Trans People Fight Reprisals by Condé Nast and Trump Regime
Leading Off: The media corporation is union busting, the NewsGuild says. Trans troops take Trump to court over broken promises. The week’s top story lines.
by Assigned Media
More than 4,000 journalists and counting have signed a petition calling for the immediate reinstatement of Condé Nast employees summarily fired or suspended without pay for questioning an executive about the company’s decision to dismantle Teen Vogue and more broadly to purge queer employees from its ranks.
Following a round of layoffs that included a disproportionate number of queer journalists and the closing of Teen Vogue, known for its coverage of politics from a queer perspective, nearly 20 union employees tried to question the head of human resources, Stan Duncan, outside his office on Nov. 5. Duncan, who had ignored repeated earlier requests from union leaders to meet, waved off their efforts that day as well.
Almost immediately, the company fired four union leaders in retaliation. Two days later, five more employees who were present were suspended without pay.
The Newsguild of New York, which is circulating the petition, said the employees were engaged in actions protected under federal labor law and called Condé Nast’s retaliation a form of union busting that was intended to silence employees. The petition had received 4,207 signatures as of Monday morning, two-thirds of the way toward its goal.
The State Department has updated its listed policies on passport expiration. The change updated language on an FAQ page saying that a passport with an X gender marker is “valid for travel until its date of expiration” to add the clause “or until we invalidate it under federal regulations.”
The change came shortly after the Supreme Court issued a ruling allowing the Trump regime to resume restrictions on transgender passports during litigation. The timing of this update, along with the conservative court’s continual deference to Trump’s decrees, has led to wide speculation that the State Department may begin taking unilateral discriminatory actions toward transgender American passport holders.
After denying transgender troops the option to retire early, the federal government is being sued by 17 transgender members of the Air Force.
In January, Trump signed an executive order, banning trans people from serving in the military. Following this order, the Air Force said that it would allow service members to retire early with full benefits. In August, however, the Air Force rescinded this offer, blanket denying all retirement applications by trans servicemembers.
Now, this group of trans members of the Air Force have filed a suit in federal court to receive the pay and benefits that the policy change would attempt to deprive them of.
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