Chinese court rules transgender man sacked unfairly
IN WHAT has been described as China’s first case involving transgender discrimination in the workplace, a court in the southwestern province of Guizhou has ruled that the plaintiff was illegally fired but that there was no proof that his dismissal was a result of bias against transgender people.
“We found this a little bit of a shame,” Huang Sha, the lawyer for the plaintiff, a 28-year-old transgender man who has been identified in the state news media only as “Mr. C” and who has declined to provide his real name to protect his privacy, said in a telephone interview.
Mr. C, who was born a woman but says he has long considered himself a man, was dismissed from the Ciming Health Checkup Center in Guiyang, the provincial capital in April 2015 after a one-week probation. In March 2016, Mr. C filed his case with a local labour arbitration committee asking for compensation and a written apol- ogy. Mr. C said in an interview in April that the company’s human resources manager had complained that he dressed like a gay man and looked too “unhealthy” to be an employee for a health checkup company.
In May, the arbitration committee ordered the company to pay Mr. C 402.30 renminbi, about $61 at the time, for the probation period, but rejected his demand for an additional month’s pay of 2,000 renminbi and an apology. He and Huang then brought the case to court.
The court held its first hearing in June but adjourned when Huang demanded an examination of two documents that the company had submitted as evidence Mr. C had been fired for poor performance, failing to dress according to company standards and missing work.
The case resumed in December, after court-appointed experts from the Center of Forensic Science at the Southwest University of Political Science and Law concluded there was no way to authenticate the two documents, Huang said. The court’s ruling was issued on December 30.
Huang said the court concluded the company had failed to prove that it had fired Mr. C for reasons permitted as grounds for dismissal under labour law and ordered the company to pay Mr. C the 2,000 renminbi in compensation. But the court also said there was no proof Mr. C’s termination had resulted from the company’s discrim- inatory attitude toward transgender people and did not grant Mr. C’s demand for an apology.
“This has demonstrated how low the cost of breaking the law is for employers,” Huang said, referring to the amount of compensation. “This is why the current job discrimination situation is so grim.”
“This case also highlights the problem of ‘invisible discrimination’, because employers can always claim they fired people for reasons other than the one they’re accused of,” he said.
In recent years, there have been several high-profile lawsuits involving gender and sexual orientation, but most produced outcomes disappointing to activists. In September, a court in Beijing ruled against a lesbian who had sued the Ministry of Education over textbooks that referred to homosexuality as a disease. In April, a court in Hunan province rejected a gay couple’s demand that they be allowed to marry.