Formation | 2017 |
---|---|
Founders | Kaeley Triller Haver, Miriam Ben-Shalom |
Affiliations | The Heritage Foundation, Women's Liberation Front |
Website | Official website |
The Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC) is an organization founded in 2017 and operating primarily in the United States, known for its opposition to transgender rights. The organization aims to connect trans-exclusionary radical feminists with conservative Christian anti-LGBT groups, ostensibly "tabling [their] ideological differences" to "oppose gender identity ideology". The organization actively supports anti-LGBT groups in legislation targeting transgender rights. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Since 2019, HATAC has worked with The Heritage Foundation, holding panel discussion events featuring Republican Party strategists, Christian evangelical advocates, and leaders of anti-trans feminist organizations such as the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF). [5]
Hands Across the Aisle was co-founded by Kaeley Triller Haver, an anti-abortion conservative, and Miriam Ben-Shalom. Haver is a sexual assault survivor and Ben-Shalom was discharged from the U.S. army for coming out as a lesbian in 1976, causing her to campaign against Don't Ask Don't Tell for decades. In 2016, Ben-Shalom was dis-invited from being grand marshal of the Milwaukee Pride parade because of her support for "bathroom bills" which deny transgender people the right to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. [2] [3]
Before founding HATAC, Haver was the communication director for Just Want Privacy, a campaign to repeal a law in Washington state that allows transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. Just Want Privacy was criticized by a sexual assault survivor for using her story to fundraise for anti-trans goals. [2] Haver admitted to having sex with a 17-year-old, who had previously been in her care at the YMCA, when she was 23; she was given a strike by Child Protective Services but not charged with a crime. [3] [6]
It's unknown who funds HATAC. [3] The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote: "With little transparency on its website about who and what formed the group, HATAC might simply be a secular-facing iteration of the same anti-LGBT agenda that has driven the Christian Right for decades." [2]
In February 2017, The Heritage Foundation hosted a panel with 5 members of the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition including members of WoLF. [6]
In May 2017, HATAC cosigned a petition with Michelle Cretella, then president of the anti-LGBT American College of Pediatricians, and leaders of other anti-LGBT groups such as the Family Policy Alliance, Concerned Women for America, and the Texas Eagle Forum, to Ben Carson, then director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The petition supported barring transgender women from accessing women's homeless shelters. In 2019, HUD proposed a new rule which would allow federally funded homeless shelters to force trans people to share facilities based on their assigned sex rather than their gender identity, or to deny them entrance altogether. [2] [3] [4]
In September 2017, WoLF and HATAC issued a letter to John Wiesman, then Secretary of Health for the Washington State Department of Health, demanding the state cease changing gender designations on birth certificates. [6]
In 2019, the anti-LGBT group Alliance Defending Freedom helped a client sue his school district in Doe v Boyertown Area School District for allowing transgender boys to use the same locker rooms and bathrooms as him. HATAC and WoLF wrote amicus briefs in support of the client. [4]
Transphobia consists of negative attitudes, feelings, or actions towards transgender people or transness in general. Transphobia can include fear, aversion, hatred, violence or anger towards people who do not conform to social gender expectations. It is often expressed alongside homophobic views and hence is often considered an aspect of homophobia. Transphobia is a type of prejudice and discrimination, similar to racism and sexism, and transgender people of color are often subjected to all three forms of discrimination at once.
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Unisex public toilets are public toilets that are not separated by gender or sex.
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Miriam Ben-Shalom is an American educator, activist and former Staff Sergeant in the United States Army. After being discharged from the military for homosexuality in 1976, she successfully challenged her discharge in court and returned to military service in 1987—the first openly gay person to be reinstated after being discharged under the military's policy excluding homosexuals from military service. She served until 1990 when the Army succeeded in terminating her service after prolonged judicial proceedings.
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The Women's Liberation Front (WoLF) is an American self-described radical feminist organization that opposes transgender rights and gender identity legislation. It has engaged in litigation on transgender topics, working against the Obama administration's Title IX directives which defined sex discrimination to include gender identity. According to its mission statement, it wishes to "abolish regressive gender roles and the epidemic of male violence using legal arguments, policy advocacy, and public education". It has been characterized by Vox, The New Republic, and La Presse as a "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" group. WoLF has been described as a hate group.
The Equality Act is a bill in the United States Congress, that, if passed, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, federally funded programs, credit, and jury service. The Supreme Court's June 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County protects gay and transgender people in matters of employment, but not in other respects. The Bostock ruling also covered the Altitude Express and Harris Funeral Homes cases.
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South Dakota House Bill 1008, also known as House Bill 1008, HB 1008, and the Bathroom Bill, was a bill passed by the South Dakota Legislature in 2016 and vetoed by Governor of South Dakota Dennis Daugaard. The purpose of the bill was to restrict bathroom and locker room use by transgender students to facilities that matched their sex assigned at birth, not their gender identity. It was the first such bathroom bill to be passed in a state legislature in the U.S. and sparked a chain of similar bills across the nation. HB 1008 was opposed by several LGBT rights organizations, such as the HRC, GLSEN, and ACLU.
The Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition is a transgender and LGBT civil rights organization in the state of Tennessee in the United States of America.
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