Much afoot about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA. I’m too slow-moving a craft to do much justice to breaking news (more cruise ship than speedboat), but I definitely want to alert readers not already more abreast than me to what’s up with this bill.

The ENDA is a proposed U.S. federal law, along the lines of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Early attempts to propose a full-blown civil rights bill for LGB folk — Bella Abzug and Ed Koch’s 1974 “Gay Rights Bill,” HR 14752 — would have added “sexual orientation” to the Civil Rights Act. In the early 1990s, though, attempts for full civil rights protections were scaled back to employment protections, and this is what we’ve got going at the moment. (Wiki synopsis here.)

ENDA was introduced in April of this year, and has snaked its way through political process to the point where we now find it, sweating under the glare of the bright lights, the transphobia and compromise-readiness of some of its handlers all hanging out for everyone to see. The battle has now shifted from attempts to get the ENDA out of committee and to a vote before the House of Representatives, to attempts to stave off the evisceration of transgender people from the historic bill. Because last week, House Speaker Nanci Pelosi and Representative Barney Frank put forth a version of the bill strategically omitting protections against employment discriminations based on gender identity, on the logic that it would have a better chance of passing.

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