Beyond the essential job protections that the inclusion of "gender identity or expression" would provide for transgender individuals, these words in the employment non-discrimination law would also become a mechanism for challenging gender-based dress codes and other demeaning and discriminatory employment practices for women everywhere. It may seem like only conservative outposts like Hooters still want to put waitresses on sexualized display, but statistically sex stereotyping still means that women make less money than men, aren't tracked to sciences or other high-paying fields of work, lose earning power when they have children and are targets of assault throughout their lives.

The feminist movement has been off the radar in so many ways since the early 90s - an evolution of its own success in spawning the reproductive health, anti-domestic violence, LGBT equality, womens' and girls' sports and academic movements (go team). But truly, if you add it up, as Robin Morgan does in this article, the job isn't done. I think the time is coming again, hopefully as a corrective to the stomach-turning gains by the Christian/corporate extreme-right of the last 20 years, for a political movement that advocates directly for women's full equality.

Sexism and feminism both touch really painful third rails for just about all LGBT folks. Whether it's the wrenching exclusion from one's innate gender (by feminists perhaps) as a transgender person, or getting paid less for one's work as a lesbian woman, or the gay man's fear of being a girly queer, or the history of male sexism towards lesbians in the movement, one way or another it touches us all. There's a world of hurt in there that will be messy to sort through, but we'll always be better for the effort.

It's an odd and probably great thing that the tables have turned since the 70s, when in my home state of Vermont the ERA was undermined by Phyllis Schlafly telling people they shouldn't support women's equality because that would open the door to gender-neutral bathrooms. I'm glad that now we are fighting openly for gender-neutral bathrooms and everything else that will make life livable and safe for transgender people. But here's a newsflash for you: that ERA never passed back in the day and it would warm my heart more than any presidential speech about hope or policy to see the women's and trans and LGBT communities standing shoulder to shoulder to end discrimination on the basis of sex as well as gender.