Transsexual Wins $4,600 Award from Rape Counseling Group for Sex Discrimination
CNSNews.Com reports that this week a Canadian human rights court awarded Kimberly Nixon $4,664 after it agreed that her rights had been violated by The Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter. Nixon is a transsexual who was born male and had sexual reassignment surgery in 1990. The shelter argued that since Nixon grew up male, he did not have the life experiences necessary to counsel women about rape. The court disagreed, finding the shelter engaged in sexual discrimination.
According to Nixon’s lawyer, Barbara Findlay — who has specialized in lawsuits that seek legal recognition of transsexuals — this is the first case of this kind in North America in which the transsexual has one. In a similar case brought against a Canadian prison which refused to hire a transsexual for a counseling position in a women’s prison, the prison prevailed in its claim that a transsexual raised as a man did not share the life experiences necessary to counsel female prisoners.
Nixon told CNSNews.Com that the refusal of The Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter to hire her had caused a great deal of harm to her self-esteem and dignity,
The fact that they view me as a man was amazingly hurtful, because my whole life I’ve had to deal with feelings around being male, because that’s not who I am. It was very, I guess, damaging to my sense of self, and my identity of being a female was undermined.
Nixon says the shelter remains in denial about its discriminatory attitude toward her and would like the court to order the shelter to institute training to “un-learn trans-phobia.”
Findlay says that the court’s decision, “sent a message to Americans pressuring for the same kind of change. It is, in my opinion, at long last the beginning of the end of discrimination against trans-gender people.” For its part, the shelter is considering an appeal.
Lets hope Findlay is wrong and that this sort of insanity does not spread south to the United States. The shelter here has an open and shut case, as far as I’m concerned, that their right to free association and desire to have an all-woman staff trumps any sort of claim Nixon might have.
Source:
Transgender Advocates vs. Feminists in Legal Battle. Alison Appelbe, CNSNews.Com, January 25, 2002.
The Transsexual Wins $4,600 Award from Rape Counseling Group for Sex Discrimination by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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