For years, human rights activists and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) community have sought a more comprehensive law that would expand federal civil rights protections — which already prohibit workplace discrimination based on race, gender, age, disability, and religion — to include similar consideration for sexual orientation, gender identity.

First introduced in Congress in 1994, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has slowly worked its way through successive sessions of Congress and various Congressional committees, offering varying levels of protection and verbiage as it has developed. Only recently, however, were changes made to the bill to provide crucial gender identity protections, in the most recent version, introduced in June 2009 by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.

The bill is reported to have the support of President Barack Obama (unlike his predecessor), and the president is expected to sign it into law should it finally make its way through the House and Senate. Back in September 2009, Rep. Frank said the measure would get a House committee vote that month and a floor vote later in the fall. Read more…