8 h, oct 24, 2019 y - TEEN VOGUE Amber Heard SCOTUS Workplace Discrimination Cases Threaten All LGBTQ+ People OP- ED

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Amber Heard: SCOTUS Workplace Discrimination Cases Threaten All LGBTQ+ People

In this op-ed, the actress and activist discusses what bisexual people, pansexual people, and all of us have at stake before the court.

BY AMBER HEARD

I knew early on that I wasn’t straight. But growing up in small-town Texas, I also felt that, for some reason, whoever I was wasn’t right. There wasn’t a single person I could reference who was openly queer, so I had no idea how to make sense of my feelings. Like many children, I longed for someone to say: “Amber, you’re not broken. You’re beautiful just as you are.”

Last week, I felt that pain again when news outlet after news outlet said that a trio of cases before the Supreme Court were only about “gay and transgender” people. The reality is that bisexual and pansexual people — who are the largest segment of the LGBTQ+ community — have just as much at stake.

When I was 19, I eventually found a hero in Alana Flores and two other lesbian teenagers who were making national headlines hundreds of miles away in California. The trio had enlisted the ACLU’s help to sue their school district for allowing rampant homophobia and discrimination to go unchecked. In one incident, a group of students allegedly shouted: "All dykes should die and you should not exist." Despite enduring years of this abuse, Flores and her friends refused to disappear, resulting in one of the first court decisions recognizing the rights of LGBTQ+ young people. The case inspired my first charitable donation, and their courage has stuck with me to this day.

When I moved from Texas to Hollywood, I, like many closeted actors, felt pressure to adopt the mantra “My private life is private.” However, as my visibility as an actor increased, so did my increasing sense of responsibility to live openly as I am, and to acknowledge the privilege of being white, cisgender, and “passable.” I was falling in love with a woman at the same time that my name was becoming known.

Even in Hollywood, being true to myself came at a cost. Some producers no longer thought I was appropriate for a part that involved male attraction. And yet, because I fit many ideas about being an attractive woman, other producers considered me inappropriate for other roles.

I quickly learned that everyone has an idea about what it means to be a woman — whom you should love, how you should dress, the words you should use to describe yourself. Being married to a woman didn’t negate my prior or future relationships with men, so when I refused to use the word “lesbian,” I received pushback from women who experienced such a dearth of lesbian representation that any nuance in sexuality or gender was disregarded.

Sometimes even walking around Los Angeles came with verbal harassment. My former wife and I were spat on once. Another time, someone threw an empty cup at us. For many transgender people, particularly black and brown trans women, this type of harassment often leads to violence and death.

But discrimination has no state lines. In one state, we were refused housing. In another state, we were asked to leave a restaurant. We were once even harassed by law enforcement who learned we shared a last name.

This discrimination is exactly why the Supreme Court cases of LGBTQ+ people who were fired because of who they are matters, and why we can’t leave anyone in the LGBTQ+ community out of these conversations.

One of the cases involves Aimee Stephens, a funeral director fired, in essence, for being a transgender woman. In 2018, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rightly ruled that Stephens was unlawfully fired and that federal law protects our transgender siblings. Along with Stephens’s case, the court is reviewing the case of Gerald Lynn Bostock, a child welfare coordinator whose employer fired him upon learning he was gay. (The employer denies that Bostock was dismissed on these grounds.) And it will decide whether the company that employed Don Zarda, who said he was fired from his job as a Long Island skydiving instructor after disclosing his sexual orientation, was within its rights to do so.

Imagine if you were a bisexual person and when you are hired, you put a photo of your girlfriend on your desk. That relationship ends, a new one begins, and a new photo appears. What if you are fired because the gender of your partner has changed?

That’s not all. That narrow idea of what it meant to be a woman that was forced upon me — what if any employer could make that a requirement to get a job or a promotion? That is exactly what the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow.

As Alana Flores, Aimee Stephens, and so many other LGBTQ+ people have shown me, visibility is important.

The Trump administration is asking that the court rule against legal protections for the LGBTQ+ community — my community. This could take away the protections that Alana Flores fought so hard for decades ago and roll back the legal protections that have been so critical to transgender people.

This is about more than laws — this is about what our country believes about our basic humanity. Polls and the arc of history show that most Americans, regardless of their political affiliation, want to live in a country where people can earn a living regardless of who they are.

LGBTQ+ people deserve a government that protects us and sends the message that we are not broken. Because we’re not. We are beautiful just as we are. And we have rights.

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