Following the many recent victories for marriage equality at the state and federal levels, anti-LGBT activists are now finding other ways to profit off of inequality – working against protections for transgender youth. Leading the anti-LGBT effort once again is Frank Schubert, who has previously worked with the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) to fight against equal protections for same-sex couples, beginning with the campaign for California's anti-gay law, Proposition 8.

NOM and Schubert's new focus is on repealing a recently passed California law that ensures transgender students will be treated the same as their peers in school. Specifically, the law, knows as AB 1266, requires that public school students are allowed to utilize sex-segregated school facilities and participate in sex-segregated school activities that are consistent with the gender they identify with, rather than the one they were assigned at birth. According to The Daily Beast, the law reinforces pre-existing non-discrimination laws for public schools in the state, and NOM's focus on repealing it only proves that the organization is less focused on marriage than it is on keeping all LGBT people from being equally protected under the law.

Schubert's essay on the conservative site Red State takes this approach by attacking the legitimacy of gender identity, and resorting to the same fear-mongering tactics often used in anti-transgender campaigns. These tactics, especially those that spark concerns over the safety of [cisgender] girls in the bathroom with "boys who dress like girls" show nothing more than a serious lack of understanding about gender identity and what it means to be transgender.

Transgender students are not "really" any other gender than the one they say they are, and being transgender is not something one "does" to gain access to a restroom or a spot on their sports team. Laws like California's exist because it is transgender people that need protecting in these scenarios, not their cisgender peers. It is the 53% of transgender people who report being harassed or disrespected in a place of public accommodation that need protecting. And according to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 26% of transgender students have been denied access to appropriate bathrooms in school.

Read more about Frank Schubert and NOM's attack the well-being of transgender students at The Daily Beast.