Alex Chen

An op-ed by Lecturer on Law Alex Chen ’15: Since the start of the modern LGBT movement in the 1960s, some members of the community have questioned the degree of common interest between lesbian, gay, and bisexual people on the one hand and transgender people on the other. Notwithstanding similar experiences of discrimination and a shared history of activism, members of both communities have sometimes viewed one another with mutual suspicion. LGB people, protective of hard-won legal, political, and societal victories, have worried that association with an even more unfamiliar and stigmatized minority group would imperil those advances. Trans people, weary of advocates prioritizing gay rights over trans rights, have worried that LGB people might achieve greater equality and then abandon the field without extending a hand to transgender people. But the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on Monday in Bostock v. Clayton County provides the strongest possible counterargument that when LGBT people band together to press for rights for the entire community, they can achieve momentous victories that would not have been possible working on their own.