WASHINGTON , Beginning in 2010, the
Obama administration, through the Office of Personnel Management, has started
to list gender identity among the classes protected by federal Equal Employment
Opportunity (EEO) policies. By including gender identity as a protected class,
the federal government is stating its commitment to protecting transgender
employees and has taken a significant step toward ending employment
discrimination of LGBT people in the federal workforce.
Although
a long-standing federal law prohibits any federal employment decisions that are
not based on merit and another law prohibits sex discrimination, the new EEO
policy marks the first time that gender identity discrimination has been
explicitly banned from the federal workplace. The policy is now on the federal
government’s jobs Web site as a link from more than 20,000 current federal job
listings. The American Civil Liberties Union praised the Obama administration
for initiating the change in EEO policy and urged Congress to continue to work
for further protections for LGBT Americans. Read
the rest of the story here.