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By Root 2056 0

course, of little interest or value to many gender-variant people, who are focused on the battle to achieve civil rights as they remain the most vulnerable minority group in our culture, and the target of the most virulent discrimination. What can one say about the case of Peter Oiler, the truck driver who was fired by the Winn-Dixie supermarket chain after twenty years of exemplary employment when his supervisor discovered that he occasionally dressed in women’s clothing? Oiler was not wearing dresses to work, nor was he negligent in his duties in any way. However, he did make the mistake of being honest when his supervisor called him into his office to discuss rumors that Oiler was gay. The married Oiler said that he wasn’t gay but that he cross-dressed occasionally and had attended support group meetings, dined in restaurants, gone shopping, and occasionally attended church services while dressed in women’s clothing. He was asked to resign shortly thereafter, and when he refused to do so, was fired, with his health care coverage and other benefits terminated.

Oiler, backed by a number of trans advocacy groups and the American Civil Liberties Union, appealed to the courts of the state of Louisiana, which denied his claim of discrimination and request for damages. Cross-dressers, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people are not covered by existing federal civil rights legislation, so people like Peter Oiler have little legal recourse when they are fired from their jobs or refused an apartment or a loan or harassed in the workplace or in a restaurant or store. Another book could be, and I hope will be, written about the legal travails of gender-variant people and the manner in which they are consistently denied the most basic liberties that most Americans take for granted.

At the fifth annual symposium sponsored by the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, held on February 27, 2002, trans attorney and activist Phyllis Randolph Frye delivered a keynote address that laid out some of the challenges that have confronted transgendered people and their allies as they have sought protection under the law. Like Sylvia Rivera, Frye continually reminds audiences that despite their crucial role in the Stonewall riots and in the early days of gay liberation, transgendered and gender-variant people have been consistently excluded from proposed legislation by gay leaders who feel that various bills would not pass if they included transgenders.

“In 1989, I became aware that even though transgenders began the Stonewall Riots in 1969, we were not welcome in the struggle for lesbian and gay rights. And as the other speakers here today know, beginning in 1989, we of the transgender community began a decade-plus-long fight for that reincorporation…. Today, we are an almost completely reincorporated LGBT community. Unfortunately, transgenders plus gender-variant lesbians and gays and bisexuals remain excluded from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) before the U.S. Congress.” ENDA, first introduced in Congress in 1994 and resubmitted each year since then, would provide federal protection for gays and lesbians—but as Frye notes, “each year since then, ENDA has been introduced with sometimes different language, but always with a deliberate and intentional exclusion of transgenders and gender variants.” At the 2001 Gender and the Law Conference, Professor Chai R. Feldblum of Georgetown University, one of the original drafters of ENDA, said that she had since come to believe that it was crucial to include protection for gender-variant people in any proposed legislation. Many of the legislators who support ENDA maintain that the act cannot be passed with such a clause, however, even though a number of cities and towns have passed laws protecting the civil rights of transgendered Americans over the past two years.

At the Georgetown conference, Phyllis Frye noted that much progress had been achieved in recent years, notably that “more and more transgenders are coming out of their closets” and that “although rampant employment