Most states lack laws protecting LGBT workers

Rumors started circulating around the fire station in Byron, Ga., within a year after the medical treatments began. The fire chief ’s oncecrewcut hair was growing longer, and other physical changes were becoming noticeable. Keeping quiet was no longer an option.

The chief said that once members of the tiny department were told, word spread “faster than a nuclear explosion” through Byron — a city of about 4,500 in a farming region outside Macon known for growing Georgia’s famous peaches. The fire chief was undergoing a gender transition and would continue to run the department as Rachel Mosby. A City Hall staffer told Mosby many were stunned because “I was the manliest man anyone had met in their lives.”

As a man, Mosby served as Byron’s fire chief for a decade until the beginning of 2018. Then Mosby started coming to work as a woman, and the city fired her less than 18 months later. Her June 4 termination letter cited “lack of performance.” Mosby insists the only thing that changed was her gender.

It’s not illegal under Georgia state law to fire someone for being gay or transgender. Twentyeight U.S. states have adopted no laws that prohibit workplace discrimination targeting LGBT employees. Only a small percentage of cities and counties offer protection at the local level. So Mosby, like thousands of other LGBT Americans, has sought recourse under the federal law that makes sex discrimination illegal at work.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has treated LGBTbased job discrimination cases as sex discrimination since 2013. But that could soon end, depending on how the U.S. Supreme Court rules in cases it heard Oct. 8 that deal with the firings of gay men in Georgia and New York state and a transgender woman in Michigan.

Only 21 states have their own laws prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

The AP found workers are particularly vulnerable in the South, home to an estimated 35% of LGBT adults. Out of 16 states the U.S. Census Bureau defines as the South, only Maryland and Delaware prohibit discrimination against gay and transgender workers.

Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee each passed laws blocking local governments from having their own antidiscrimination ordinances that cover LGBT workers.

John Bazemore / Associated Press Former Byron, Ga., fire chief Rachel Mosby is a transgender woman who held the job for more than a decade as a man, then was fired 18 months after she openly transitioned.