'Death by a thousand cuts': LGBT rights fading under Trump, advocates say

Gay rights advocates are sounding the alarm over what they say is a quiet campaign being waged by Donald Trump’s administration to chip away at hard-fought protections for LGBT Americans.

While the White House has insisted Trump is a vocal supporter of the LGBT community, breaking from previous Republican presidents, advocacy groups were left questioning that commitment following a series of recent actions dubbed by one gay rights lawyer as “death by a thousand cuts”.

The latest missive arrived on Wednesday, when the US Census Bureau said a proposal to count LGBT Americans in its 2020 report and annual survey had been a mistake. The agency said it had “inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic”. Last week, the Trump administration deleted questions on sexual orientation from at least two other government surveys.

Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), said the move was a deliberate effort by the Trump administration “to erase LGBTQ people from federal data used to inform budgets and policies across the government”.

“Their intent is clear,” Griffin said in a statement. “By denying we exist, the Trump administration hopes to deny us equality. It won’t work.”

The HRC said it had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Commerce in response to find out who directed the change at the Census Bureau and why.

Separately, Trump signed into law on Monday a bill overturning a Barack Obama executive order that required companies seeking contracts with the federal government to show compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws.

Obama’s so-called “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces” order sought to shield workers from violations of a range of labor and safety laws, not just those affecting LGBT individuals. But it was rolled out in tandem with another Obama-era executive action that barred discrimination against federal workers specifically on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Sharon McGowan, the director of strategy at Lambda Legal, the country’s oldest and largest LGBT legal organization, said the Trump administration was sending a signal that non-discrimination was not at the forefront of its approach.

“They are going to try and chip and erode away the rights we’ve seen over the last few years, but in these back-channel ways that may not be as obvious,” she said.

“It puts us in the dark about how [workplace] violations are affecting LGBT people,” said Laura Durso, the vice-president of the LGBT Research and Communications Project at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Republicans who led efforts to overturn Obama’s action deemed it unnecessarily burdensome on businesses.

But David Stacy, HRC’s government affairs director, said the action would render it more difficult for the Department of Labor to hold accountable federal contractors for prior violations of civil rights laws, including those against LGBT employees.

“It signals that the administration could continue to repeal Obama-era policies aimed at protecting LGBTQ people,” Stacy said.

On the surface, Trump has taken credit for being the first Republican presidential nominee to profess his support for LGBT Americans. The White House touted his position earlier this year, when it issued a statement confirming he would not rescind Obama’s executive order banning LGBT discrimination in the workplace.

But that pledge was born from draft executive orders leaked to the media indicating the administration had, in fact, weighed not simply reversing Obama’s protections but also unraveling other LGBT rights at the federal level.

Advocates thus remain skeptical of the Trump administration’s posturing on the issue and saw some of their fears realized when the president lifted Obama-era guidance protecting the use of bathrooms by transgender students.

Since then, gay rights supporters argue, the Trump administration has taken active measures behind the scenes that undermine the LGBT community.

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) eliminated questions that were designed to compile information about LGBT seniors. Roger Severino, the Trump-appointed chief of the HHS Office of Civil Rights, has been a forceful opponent of transgender rights in particular and other Obama efforts to protect LGBT people.

Earlier this month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development declared it would withdraw two agency notices geared toward protecting LGBT people experiencing homelessness. And on 13 March, the state department included in its official US delegation to the United Nations’ 61st annual Commission on the Status of Women conference two anti-LGBT human rights activists.

“It’s a playbook that we have seen before, which is love the sinner, hate the sin,” said Durso of the Trump administration’s public relations strategy on LGBT issues. “They get to talk out of both sides of their mouth.”

Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, joined the criticism on Wednesday in a statement decrying the Census Bureau’s decision.

“Today, the Trump administration has decided that LGBT Americans shouldn’t count,” she said, while noting the trend across agencies with respect to gathering information about LGBT people.

By excluding LGBT-specific data collection in the 2020 Census, the Trump administration showed it did not even want to have the information needed to act in the best interest of countless American families, she said.

McGowan said the collective consequences of the Trump administration’s actions would be felt for years. The Census Bureau’s decision on Wednesday, she said, would have especially dramatic consequences for identifying communities that were at risk and in need of health funding or social services protection.

“We are seeing this broader trend of erasing and eliminating any consideration of the needs of LGBT people in this administration,” she said.

“We are starting to see what the death by a thousand cuts looks like.”