Democratic Party Platform Takes Strong Stands on Transgender Equality

This week, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) adopted a platform that strongly backs LGBT equality, and specifically supports fairness for transgender people, reflecting Americans’ expanding awareness and understanding of the critical need to afford dignity and respect to all. While we see both growing support and lingering opposition to transgender equality from voters and politicians in both parties, the 2016 DNC platform stakes out strong positions on issues of equity, including on discrimination and violence against transgender people. Addressing the current political climate, it says, “It is unacceptable to target, defame, or exclude anyone because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, language, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.”

The DNC platform calls for comprehensive federal nondiscrimination laws that clearly protect LGBT people in housing, employment, education, public accommodations, credit, jury service, and federally-funded programs. It opposes efforts to impose state-sanctioned discrimination, including efforts to exclude LGBT people from public spaces, and denounces “the misuse of religion to discriminate.”

Other platform provisions call for addressing LGBT youth homelessness, school bullying, and racial and LGBT disparities in school discipline; supporting LGBT elders; collecting data on LGBT people along with other minority populations in federal surveys; and ensuring access to necessary health care—as well as “ending the crisis of violence against transgender Americans.”

The DNC platform also recognizes the vulnerability of LGBT immigrants and others fleeing persecution, and calls for keeping them out of dangerous immigrant detention centers. It calls for ensuring that US foreign policy advances the human rights of all, including LGBT people.

Whatever the positions of individual elected officials or candidates, it is encouraging that the 2016 DNC platform contains so many provisions that reflect growing understanding and acceptance of LGBT and particularly of transgender people nationwide.

NOTE: NCTE is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and as a result does not endorse or oppose any candidate for elected public office.