By: Thomas Lewis

Decades from now, I’m going to look back at the second week of May 2016 as a historic turning point for transgender equality. I have little doubt that it will be remembered as the week transgender Americans had their rights recognized and that our crawl toward equality found surer footing.

This morning, the federal government finally released guidelines for public schools on how Title IX protects transgender students. It’s actually pretty simple: Title IX is a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. When schools force transgender students into the wrong bathroom or tell us we have to use a separate bathroom that is sex discrimination plain and simple. But for some reason, state governors and lawmakers just don’t get it — or don’t care.

The new guidelines issued by the Departments of Justice and Education remind them of what they should already know: discriminating against transgender students is against the law. These guidelines should send a clear message to lawmakers who ignore the rights of transgender students like me and single us out for harmful discrimination at school, the place where we should all feel most comfortable.

Transgender Americans scored another victory today when the federal government announced that medical care for transgender people, including care related to gender transition, cannot be denied under the Affordable Care Act. Transgender people no longer have to worry that we won’t get the healthcare we need simply because of who we are. The victory, however, didn’t just protect the transgender community. The new rule also protects women – cis and trans - and all LGBT patients who previously had no protection from the federal government against discrimination in health care.

And last but certainly not least, the federal government announced they would challenge North Carolina’s harmful anti-transgender law in federal court. In a historic show of support for the transgender community, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said she will stand with us in our fight to stop Gov. Pat McCrory and the North Carolina Legislature’s attack on transgender people.

North Carolina is on the wrong side of history, and the law should be repealed so that transgender North Carolinians can comfortably use the restroom they have always used without fearing they will be targeted for harassment or even arrest. Attorney General Lynch said it best: “What we must not do — what we must never do — is turn on our neighbors, our family members, and our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human.”

A lot has happened since I worked with the ACLU to convince South Dakota’s governor to veto what could have been the country’s first statewide, explicitly anti-transgender law. My home state made the right decision, but transgender students in states like North Carolina were not so lucky and needed the federal government’s protection. No matter where we live, all transgender students deserve to be treated just the same as our classmates. That’s why I am so happy the federal government is beginning to make that clear to public schools all across the country.

After a long, painful fight, our lawmakers are finally starting to realize that it’s time to put the awful history of injustice against transgender people behind us. My generation will soon be the leaders of this country and they understand that equality is one of our most sacred values. While the struggle is far from over, I believe this week proves that we are entering a new era where transgender people are treated like human beings with our civil rights firmly in place.

By: Libby Skarin, Policy Director & Lobbyist, ACLU SD

On January 1, 2016, South Dakota was one of 36 states to have laws on the books allowing children who commit crimes to be sentenced to life in prison without parole. On March 29, 2016 that all changed, and we became the 15^th state to ban this cruel practice with the passage of SB 140.

SB 140 becoming law was a true victory. This simple bill ended life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders. This means that people convicted of crimes committed when they were minors will now have the opportunity to see the parole board and show them they’ve been rehabilitated. This puts South Dakota in line with a series of rulings handed down by the Supreme Court, most recently the case of Montgomery v. Louisiana, which was decided during the legislative session.

This law doesn’t guarantee that serious offenders will be released from prison. Instead, it gives people sentenced to life in prison as children a chance to turn their lives around and seek redemption. This is vitally important because studies have shown that kids are simply not as mature as adults; they’re more vulnerable to negative influences and outside pressures, they have less of an ability to remove themselves from horrific situations at home, and their brains are not fully developed. All of these reasons show why locking up kids and throwing away the key is inappropriate.

The ACLU of South Dakota worked hard on this bill, but we didn’t do it alone. We worked closely with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a national organization committed to ending unfair sentencing practices applied to children. For an in-depth look at the use of life in prison without parole for kids and other criminal justice issues children face (including scientific research behind the brain development of children) take a look at the Campaign’s website: http://fairsentencingofyouth.org/.

The passage of this bill gives us hope that in the future we will see more laws in South Dakota that make our criminal justice system a fairer place – one that recognizes that even when people commit crimes and make horrible mistakes they can still be redeemed. 

By: Libby Skarin, Policy Director & Lobbyist

As you know, ACLU SD worked on a lot of issues during the 2016 Legislative Session. I’ve already blogged about the slew of anti-LGBT legislation we saw in Pierre this year and detailed our successes there. That was the good news portion of my legislative recap. Today, let’s delve into the bad news: this session was dismal for supporters of women’s reproductive rights.

In 2015, we made it out of the session with no major anti-abortion bills passed into law. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case in 2016. This year we saw three bills with a substantive focus on abortion pass into law.

• SB 24, a bill to “prohibit the sale of fetal body parts” appeared to have arisen out of the baseless attacks waged on Planned Parenthood over the past year. This bill, introduced in the legislature at the request of the Attorney General’s Office, sailed through the legislature. The good news is that it doesn’t actually impact abortion rights – the sale of “fetal body parts” is already illegal under federal law. The bad news is that this bill was unnecessary political posturing in an attempt to give a smudge of credibility to the widely-discredited nationwide attacks on abortion providers.
• HB 1157 was a bill to “require that a doctor provide a woman additional information as part of informed consent prior to performing abortion.” That may sound harmless, but it’s anything but – what this new law does is force a doctor to give her patient information that she may believe is medically inaccurate or even harmful. This bill was drafted based on the extremely dubious claim that medication abortions can be “reversed” – a claim refuted by major medical groups such as the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).
• SB 72, a full 20 week abortion ban, was perhaps the worst bill we saw this session. Signed by the Governor at the end of March, this bill presents significant constitutional problems. Even worse, it includes no exception for unviable fetuses with severe medical problems, for women suffering from severe mental illness, or for cases of rape or incest. Like HB 1157, this law is opposed by experts in the medical field such as American Psychological Association, National Physician’s Alliance, American Nurses Association, and ACOG, among others.

All in all, the South Dakota Legislature’s attacks on women were callous and legally unsound. This session emphasized what we already know: that politicians in Pierre are determined to making abortion so difficult to access that the right to choose becomes non-existent in our state. These attacks aren’t just cruel – they’re also at odds with the Constitution. We will continue to fight against these measures in our work, and we hope you’ll be there fighting with us.