… so it turns out that U.S. employers are not going to be forced to fire millions of employees. The Department of Homeland Security is trying to crack down on anyone whose records don’t match up properly, which is like firing a shotgun into a crowd because you think there might be a bad bad man hiding somewhere in there. Who cares if some other misfits and collaborators get hit? Oh wait, that’s standard operating procedure for our government already, isn’t it? From the National Center for Transgender Equality:
The DHS rules would have required employers to either fire employees or face stiff penalties when employee records do not match information in the Social Security Administration (SSA) database, such as name, Social Security number, or gender. Transgender employees who are listed as one gender in SSA records, but who live and work in another gender, would have been one of the groups at greater risk of losing their jobs as a result of the DHS enforcement procedures.
Of course, the DHS is not actively trying to get trans people fired; they couldn’t care less about trans people. They’re going after immigrants who are working with false or fudged records. Trans people are just collateral damage. Still, with so many trans people out there unable to change their “official” gender because of absurdly strict federal policies, it makes sense that NCTE and other trans groups signed onto efforts led by immigration and labor groups to stop this madness. Forcing employers to fire people? Last month, a judge agreed with the concerns brought up in the lawsuit against these rules, and now the DHS is retreating to come up with new policies that they hope will stand up better under legal scrutiny. Let’s hope that doesn’t mean some end-run that allows them to require firing or fines, but I’m sure that’s their intention.
This saga, along with other stuff around the federal “Real ID” and other broad-crackdown measures following the lead of the PATRIOT Act, is a really good example of why we all need to band together to fight against increasingly totalitarian “security” restrictions. It’s not just intersectionality, although there are definitely a ton of trans immigrants out there, for instance, who have a doubly difficult time making their way through the system. It’s that the jackbooted “security sweeps,” even if they’re just bureaucratic maneuvering and fines at this point, are squarely aimed at anyone whose papers aren’t in order. At any sign of unorthodox activities or behavior. That’s a shotgun firing at a whole lot of us.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that these new harsher rules were blocked, the Social Security Administration still has a policy of sending out “no match” letters to employers when there’s some mismatch between federal government records and an employee database. I’m not sure what the regulations are around how large an employer must be before having to submit employee records (is it all employers who file W-4s?) — and I’m one of the lucky few who has all of my records in matching order. But this is the kind of thing that keeps many immigrants, along with trans people and others, working in the cash economy. A letter to an employer can out a trans person when details of their gender are not relevant to their job at all, and some employers think it’s completely fine to just fire a trans person for this kind of mismatch. Other trans people have had their drivers’ licenses revoked due to this kind of federal-overmind “make sure nothing fishy’s going on” procedure.