How Obama Powers the Transgender Movement

While attention focuses on a North Carolina bathroom law, the White House is pushing a broad special protection agenda

In 2013, President Obama’s second inaugural address thrilled his progressive base with a line that subtly equated the historic struggles of black Americans with those of gay Americans. “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is that star that guides us still,” said Mr. Obama, “just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.”

Seneca Falls and Selma are of course shorthand for the women’s rights and black civil-rights movements. The Stonewall citation is less well-known but alludes to the gay bar in New York City that was raided by police in 1969, an event that many consider the start of the gay-rights movement.

Some of the president’s black supporters find the black/gay parallels too facile. The black author Ellis Cose has written that, “Both movements share the goals of ending discrimination and fostering decency. But in many respects, they are more different than they are alike.” He added: “With gays, we are not looking at roped-off communities or at intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.”

Sharon Lettman-Hicks of the National Black Justice Coalition, a group that fights discrimination in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities, has noted that gay history in the U.S. didn’t involve getting “hosed down and dogs sicced on us” and that “you can’t compare the plight of the movement, the centuries of oppression that black people in this country had to face.”

Mr. Obama doesn’t seem to mind such criticisms. In fact, he has used his second term to push a rather radical agenda on behalf of LGBT activists who regularly invoke the black civil-rights movement. A new law in North Carolina, which protects privacy and safety in public bathrooms, locker rooms and showers, is currently grabbing the headlines. The state law overturns a local ordinance passed by the city of Charlotte that allowed men to have access to women’s facilities. Critics of the legislation say it discriminates against people who “identify” with a sex other than the one on their birth certificate, and the critics dismiss safety concerns as overblown.

What has received less attention is how the Obama administration has been quietly reinterpreting long-standing antidiscrimination statutes to advance LGBT causes...

Read the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal