The Human Rights Law prohibits employers, businesses or housing providers from discriminating against someone based on a wide variety of factors, including age, race, creed and color.
Today we are sending the message loud and clear that New York will not stand for discrimination against transgender people. It is intolerable to allow harassment or discrimination against anyone, and the transgender community has been subjected to a second-class status for far too long.
The regulations make clear that the word “sex” refers not only to gender, but also “gender identity and the status of being transgender. Since the Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination based on sex or disability, the regulations make clear those protections apply to transgender individuals and those with gender dysphoria, too.
This past Thursday evening, ay a dinner for the Empire State Pride Agenda Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that, through executive action, he had added transgender and gender nonconforming people to New York's Human Rights Law of 1945.
This action comes after the Republican-controlled State Senate once again failed to pass GENDA, New York's Fender Non-Discrimination Act. As in the past, the Act passed the Democratic-controlled Assembly only to find that it would not even receive a vote in the Senate.
The Human Rights Law protects individuals from discrimination on the basis of "age race, creed, natinoal origin, sexual orientation (SONDA passed in 2002), and sex in the areas of employment, housing, public accommodations, education, and credit.
Last month I wrote a couple of diaries about New York's struggles with its own Dignity for All Students Act:
Indignity in New York, one of my least successful diaries ever, concerned an NYCLU on the status of transgender students in the state
Outraged focused on Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Angry Letter to Acting Education Commissioner Elizabeth Berlin demanding action to ameliorate the situation.
Funny thing about that letter: As well-publicized as it was, Education Department spokesman Dennis Tompkins says that Berlin never received it.
Be that as it may, this past Tuesday the New York Board of Regents issued guidelines to schools about how to treat transgender students. The Regents called for schools to respect the self-identity of youngster whenever the subject of gender arises.
Andrew Cuomo is outraged! Outraged, I say! He's so outraged, he wrote an Angry Letter on Friday.
In one of my least successful diary efforts, Indignity in New York from this past week I recounted how the NYCLU had released a report charging that the state of New York was a failure at protecting transgender and gender non-conformiing students as charged under the Dignity for All Students Act of 2010.
This lack of action appears to have resulted in harassment and violence being perpetrated against transgender and gender-nonconforming students.
--Cuomo
According to the report, 19% of the 24,478 incidents of harassment reported in New York schools during the 2012-13 school year involved gender stereotypes.
Cuomo called the report “truly disturbing” and demanded that Acting Education Commissioner Elizabeth Berlin “take any and all necessary action” to address its findings.
In 2010 New York passed the Dignity for All Students Act.
The Dignity Act prohibits acts of harassment and bullying, including cyberbullying, and/or discrimination, by employees or students on school property or at a school function, including but not limited to such conduct those based on a student’s actual or perceived race, color, weight, national origin, ethnic group, religion, religious practice, disability, sexual orientation, gender (defined to include gender identity or expression), or sex.
The good news is that overall anti-LGBT violence decreased by 32% from 2013. To a large extent that was due to sharp declines in New York City and Los Angeles...which may be as much related to decline in staffing programs as actual decline in incidents.
The bad news is that the number of fatal anti-LGBTQ hate crime reports increased by 11%...and the severity of the violence remained high. Especially impacted were transgender women, the LGBT and HIV-affected communities of color, and gay men.
The ACP recognizes that LGBT people have significant disparity in the health care we receive, ranging from coverage to culturally competent care to state and federal policies that systemically reify social stigma, marginalization and discrimination. That results in LGBT people being discouraged from seeking preventative health care, as well as increasing anxiety, suicidal ideation and substance and alcohol abuse.
New York is one of only three states which protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation but not on the basis of gender identity. The other two are Wisconsin and New Hampshire.
Partially that is because too many people believe that the protections afforded to LGB people automagically extend to transgender people. But the law knows what we have have been enunciating for years: sexual orientation and gender are not the same.
Sexual orientation is about who you desire to go to bed with. Gender identity is about who we go to bed as. In other words, sex is between our legs. Gender is between our ears.
The Sodus, NY Central School District has decided to honor a request by a transgender student to use the girl's bathroom and locker room.
After a series of adults spoke against a transgender girl sharing facilities with their children, Jennifer Surridge stood up to speak. A hush fell over the proceedings.
My daughter has a civil right to be in the bathroom that she gender identifies with. And your children have the same right to be in the bathroom that they gender identify with. If they choose to leave that's a choice- my daughter is not choosing. She just is.
For years, since she was 3 or 4, she has told me she was a girl and I wasn't excepting. I didn't understand and agree with any of it because I didn't get it.
Last month I wrote a couple of diaries about New York's struggles with its own Dignity for All Students Act:
Barnard College's trustees are 
The American College of Physicians (ACP) is the second largest group pf medical doctors in the nation, behind the AMA. This past week the 