Nan Hunter blogged about this case here, writing:
The Schroer court held that just as discrimination against converts from one to faith to another is still discrimination based on religion, so too discrimination against transgender persons is still sex discrimination. Although doubtless Congress did not have transgender persons in mind when Title VII was enacted in 1964, the court found that the plain text of the statute covers this situation.
“Diane Schroer is a male-to-female transsexual. In August 2004, before she changed her legal name or began presenting as a woman, she applied for the position of Specialist in Terrorism and International Crime with the Congressional Research Service (CRS) at the Library of Congress. The selecting official for the position, Charlotte Preece, offered Schroer the job, but then rescinded the offer after learning of Schroer’s intent to present as a woman when she started at CRS. After a bench trial in August 2008, I found that the Defendant had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against Schroer because of sex.”
So wrote Judge James Robertson a couple of weeks ago, in the context of awarding Schroer “$183,653 for back pay and benefits, $300,000 for nonpecuniary losses, and $7,537.80 for past pecuniary losses,” comprising “a judgment in Plaintiff’s favor in the amount of $491,190.80.”
There is a lot of legal scholarship on the general topic of transgender/transexual issues in employment discrimination, see e.g. this, this, this, and this.
–Ann Bartow
