• 12
  • April
    2011

Gender discrimination is illegal. It should be a straightforward issue, but it's not. Each year California courts receive hundreds of gender discrimination lawsuits. Now, the nation could be facing a ground-breaking discrimination lawsuit. The lawsuit focuses on an unusual question: what constitutes a person's gender?

Is a person's gender based on what is recorded on the birth certificate, the individual's driver's license and with Social Security Administration? Or is based on surgeries an individual has had during his or her lifetime? The country is about to find out.

Meet El'Jai (pronounced L.J.). El'Jai has considered him a man since he was five years old. The Motor Vehicle Commission, the Social Security Administration and his family all identify him as male. He was even issued a new birth certificate stating he is a man.

However, that was not enough for his employer.

El'Jai's job was to supervise men who were urinating into plastic cups at a drug treatment center. He was responsible for making sure the men did not substitute another man's urine for their own during drug tests.

During his second day on the job, his qualifications for the job were questioned. His boss approached him and said that she heard he was transgender. El'Jai stated that he was male, but she pressed further and asked him whether he had undergone any surgeries.

El'Jai had a sex-change surgery in 2006. However, he politely declined to answer his boss's question, saying that was private information and he was not required to share it. His position was wrongfully terminated almost immediately.

Read more in the next post to learn more about California's discrimination laws, as well as additional information about El'Jai's lawsuit.

Source: The New York Times, "A Lawsuit's Unusual Question: Who Is a Man?" Richard Perez-Pena, 10 April 2011