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Jillian Weiss joins host Callie Wright for a discussion of the meaning and effects of Bostock v. Clayton County, the June 15 decision holding that gay and trans people are protected from discrimination under the federal Civil Rights Act.
http://www.queersplaining.com/2020/06/22/we-won-one/
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“Twelve people in Oklahoma understood that this trans woman was discriminated against, and they should have their verdict back, and she should have her life back,” said Jillian Weiss, an employment discrimination lawyer who is representing Ms. Tudor.
Transgender Americans such as Rachel Tudor have been fighting for their rights at work, school and housing for years. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave them hope.
By Erica L. Green WASHINGTON — The only thing Rachel Tudor wants more than to be herself is to teach. After transitioning from male to female in 2007, Ms. Tudor, a professor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, applied for tenure to ensure she could do both. But her path was blocked by members of the university’s administration, including one who wondered if she could be fired for her new gender identity. In 2011, she was out of a job. Nine years later, the Supreme Court seemed to confirm on Monday that the university’s actions violated Ms. Tudor’s civil rights, when six justices ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act extended to gender identity. Ms. Tudor’s long-stalled federal employment suit was granted new life. “When I read what they decided, I felt a page had turned not only in my life, but in the nation’s, and in the history of civil rights,” Ms. Tudor said in an interview on Tuesday. “I hope that as a result of the Supreme Court decision, no one else will have to live with the dilemma of having to choose between doing what they love and being who they are.” Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/us/politics/transgender-rights-cases-supreme-court.html
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Courts in conservative states have issued rulings saying they follow Title VII, and those states will likely yield to the federal law, said Jillian Weiss, an attorney with Outten & Golden who works with the firm's LGBTQ Workplace Rights Practice Group.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision giving LGBT workers federal anti-discrimination protections will ripple across those states without laws that explicitly prohibit bias based on sexual orientation or gender identity. State courts aren’t bound by the high court’s ruling that interpreted Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But they’ll be persuaded by the decision and its reasoning that bias “because of sex” includes orientation or identity discrimination, especially if their state law was modeled on Title VII or includes similar language, legal observers said.
The Supreme Court’s ruling also could fuel action in Congress and spur some state legislatures to expand their anti-discrimination laws, observers said. The scope of state workplace bias laws could have a significant impact on LGBT workers despite Title VII covering the entire country. That federal law doesn’t apply to companies with less than 15 employees, meaning millions of workers at very small businesses must rely on state-level protections. Workers might also choose to sue under state law instead of Title VII due to statute of limitations issues, the state law having more generous remedies, or a desire to keep their case in state rather than federal court. Read more: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/high-court-ruling-on-lgbt-workers-set-to-reverberate-in-states
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The Supreme Court decision gives plaintiffs leverage, but companies large and small are still expected to face legal cases over their policies.
Ms. Weiss said she expected the decision on Monday to change her bargaining position in settlement talks with defendants who had said, “We’re not going to give you more because once the Supreme Court rules, then we’d have to give you zero.”
When a Walmart associate named Jacqueline Cote filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2014 contending that the company was discriminating against her by denying health insurance benefits to her same-sex spouse, it signaled the beginning of a drawn-out legal battle.
It was not until December 2016 that the company announced that it had agreed to a settlement retroactively compensating Ms. Cote and other employees affected by the denial of spousal benefits. If, by contrast, Ms. Cote had brought her case after the Supreme Court ruling on Monday holding that lesbian, gay and transgender employees are covered by the civil rights law that protects workers from discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sex, said one of her lawyers, Janson Wu, executive director of LGBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, the case would probably have been resolved much more quickly.
“At the time we litigated that case employers could argue that an employee didn’t have a legal claim to bring,” he said. “With this decision, it should be clear that employees shouldn’t even have to bring a lawsuit to enforce their rights.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/business/economy/lgbtq-supreme-court-workforce.html?searchResultPosition=1 x
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For the majority of his career at Unified Police Department, Taylor Scruggs loved his work. If he wasn’t taking phone calls or writing reports, he said, he was being proactive, out finding stolen cars or fugitives or illegal drugs. A former teacher, he said he loved the ebb and flow of police work, that every day was different than the one before. But there was at least one constant. “I went home every night, and was like, ‘Man, I can’t wait to get up tomorrow and do this all over again,’" Scruggs said.
Yet when the UPD detective, with ten years of experience on the force, came out as transgender and started physically transitioning, people around the office treated him differently, he said...
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A transgender English professor at Kingsborough College says colleagues’ failure to use up-to-date they/them pronouns partly justifies they/their lawsuit against the school for gender discrimination.
Red Washburn, who uses they/them pronouns and has taught English and Women and Gender Studies at the CUNY Brooklyn community college since 2011, alleges in a Brooklyn Federal Court lawsuit filed Friday that the school began discriminating against them in 2017 when they came out as transgender.
Washburn’s boss continually referred to the professor by their ["dead name" (former name)] despite the fact that Washburn legally changed their name to “Red.” Colleagues also continued to use the pronouns “she” and “her” for Washburn, despite the fact that the professor repeatedly advised them to use they/them pronouns.
“While occasional misgendering could be attributed to innocent error, the protracted and continuing misgendering of Dr. Washburn, despite continued notice, created a hostile environment based on gender,” the lawsuit says.
Washburn claims the school defunded the Women and Gender Studies department soon after Washburn came out as transgender.
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“Six months after I came out as trans at work by requesting a name and pronoun change and sharing that I was getting top surgery, Kingsborough’s administration announced that it was defunding my concentration,” Washburn wrote in an op-ed for the Daily News in June.
Top surgery is reconstructive surgery to a transgender person’s chest.
Washburn also alleges in the lawsuit that they were moved into a new office at the school that was no more than a tiny storage closet, claiming the room did not even have space for a desk.
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In the fall of 2018, the day before classes started, Kingsborough College cancelled Washburn’s Sexuality and Literature class, claiming the enrollment was too low, the lawsuit said.
“This explanation was incorrect, as the amount of enrollment was the same as that considered sufficient for other classes,” the lawsuit said.
“[Kinsborough College] is, I believe, a safe place neither for gender non-conforming and trans faculty to work, nor for such students to learn,” Washburn wrote in their op-ed.
Noah Goldberg
New York Daily News
CONTACT
Noah Goldberg covers Brooklyn supreme and federal courts for the New York Daily News. He previously covered criminal justice for the Brooklyn Eagle.
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See this link: https://nypost.com/2019/12/25/ex-teacher-harassed-ousted-from-upper-east-side-middle-school-for-being-gay-suit/
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By The Associated Press
Oct. 15, 2019Updated 9:51 a.m. ET
Rumors started circulating around the fire station in Byron, Georgia, within a year after the medical treatments began. The fire chief's once-crewcut hair was growing longer, and other physical changes were becoming noticeable. Keeping quiet was no longer an option.
"If the Supreme Court sides against LGBT employees, it means they have to be really cautious and careful about living their lives openly and proudly," said Jillian Weiss, a New York attorney who focuses on LGBT discrimination cases. "They may encounter a lot of discrimination, and there may not be anything they can do about it."
The chief said that once members of the tiny Fire Department were told, word spread "faster than a nuclear explosion" through Byron — a city of about 4,500 in a farming region outside Macon known for growing Georgia's famous peaches. The fire chief was undergoing a gender transition and would continue to run the department as Rachel Mosby. A City Hall staffer told Mosby many were stunned because "I was the manliest man anyone had met in their lives."
"They initially took it very well, much to my surprise," Mosby said. "I heard a lot of comments like, 'Chief, you don't have anything to worry about. We've got your back.'"
It didn't last. As a man, Mosby served as Byron's fire chief for a decade until the beginning of 2018. Then Mosby started coming to work as a woman, and the city fired her less than 18 months later. Her June 4 termination letter cited "lack of performance." Mosby insists the only thing that changed was her gender."They didn't want somebody like me in that position," she said, "or any position with the city."
It's not illegal under Georgia state law to fire someone for being gay or transgender. Twenty-eight U.S. states have adopted no laws that prohibit workplace discrimination targeting LGBT employees. Only a small percentage of cities and counties offer protection at the local level. So Mosby, like thousands of other LGBT Americans, has sought recourse under the federal law that makes sex discrimination illegal at work.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has treated LGBT-based job discrimination cases as sex discrimination since 2013. But that could soon end, depending on how the U.S. Supreme Court rules in cases it heard Oct. 8 that deal with the firings of gay men in Georgia and New York state and a transgender woman in Michigan.
The key question: Do firings and harassment based on a worker's sexual orientation or gender identity qualify as sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act?
A ruling that says the federal law doesn't protect workers targeted because they're gay or transgender could leave millions vulnerable in more than half of U.S. states, an Associated Press analysis found.
Only 21 states have their own laws prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Wisconsin outlaws discrimination because of sexual orientation but doesn't protect transgender workers. And fewer than 300 cities and counties have local ordinances protecting LGBT workers, according to an advocacy group. That patchwork of state and local laws leaves large gaps where LGBT workers have no job protection beyond federal claims under Title VII. About half of the nation's estimated 8.1 million LGBT employees live in states where job discrimination laws don't cover them, according to the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute.
"If the Supreme Court sides against LGBT employees, it means they have to be really cautious and careful about living their lives openly and proudly," said Jillian Weiss, a New York attorney who focuses on LGBT discrimination cases. "They may encounter a lot of discrimination, and there may not be anything they can do about it."
The AP found workers are particularly vulnerable in the South, home to an estimated 35% of LGBT adults. Out of 16 states the U.S. Census Bureau defines as the South, only Maryland and Delaware prohibit discrimination against gay and transgender workers. Protection at the local level is sparse, with most Southern states having five or fewer cities or counties that shield private-sector LGBT workers.
South Carolina offers no protection at the state or local level. And Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee each passed laws blocking local governments from having their own anti-discrimination ordinances that cover LGBT workers.
Those large gaps mean only about 18% of adults in the South are protected against LGBT-based job discrimination, compared with about 89% in the Northeast, according to Naomi Goldberg of the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBT-rights think tank that tracks anti-discrimination laws.
The Supreme Court's upcoming decision, not expected until next year, could make or break Lonnie Billard's discrimination lawsuit in North Carolina against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte and an affiliated high school. A federal judge put Billard's case on hold until the high court rules.
Billard, a substitute teacher and longtime employee at Charlotte Catholic High School, was fired after announcing on Facebook in 2014 that he was marrying his male partner.
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"If the Supreme Court sides against LGBT employees, it means they have to be really cautious and careful about living their lives openly and proudly," said Jillian Weiss, a New York attorney who focuses on LGBT discrimination cases. "They may encounter a lot of discrimination, and there may not be anything they can do about it." https://ift.tt/2MgYMQ9 See this link: https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/10/15/us/ap-us-lgbt-discrimination.html
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See this link: https://www.facebook.com/aclu/videos/2411380639187613/
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Callie Wright of Queersplaining Podcast interviewed me on the topic of "how scared should we be?" about the upcoming SCOTUS case on workplace sex discrimination and LGBTQ rights and I gave her my sure-to-be controversial hot take. https://ift.tt/2MIZd7p "Some important stuff is happening at The United States Supreme Court on October 8th. The question: does the 1964 Civil Rights act protect LGBTQ folks from employment discrimination. Lots of folks are pretty nervous, and I am too. So I talked to an attorney who specializes in this sort of thing and asked her what she thought. Her surprising take is that she thinks we’ll win. Listen to find out what she thinks might happen. Some important stuff is happening at The United States Supreme Court on October 8th. The question: does the 1964 Civil Rights act protect LGBTQ folks from employment discrimination. Lots of folks are pretty nervous, and I am too. So I talked to an attorney who specializes in this sort of thing and asked her what she thought. Her surprising take is that she thinks we’ll win. Listen to find out what she thinks might happen." See this link: http://www.queersplaining.com/2019/08/29/10-8-how-scared-should-we-be/
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NY Times: Virginia Schools’ Bathroom Rule Violates Transgender Rights, U.S. Judge Says The ruling is an important victory for transgender rights advocates as legal battles over school bathroom policies continue to play out across the country. https://ift.tt/2GX7MXI See this link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/virginia-transgender-bathroom-policy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
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NPR Morning Edition reports on my clients' suits against computer company Dell. From NPR Morning Edition: Helen Harris doesn't wear makeup or feminine jewelry. She mostly dresses in men's tailored suits and men's shoes. She's gender nonconforming and identifies as a woman. And, she says, that's nobody's business. Which is why in late 2015, when she started taking hormones to become more masculine looking, she did it quietly. Harris, 37, is a systems engineer who worked at Dell, selling technology to major companies and helping them set it up. But she says she had a tough time moving up at the computer company and was assigned to a lengthy training period, while colleagues were promoted. She says she got heckled by co-workers when she gave presentations. And, Harris says, one of her instructors kept telling her "people have to like you for you to be able to do this job. He kept saying stuff like that to me." NPR spoke to four colleagues with whom Harris has worked. They described a talented young woman whose career was completely derailed a few years ago. And they, like Harris, suspect she had a tough time because of the way she looks. Article continues after sponsor message Her struggle at Dell led Harris to file a complaint with New York City's Commission on Human Rights, alleging the company didn't want to put her in front of customers because of her appearance. Dell says Harris' situation was resolved amicably. But there are at least two other cases against the company from LGBTQ workers alleging discrimination. Dell, which is an NPR sponsor, denied liability in one case. The other is ongoing. After Harris' company merged with Dell, she and other employees were assigned to training. Harris says she was heckled by co-workers when she gave presentations. She says her colleagues who attended the training started moving up the corporate ladder, but Harris didn't. Elias Williams for NPR Harris says her problems happened around the same time her employer, EMC, was merging with Dell. In her complaint, Harris detailed how she kept being told she needed to keep on training. So she did — for three years. During that time, she says, she'd speak with managers, executives, colleagues and human resources. "What is the problem? Like, if there is a problem with me, like [with] what I'm doing, can someone please speak up?" she says she asked them. The rights of trans and gender-nonconforming people in the U.S. are starting to get more attention. Activists say limited job opportunities and lack of clear protection from workplace discrimination have helped marginalize transgender people and hurt them financially. Over 200 companies — including Amazon, Google and Uber — have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that federal civil rights law prohibits discrimination against gay and transgender workers. The Justice Department has argued that it does not. ' And there's this idea that the tech industry is a place where stuff like this doesn't happen: Scooter in to work and have piercings and tattoos? No problem. As long as you work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or what you look like. The diversity numbers at big tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple tell a different story. Take Facebook: Less than a quarter of tech roles there are held by women; African Americans make up only about 1%. And when you look at Dell, you get a complicated picture. Cicilia Gilbert, who was also a systems engineer at Dell, was let go in 2018, during the middle of her transition. The company has repeatedly been ranked among the 50 best for diversity. But several current and former Dell employees, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the company's New York office has the reputation of being a "boys club." Cicilia Gilbert, who was also a systems engineer at Dell, says it's especially bad in the tech sales division. Gilbert, 58, is suing Dell for, among other things, allegedly discriminating against her for her gender transition. The case is ongoing. She told NPR that when she decided to transition from male to female, a trans co-worker advised her: "Don't tell these people that you're transgender. It's a career ender." In her lawsuit, Gilbert said that in late 2018, right in the middle of her transition, she was let go. "They said, 'We're laying you off because your transgender transition is impeding your ability to travel,' " she told NPR. It's not unusual for a company as large as Dell to have discrimination lawsuits. Jennifer Davis, a spokeswoman for Dell, told NPR that Gilbert's layoff had nothing to do with her gender — it was part of a restructuring in which hundreds lost their jobs. Gilbert and her wife, Alexandra, stand in their yard in upstate New York. Gilbert is suing Dell for, among other things, allegedly discriminating against her for her gender transition. The case is ongoing. And Davis pointed to the company's support network for trans employees. NPR spoke to two workers who say the extensive medical coverage and support Dell offers made their gender transition possible. They said they consider themselves very fortunate to work for a company that's so inclusive. But in 2017, the Massachusetts attorney general investigated the case of a former intern who is trans and who had complained about discrimination. Dell denied wrongdoing but paid a $110,000 settlement. Harris says she always saw the tech industry as a place where, no matter what you look like, "if you put your head down and you learn the stuff and you do the work, you can change your circumstances." Earlier this summer, Harris told NPR she was still on Dell's payroll, but she wasn't going into the office on a regular basis anymore. In her complaint to New York City's Commission on Human Rights, she detailed her problems using Dell's bathrooms. "That's the truth," she told NPR. She added that after being harassed a second time about which restroom she was using, she decided to stop going to work. Harris said she was exhausted. A few weeks later, she left the company. Harris quit working at Dell but plans on staying in a career in tech. Elias Williams for NPR Davis, Dell's spokeswoman, wouldn't provide details about Harris' time at the company, saying she wishes to respect Harris' privacy. But Davis said, "The matter was resolved amicably." Despite her experience at Dell, Harris said she wants to keep working in the tech industry. "I want my money. I don't want to be poor," she said. "My father, he picked cotton. My grandfather was a sharecropper. I'm a systems engineer. So, I'd rather stay." https://ift.tt/2Y36d4s See this link: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/15/740726966/it-s-a-career-ender-2-lgbtq-former-dell-workers-share-their-stories
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I spoke to Eric Lesh of LeGal about my work in LGBTQ employment discrimination, how I got into this line, the history of court involvement in these issues, and where the courts may be going with this. https://ift.tt/2YJTdxM tw: legal jargon See this link: https://legal.podbean.com/e/lgbtq-workplace-fairness-from-the-litigators-pov/
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See this link: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1332111803
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