Just Because There Are Laws

Doesn’t mean discrimination will go away, it also will take vigorous enforcement.

Federal Government Sues Companies Over Anti-Transgender Discrimination Claims
An historic first from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
BuzzFeed
By Chris Geidner
Sept. 25, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed lawsuits Thursday against two companies accused of discriminating against transgender employees, the first time the federal government has brought suit under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect transgender workers.

The two complaints, filed in federal courts in Florida and Michigan, are the latest — and most ambitious — steps in a series of aggressive moves taken by the commission in the past several years to advance LGBT rights under existing laws.
[…]
In Thursday’s cases, the EEOC argues that Amiee Stephens and Brandi Branson deserve restitution for back pay, reinstatement or front pay, and punitive damages for the discrimination they faced. EEOC is also seeking additional remedies to protect against future discrimination against other people.

Stephens had worked at R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Home Inc. in Michigan as a funeral director and embalmer for nearly six years when she informed her employer and co-workers in 2013 that she was transitioning from male to female and would begin “dress[ing] in appropriate business attire at work as a woman from then on.” Within two weeks of her announcement, according to the complaint, the funeral home owner “fired Stephens, telling her that what she was ‘proposing to do’ was unacceptable.”

Branson’s case, a senior EEOC staffer acknowledged, is a less direct claim. In 2010, Branson, who then presented as male, was recommended for and hired as the director of hearing services at Lakeland Eye Clinic in Florida — a position in which she exclusively relied about referrals from the company’s eye doctors. When Branson began “wearing feminine attire to work, including make-up and women’s tailored clothing” about six months later, the complaint claims that other employees snickered. She was soon thereafter confronted about the changes by her employer, at which point she acknowledged that she was transitioning from male to female.

And it is not just the federal government that are filing complaints…

Texas Trans Man Won't Back Down From AT&T Discrimination Claim
Despite AT&T's denial that Matthew Hileman faced discrimination, he says the company tried to keep him from releasing a recording of coworkers discussing an 'ass-whooping.'
The Advocate
By Mitch Kellaway
September 24 2014

After working as an IT contractor for AT&T in San Antonio, and enduring his coworkers' derogatory comments about LGBT people, transgender man Matthew Hileman finally had enough after he found a sign with an antigay slur placed on his chair.

In January, he sought to be reassigned in his position at San Antonio's Resources Global Professionals, and filed a formal complaint against AT&T, which had contracted RGP's services, according to San Antonio's KSAT.

The next week, Hileman was fired.

In response, Hileman filed the first claim of antitransgender discrimination under San Antonio's new nondiscrimination ordinance, which took effect last September.

Here in Connecticut there have been a number of claims that have filed against businesses for discrimination and are making their way through the system.In many of them we don’t know the outcome in many of the cases because once the businesses are confronted with their discrimination they settle the case privately.