This event features a discussion with Suzanne Goldberg (Columbia Law School).
Abstract
Over the past decade, lawmakers in the United States and elsewhere have proposed an extraordinary number of restrictions on transgender people across nearly every area of public and private life—bathrooms, healthcare, athletics, education, identity documents, military service, prisons and more. This Article argues that these measures are best understood as legal scapegoating. That is, they function not as discrete responses to documented problems but rather to galvanise hostility, direct blame, and legitimate exclusion.
Although the intense targeting of transgender people is relatively recent, it is continuous with a half-century of law-related campaigns against lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Those campaigns gained traction by provoking genuine distress about broad social problems, such as sexual violence or social instability, and presenting restrictions on LGBT people as a purported fix. Contemporary anti-transgender measures follow the same playbook. The laws themselves do not respond to widespread problems reported by the public or government agencies. Instead, they are framed in a way that urges people to attribute their fear, anger, or unease about an assortment of issues—public schools, identity fraud, national security, healthcare access, among others—to transgender people. Indeed, from the volume and breadth of proposed restrictions nationwide, an outsider might infer that transgender people are among the greatest threats to Americans today.
This use of law to drive public scapegoating raises a risk that courts evaluating one law in isolation from a cluster of similar restrictions may miss the presence of an impermissible purpose. More broadly, recognising legal scapegoating brings into focus the challenge for democratic processes meant to constrain the use of law to rouse or implement hostility toward vulnerable groups.
Speaker
Suzanne B. Goldberg is the Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she also directs the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic and teaches civil procedure. She co-founded the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law and previously served as Executive Vice President of Columbia University. From 2021-2025, she served as a senior official with the Biden Administration in the U.S. Department of Education (Office for Civil Rights) and State Department (Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights).
Her scholarship focuses on barriers to equality in constitutional law, employment law, higher education, family law, and other areas, and she continues to support equality-focused litigation and advocacy. She has won numerous awards for her scholarship and her advocacy and is a frequent commentator on civil litigation, civil rights, and sexuality and gender law issues.
Prior to entering academia, Professor Goldberg spent a decade as a staff lawyer with Lambda Legal, the United States’ oldest and largest impact-litigation organisation focused on the rights of LGBTQ people and people with HIV. While at Lambda, she also co-founded Immigration Equality, a national organisation focused on promoting justice and equality for LGBTQ and HIV-positive immigrants.
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