After a city manager in Largo, Florida, admitted he is seeking a sex-change operation, city commissioners voted 5-2 to fire him based on their views that he had lost “his standing as a leader among the employees of the city.”
City commissioners listened to about 60 speakers at the four-hour meeting Tuesday night to decide whether Steve Stanton should keep his $140,234-a-year job as city manager.
However, Rebecca Steele, director of the ACLU West Central Florida office, says this is primarily a personnel issue, and a meeting should never have been held.
“Employers are throwing away valuable resources when they make employment decisions based on gender orientation or identity, instead of relevant skills, training, and experience,” says Steele.
Trans-phobic Biases Alleged
The local St. Petersburg Times wrote an editorial last week that said employers should rely on employees’ “skills, not sex” when evaluating workers.
The ACLU’s Steele agrees, noting that “it would be far better for recruiters to help employers with diversity/sensitivity training if necessary, so that valuable employees can be kept or recruited.”
Steele notes that Stanton was a good employee with valuable contacts.
“Recruiters know how expensive it is to recruit, hire, and train new employees and bring them up to speed. That is going to be a loss to the city,” she says.
The ACLU also faxed a letter before the Largo meeting in which it stated, “the government cannot discriminate on the basis of avoiding others’ societal prejudice, however real.”
Employment At Will Issues
Employment at will means you can’t fire someone because of age, race, or religion, but as long as they are not specifically covered under the law, employers can fire anyone, according to Mickey Silberman, a partner at the law firm Jackson Lewis.
“You don’t have a right to your job,” he says. “It can be a bad reason or unfair, but it doesn’t necessarily make it unlawful.”
