American Civil Liberties Union

Yesterday, the residents of Gainesville, Florida, soundly defeated an effort to repeal a city ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. With turnout nearly double that of a typical city election, voters rejected Amendment 1, which would have reversed a discrimination ban passed by the city council, by a stunning 58 percent to 42 percent margin. Go Gainesville!

What makes the victory sweeter is that the proponents of Amendment 1, the deceptively named Citizen for Good Public Policy PAC, had pushed the initiative using scare tactics preying on public ignorance of and misconceptions about transgender people. Instead of talking about what the law did do — protect LGBT people from being fired, denied housing or refused service simply for being who they are — they made up something that the law did not do: allow male pedophiles to hang out in women’s washrooms.

That was what the whole Amendment 1 campaign became about. "Keep men out of women’s restrooms!" The LGBT citizens of Gainesville were trying to make sure they wouldn’t live in fear of being fired or kicked out of their apartments and the opposition was making up lies about the bathroom. Today Jim Gilbert, a spokesperson for CGPP, even said he was proud of the group for focusing so consistently on trumpeting this lie in their efforts to deny basic protections for gay and trans people.

Yesterday, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) introduced legislation to overturn the disastrous "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy, which bans LGBT people from serving openly in the military. While this legislation has been introduced previously, it stands a real chance of passage this time, given increased support in Congress and a new President who has already promised to repeal the policy during his administration.

One year ago today, Lawrence “Larry” King, a 15-year-old student at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, was shot to death in class by the boy he asked to be his Valentine. By the time he was killed, Larry had endured years of relentless teasing and bullying from his classmates, both because he was openly gay and because of his gender expression. Though his killer has not explicitly said why he murdered Larry, classmates believe it was because he himself was subjected to anti-gay harassment after his friends learned he was the object of Larry’s affections.

In addition to being my birthday, today is the fifth anniversary of the settlement in Flores v. Morgan Hill Unified School District. In that case, six students sued their school district after enduring horrifying homophobic harassment from their classmates while staff, teachers and administrators did nothing — even when the students asked them for help. The settlement required the district to train all staff on how to protect students from anti-LGBT harassment. It also required middle and high schools in the district to hold yearly sessions for incoming seventh graders and freshman, focused on preventing anti-gay bullying and reminding them of the punishments for homophobic harassment.