Gender and Sexuality

“This is a new way of doing business,” said Seth Galanter, an attorney who worked for OCR under the Obama and Biden administrations and is now a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at Berkeley Law. “There’s no nuance,” Galanter said. “There’s no inquiry into whether there’s a hostile environment. They say, ‘You have a policy, and the policy violated the law and yeah, you’re in trouble now.’ That is not something that prior administrations would have done.”

Catherine E. Lhamon, Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy and Former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, delivered the distinguished keynote address at the 132nd commencement for UC Berkeley’s School of Education on Thursday, May 21, 2026.

Savala Nolan, executive director, Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at Berkeley Law joins Forum to discuss her new book of essays “Good Woman: A Reckoning.”

“At the moment, the most painful, prejudicial consequences are for trans people,” says Kathryn Abrams, a University of California, Berkeley law professor studying sex discrimination. But “the executive order absolutely has implications for heterosexual, cisgender women,” she says. “Sometimes, I think that’s their main target.”

“Unfortunately, the opinion establishes that courts now have discretion whether or not to analyze under heightened scrutiny a law that treats men and women differently,” said Professor Russell K. Robinson. “This creates an opening for justices to rely on policy arguments instead of legal principles.”