The Right to Transgender Identity

In this chapter, we posit and explore the existence of a right to transgender identity, understood as the right for transgender people to enjoy equal protections under the law such that they are not excluded from normal social and political practices due to their transgender status. Within the context of American constitutional law, we ask what level of judicial scrutiny ought to be applied to cases involving transgender discrimination as transgender discrimination (as opposed to as a sub-category of sex discrimination), a particularly pressing (and still unanswered) question given the recent explosion of anti- transgender legislation. We argue that transgender people constitute a suspect class — a designation reserved for insular minority groups that have been established to be particularly vulnerable to discrimination — which would trigger the highest level of constitutional protection. With the methodologies of experimental jurisprudence, we approach suspect classification from a distinctly empirical perspective, reviewing the available data and concluding that transgender people unambiguously meet the criteria for suspect classification on empirical grounds. Suspect classification typically triggers strict judicial scrutiny, so our finding requires that transgender discrimination cases receive strict judicial scrutiny, calling into question the both the legality of many recent anti-transgender laws nation-wide, as well the (limited) benefit of the doubt judges have offered such laws under the traditional sex discrimination rubric.