Transgendered worker loses lawsuit
A federal judge has ruled against a U.S. Customs and Border Protection employee who claimed discrimination by co-workers after undergoing a sex change.
Tracy Nichole Sturchio, formerly known as Ronald Sturchio, sued the Department of Homeland Security, alleging a hostile workplace, retaliation and sexual discrimination.
After a six-day bench trial in Spokane, U.S. District Judge Robert H. Whaley said in a ruling made public Monday that Sturchio failed to prove discrimination under federal law.
Sturchio, 56, said she did not know if Whaley’s ruling would be appealed.
“In my heart, I know he is wrong, he just did not get it,” Sturchio wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press.
Mario Villarreal, an agency spokesman in Washington, D.C., acknowledged that the U.S. District Court case had been resolved in favor of the government, but said he could not comment further.
Whaley said he was sympathetic to the emotional toll Sturchio’s gender change took, but said many of her allegations stemmed from misunderstandings.
“The court is sure that (Sturchio) felt isolated and unfairly treated at the Border Patrol. Part of this feeling was caused by the difficulty her co-workers had in dealing with the manifestations of plaintiff’s gender conflict,” Whaley wrote.
“Nevertheless, the evidence does not show that this confusion caused the Border Patrol, or her co-workers, to discriminate against her because she failed to conform to a sex stereotype,” the judge wrote. “Instead, action taken by her employer and her co-workers were on account of legitimate workplace concerns, including supervisory deficiencies and inappropriate conversations.”
Sturchio, a telecommunications specialist, joined the U.S. Border Patrol in 1991, and transferred to the Spokane office in 1998. In late 2002, Sturchio legally changed her name and had her driver’s license and Social Security records changed to reflect her new name and gender.
Attorneys for the federal government had argued that past decisions held that transsexuals were not members of a protected class under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That landmark federal law made it unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their sex, religion, race or national origin.
The government contended that Sturchio, in her lawsuit, never identified her sex, contending only that she was a “transgender person.”
Sturchio was born a male, but has been diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, according to court documents. She has been on hormone therapy and last August underwent sexual reassignment surgery in Colorado, she said.