Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on a case involving school bathroom rules for transgender students sometime next year. The high court will hear the case of Gavin Grimm, a 17-year-old transgender student at Gloucester High School in Virginia.
The Supreme Court will take up transgender rights for the first time in the case of a Virginia school board that wants to prevent a transgender teenager from using the boys' bathroom at his high school. The justices said Friday they will hear the appeal from the Gloucester County school board sometime next year.
The Supreme Court on Friday said it will decide whether the Obama administration may require public school systems to let transgender students use bathrooms that align with their gender identity, putting the court again at the center of a divisive social issue. School districts across the country are split on how to accommodate transgender students in the face of conflicting guidance from courts, the federal government and, in some cases, state legislatures that have passed laws requiring people to use public restrooms that coincide with the sex on their birth certificates.
The landscape of transgender law impacting students is quickly evolving, in large part due to the increasing national debate over restroom access for transgender students. By way of background, under Title IX, schools receiving federal money may not discriminate based on a student's sex.
In this June 26, 2015, file photo, a supporter of same-sex marriage runs with an "equality" flag under a larger "equality" drape outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, before the court declared that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the U.S. Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land, but there are other battlegrounds related to civil rights and non-discrimination protections for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.
A federal magistrate judge recommended this week that a transgender girl at the center of a lawsuit over restroom and locker room access be able to use the girls' locker room at her Illinois high school, writing that the Constitution doesn't protect students against having to share such facilities with their transgender peers. In an 82-page report, Magistrate Judge Jeffrey T. Gilbert sided against a group of students and parents who sought a preliminary injunction to force the girl to use the boys' locker room or a private bathroom while the court moves forward with the case.
North Carolina has traditionally leaned Republican in U.S. presidential elections but a series of local controversies -- including policies affecting transgender people; voting-rights disputes; and police shootings of black people -- have made the state a partisan battleground.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left intact California's ban on "gay conversion" therapy aimed at turning youths under age 18 away from homosexuality, rejecting a Christian minister's challenge to the law asserting it violates religious rights. The justices, turning away a challenge to the 2012 law for the second time in three years, let stand a lower court's ruling that it was constitutional and neither impinged upon free exercise of religion nor impacted the activities of clergy members.
Gov. Jerry Brown waded further into the national debate over transgender rights Thursday as he signed a bill requiring that all single-stall toilets in California be designated as gender neutral. The measure requires that businesses and governments post non-gender-specific signs on single-occupant restrooms by March 1, 2017.
" A transgender man granted asylum by the U.S. last year is challenging an Indiana law that prevents him from changing his first name to a male name that matches his gender identity. The 31-year-old, who was brought to Indiana from Mexico illegally by his parents at age six, contends in his federal lawsuit that Indiana's law requiring anyone seeking a name-change to provide proof of U.S. citizenship is unconstitutional and essentially forces him to "out" himself as transgender whenever he must display his driver's license.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends a campaign event with veterans at the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, where he stated he believes President Obama was born in the United States, September 16, 2016. ow can it possibly be that Donald Trump is on the verge of overtaking Hillary Clinton? Despite all of the questions Trump has raised about his suitability to lead the United States, nearly half of America's voters seem willing to cut him enough slack to quite possibly elect him.
North Carolina's Republican leaders and gay-rights supporters are daring each other to clean up the mess over the state's law limiting LGBT protections against discrimination, which is crimping the state's economy as sponsors of major sporting events pull out of the state. Gov. Pat McCrory and GOP legislators have offered to consider rescinding the law, but only if the Democrats who lead Charlotte's City Council act first and essentially admit they were wrong to pass a local ordinance that would have expanded protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory dropped a lawsuit against the federal government Friday, but debate over the state's so-called 'bathroom bill' rages on. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory speaks June 24 during a candidate forum in Charlotte, N.C. After suing the federal government in May to defend the state's controversial new law limiting LGBT rights, Gov. McCrory dropped the lawsuit Friday.
Now that North Carolina has lost its NCAA and Atlantic Coast Conference championship events for this year, some other states shape up as the next potential battlegrounds in the organization's fight for discrimination-free environments. The NCAA earlier this week took the unprecedented step of pulling seven championship events from the state over its objection to a law that can allow for discrimination against LGBT people.
Following last academic year's seemingly powerful Black Lives Matter protests, a group called Black Students for Revolution has now issued a 13-demand manifesto at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The protracted set of 13 demands - which, at 3,211 words, clocks in at over 220 percent of the length of the Declaration of Independence - charges that the taxpayer-funded school "acts an extension of a colonial system that profits from the exploitation of historically-looted communities."
Saturday night saw 3,600 members of the LGBTQ community and their allies gather at the DC Convention Center for the Human Rights Campaign's annual National Dinner. This year the chairs of the dinner were Bruce Rohr and June Crenshaw .
Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine is predicting that the Roman Catholic Church may eventually change its opposition to gay marriage. Kaine is a devout Roman Catholic as well as a U.S. senator from Virginia and a former governor of that state.
As the school year begins, one thing is certain: There will be anti-Semitic outbursts and incidents at campuses of the University of California. We know this because of a long history of such episodes at campuses like Berkeley, Irvine and UCLA, where Jewish students have been subjected to everything from physical obstruction and attempted intimidation to questions by Palestinian students and their sympathizers about whether their faith allows Jews elected to student government posts to make objective decisions.
College applications and high school graduation are the biggest worries for most 17-year-olds. For Gavin Grimm, it's waiting for the nation's highest court to decide whether he can use the boys restroom.
The Missouri School Boards Association originally recommended schools allow transgender students to use the bathroom and locker room they identify with, but it swiftly rewrote the policy, leaving the decision up to districts. The sudden change came after a Virginia district court ruled it did not accept the U.S. Department of Education's interpretation of Title IX to include "gender identity," allowing transgender students to use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity.