Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender Workplace Rights

Reflections

        In recognition of National Coming Out Day, October 11, 2008, Anne Golden, Co-Chair of Outten & Golden LLP’s LGBT Practice Group and an ally of LGBT communities for more than thirty years, shares these thoughts:

        I’ve been a lawyer since 1978. The progress I’ve seen in the past thirty years – especially in New York, where I live and work – has been amazing. In the early 1970s, when I worked in children’s books before I went to law school, my publishing house (then Harper & Row) published William’s Doll by Charlotte Zolotow. The book was considered controversial, and rumors spread that libraries and parents wouldn’t buy it because it might “encourage” boys to become gay. How much we’ve learned since then – both empirically about sexual orientation and gender identity, and emotionally as a society – about acceptance and the value of different experiences, backgrounds, and lifestyles! And how much change I’ve seen in my own work environment! When I eventually started working as a new attorney, to my knowledge there were no openly gay lawyers in my law firm, although it had hundreds of lawyers. Today, I work at a firm that devotes an entire practice group to serving LGBT employees, and where openly gay lawyers comprise 11 percent of our entire pool of attorneys – and one of them was just promoted to partner.

        At least in New York City, the changes are tangible. For example, in the’70s and ’80s, one of the biggest excuses employers used to exclude gays and lesbians from sensitive or prominent jobs was an assumption that gays and lesbians were more vulnerable to blackmail because they might be “outed.” (And forget about employers hiring transgender employees!) But as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals and their relationships have been humanized, recognized, and accepted in the mainstream, as communities have passed laws recognizing LGBT civil rights, and as more and more individuals have voluntarily “come out” at work, these sham excuses have melted away. As an employment lawyer, I have found it especially satisfying to work with increasingly progressive laws that make it a little easier for people to “come out.” Some examples include:

• In 1986, the New York City Human Rights Law was amended to include “sexual orientation” as a protected category. Sexual orientation was defined as “heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality.”
  
  
• On January 16, 2003, the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (“SONDA”) became effective, amending the New York State Human Rights Law to include “sexual orientation” as a protected category. Sexual orientation was defined as “heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality or asexuality, whether actual or perceived.”
  
  
• In April 2002, the New York City Human Rights Law was amended by re-defining “gender.” The amendment defined gender to include not only actual or perceived sex, but also “a person’s gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression, whether or not that gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the legal sex assigned to that person at birth.”
  
  
• In December 2004, the New York City Commission on Human Rights issued “Guidelines Regarding Gender Identity Discrimination” based on the April 2002 amendment to the city’s Human Rights Law. The guidelines were created by the New York City Commission on Human Rights with the assistance of a working group from the city’s LGBT communities, as well as input from various city agencies and the private sector, to assist individuals and organizations in evaluating and handling gender identity issues.

        In addition to these improvements in employment law, LGBT individuals have won other important rights. Same-sex marriage is now legal in three states, though unfortunately not in New York . . . yet. People are discovering that encouraging diversity and equal rights in all areas of life, including work, solves problems instead of causing them. Biased managers, co-workers, and others are increasingly forced to confront their prejudices, face-to-face, for what they are, and to abandon them.

        Nevertheless, there is still much work to be done. LGBT individuals continue to knock on our firm’s door seeking advice and counsel after they’ve been subjected to pervasive homophobic comments, fired for complaining about discrimination, harassed for not presenting as the gender people expect them to, or penalized in any of the other ways in which LGBT employees are discriminated against or retaliated against in the workplace. I have seen many legal advances, but I continue to work to help individuals use those legal advances and hopefully push them forward. My goal is to help educate employers to appreciate the unique value of every individual who works so hard for them, and to help and encourage individual employees to recognize their own value and to stand proud.

        After all, once you open the baggage you’ve been carrying around and see that it’s actually empty, you can throw it away.