(AP Photo/Jason Minto)Among transgender-rights activists, there’s a powerful mix of hope and fear heading toward the Nov. 3 election. “The stakes are extremely high,” said Shannon Minter, a transgender attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights. — Support from administration attorneys for efforts to prevent transgender girls from competing in Idaho K-12 girls' sports and university women sports and from doing so in Connecticut high school girls' sports. There have been at least 33 violent deaths of transgender or gender nonconforming people this year in the U.S., according to the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ-rights organization. “If Trump loses, I’m hopeful we’ll see federal agencies reversing the many anti-trans policies that the Trump administration has adopted,” Strangio said.

DETROIT The United States Supreme Court ruled Monday that LGBT workers are protected from job discrimination and being fired for sexual orientation under the Civil Rights Act. The victory is bittersweet for the ACLU, as Aimee Stephens, the transgender woman at the center of the ruling, died last month. She sued, saying the Civil Rights Act prevents employment discrimination based on sex. Seven years later, the Supreme Court agreed, in a 6-3 decision. John Borsch, the attorney who represented the funeral home before the Supreme Court last year, disagrees.

Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of sex is different from discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity.'" But Monday's decision is not likely to be the court's last word on a host of issues revolving around LGBT rights, Gorsuch noted. The cases were the courts first on LGBT rights since Justice Anthony Kennedys retirement and replacement by Kavanaugh. During the Obama years, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had changed its longstanding interpretation of civil rights law to include discrimination against LGBT people. In recent years, some lower courts have held that discrimination against LGBT people is a subset of sex discrimination, and thus prohibited by the federal law.

DETROIT - The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in a case involving a Detroit funeral home. The owners said they believed she could no longer effectively deal with grieving families as a funeral director. Supporters for Stephens marched at the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices heard the case. "ACLU is using my grandfather's business to achieve a political goal," Harris Funeral Homes director Tom Rost said. The funeral home's attorney argued that the ACLU is trying to change existing sex discrimination laws that the company didn't violate.