State sues S.F. over transgender access

A state civil rights agency has sued San Francisco on behalf of a transgender woman who said a city employee refused to let her use the women’s restroom and cursed at her while she was taking part in a training session on city property.

Tanesh Nutall said she was so traumatized by the incident that she suffered a nervous breakdown and lost her job.

Nutall, 52, was an AIDS educator and transgender program manager for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation at the time of the incident in February 2016, according to the suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court last week by the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

As a private employee, she was attending a city Public Health Department training session on working with poor or traumatized clients, in a city building at 25 Van Ness Ave. During a break, the suit said, she went to use the restroom, saw another woman entering and asked her to hold the door.

The woman, who worked for the city’s Department of Police Accountability, replied, “No, this is a women’s restroom,” and quickly closed the door, the suit said.

Nutall went back to the training room and asked for help from the instructor, private consultant Natalie Thoreson. As the two approached the restroom, the suit said, the same woman was leaving and told Thoreson, “Yes, this is a women’s restroom, and that is a f— man.” She then turned to Nutall and called her a “f— freak,” the suit said.

Thoreson told the woman that what she did was unacceptable and asked for her name, but she ran down the hall, the suit said. It said an office manager and a security guard also refused to identify the woman, but handed Nutall a small piece of paper and suggested that she write a formal complaint.

When she filed a complaint, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission refused to investigate it because City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office told the commission it could not investigate a city agency, said the Transgender Law Center, which represented Nutall.

The law center said Nutall became emotionally distraught and finally lost her job with the AIDS Foundation in April 2017. No longer able to afford housing, she and her husband had to leave San Francisco.

“As a transgender person, I heard about San Francisco my whole life and moving there felt like I’d finally found home,” Nutall said in a statement released by the law center. “So I was devastated and crushed when a representative of my new city stopped me from using the bathroom and called me a freak. Everywhere I went after that, I saw her face and heard her voice and I started believing that what she said about me was true.”

John Coté, a spokesman for Herrera, said the employee whom Nutall encountered is no longer with the department. He did not know the circumstances of her departure.

“San Francisco respects the rights of all individuals, and the department apologized to Ms. Nutall after the incident and provided additional training to the now former employee in question,” Coté said. “But it is our understanding that the factual allegations are not entirely accurate, and that the former employee did not violate Ms. Nutall’s protected rights.”