transgender constitutional litigation was virtually nonexistent prior to 2016. Moreover, as late as 2018, the few victories in such cases were almost always either temporary or predicated on arguments with only limited application. In contrast, the most recent wave of anti-transgender constitutional litigation has seen increasing success in invalidating or limiting transgender equality measures, based on increasingly broad and potentially impactful rationales.
AUTHOR:
Katie Eyer