A Bare Desire to Harm: Transgender People and the Equal Protection Clause
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges establishing marriage equality for same-sex couples marks a major shift in recognizing gay, lesbian, and bisexual people as a central part of the fabric of American society. Obergefell also marks the passing of the torch from “LGB” to “T”; the next civil rights frontier belongs to transgender people, for whom key barriers still remain. In January 2015, a transgender woman filed an equal protection challenge to a provision of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), which explicitly excludes several medical conditions closely associated with transgender people. In support of this challenge, lawyers for the plaintiff (and co-authors of this Article) advance a novel argument: transgender people are a “suspect” or “quasi-suspect” class entitled to heightened scrutiny. The authors further argue that the ADA’s transgender exclusions are unconstitutional no matter what level of scrutiny applies because moral animus against transgender people is not a legitimate basis for lawmaking. This equal protection challenge paves the way for the extension of disability rights protection to transgender people under the Rehabilitation Act, Fair Housing Act, and state anti-disability discrimination laws that mirror the ADA. It also marks a new break for equality law—reaching far beyond disability rights to all laws that single out transgender people for disparate treatment. This challenge also informs the broader theoretical debate over the relationship between identity and impairment, and diagnosis and discrimination.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it