The following weekly digest is written and compiled by the Trans Formations Project, a grassroots nonprofit dedicated to tracking and educating about the anti-trans legislative crisis currently sweeping the United States. You can follow their work and latest updates via Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, and Facebook.
Hello readers. It’s Friday, July 5, 2024.
As a reminder, legislative sessions are different for each state — and you can keep track of your state’s legislative session here. Currently, bill progressions have slowed following the conclusion of legislative sessions in most states.
Special Newsletter Feature: Chevron Deference
This week, Mika Fernandez, Esq. (she/her), President of the Board of Trans Formations Project, gives their perspective on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Chevron deference.
In Mika’s own words:
For almost twelve years, I have been a civil rights lawyer specializing in education law. I focus specifically on cases that directly impact trans kids, kids of color, kids with disabilities, and members of other marginalized communities.
During that time, many of my fellow advocates feared the overruling of a Supreme Court case that most people probably hadn’t heard of, Chevron v NRDC—or, as you might have heard it called in the news recently, Chevron deference. On June 28, the Supreme Court overturned this important legal precedent, making it more difficult to enforce civil rights protections for minoritized groups.
But even without Chevron deference, hope is not lost: there is still important work that can be done to protect those rights. I work with Trans Formations Project because it is one of the very few organizations currently doing the work that is actually needed to protect trans kids.
Before Chevron deference was overturned, federal agencies like the Department of Education had offices for civil rights, created by the US congress to be experts on civil rights law (including trans rights, racial justice, etc.). These offices employ hundreds of experts on civil rights laws: lawyers, peer reviewed researchers, child psychologists. When they make statements, like the recent April 2024 rule on transgender rights, they do so with an authority that few others in the world have access to.
Judges aren’t experts, and when someone brings a case, oftentimes expert witnesses determine what the truth actually is. Anti-trans “experts” rely on pseudoscience and present it as science. Notably, the scientific community itself has come to the overwhelming conclusion that trans people are real, and that the real danger to them is not supporting them in their identities. The word of psuedoscientific “experts” should be nothing compared to an agency with hundreds of experts charged with protecting student civil rights.
