The Washington Times Publishes Blatantly Transphobic Editorial.

I really think when newspapers publish editorials they should pick ones that have more solid logic than, well, blatant transphobia. Reading Lara sends in this garbage published at the Washington Times,

ENDA purports to “prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.” Clever politically correct wording aside, this is a direct attack on common sense. On some matters, it is good to be discriminating. It is right to discriminate between honesty and dishonesty, between politeness and impoliteness, between right and wrong. And it assuredly is right to be discriminating in choosing who teaches our children. ENDA would make it impossible for a non-church-based charter school, for instance, to remove from the classroom a “she-male” who insists on exposing her pupils to her unnatural transformation.

I suppose making some really legitimate arguments about how laws like ENDA are needed to counteract years of transphobia and homophobia in the workplace or how discrimination is nearly a universal experience for transgender folks just nonsensical in the face of someone that uses words like “she-male,” but seriously, ENDA is only one step in the right direction.
Lisa Mottet writes at Roll Call,

A 2007 meta-analysis by the Williams Institute of 50 studies of job discrimination against LGBT people found regular evidence of bias in the workplace. LGBT people reported various discriminatory behaviors, including overt discrimination (up to 68 percent in the surveys), firing or denial of employment (up to 17 percent), denial of promotion or negative performance evaluation (up to 28 percent) and even verbal or physical violence (up to 41 percent).
For transgender workers specifically, widespread bias makes their quest for jobs even more bleak. Preliminary data from a forthcoming, groundbreaking survey on discrimination against transgender people in the U.S. from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality shows that discrimination in employment is a nearly universal experience. Ninety-seven percent of our sample (approximately 6,500 transgender people) report being mistreated or harassed at work. Almost half (47 percent) lost their jobs, were denied a promotion or denied a job as a direct result of being a transgender individual.

But hey, what’s a little lot of evidence in the face of sweeping generalizations based on ignorance and hatred?
Passing or protesting laws in an effort to “protect our children,” are often misguided efforts that don’t really look at how youth actually interact or deal with different communities or types of people or what youth actually need (think abstinence, drug war, etc etc etc). They are generally a front for parents to air their homophobic, transphobic and often racist ideas of community to a media and political landscape that often buy their bogus ideas of “family values” even when it flies in the face of real common sense, logic and evidence. As someone who taught in public schools for 5 years, kids are able to navigate diverse and new situations without fear and hatred as long as it is facilitated. If all they are fed is fear and hatred than that is what they will see and it is what they will reproduce.
Sounds like these children need protection from their parents myopic worldview more than anything else. The only discrimination I see necessary here should be on behalf of the editors at the Washington Times on what is legitimate political commentary verses ignorant blathering.