In 1971, 52-year-old New Jersey music teacher Paula Grossman transitioned from male to female. A tenured teacher, characterized by contemporary reporters as being “well-liked by students,” Grossman thought she would have no problem returning to the classroom as a woman. Her school, however, soon dismissed her because officials worried that an out transgender teacher might inflict lasting psychological harm on her students.
For the next eight years, Grossman fought her employer in state and federal court. While she never regained her job, she did eventually win back pay and a disability pension.
Grossman was far from the only out transgender worker caught in a web of transphobia that kept transgender women and men from exercising their freedoms. In 1975, administrators at the Ralph K. Davies Medical Center near San Francisco justified their dismissal of hemodialysis technician Carol Lynn Voyles by arguing her very presence in the ward as a trans woman further harmed sick patients. In 1980, Eastern Airlines argued in court that because pilot Karen Ulane was transgender, she might prove to be as dangerous to passengers as an alcoholic pilot.
As this suggests, it was quite common for employers to justify these dismissals by arguing that the presence of transgender employees was effectively bad for business. Initially, the courts upheld this reasoning. In 1978, Florida hairdresser Raegan Kelly Kirkpatrick was fired for wearing women’s clothing at work, despite a note from her doctor attesting she was trans. A federal judge upheld her dismissal, writing that one should “dress and act as persons of their biological sex” because “allowing employees to do otherwise may disturb the customers and cause them to take their business elsewhere.”
Then as now, there was zero evidence that transgender people posed any kind of threat to others or to businesses. Nevertheless, the baseless claims of employers proved a convincing rhetorical scare tactic that helped to legally justify workplace anti-trans discrimination.
Appeals to biology also played a role. Courts rarely sided with transgender plaintiffs, in part because judges hesitated — often in degrading or humiliating ways — to affirm plaintiffs’ claims to womanhood or manhood. In discussing Kirkpatrick’s case, for example, a federal judge categorically stated: “No finding is made that plaintiff is female or would be female after completion of the reassignment procedures.” Similarly, the pilot Ulane’s body was rigorously scrutinized in court, with her organs, hormone counts and sex chromosomes weighed heavily in judges’ determination of her biological sex.
Transgender activists challenged this legal reasoning and the rigid ideas about gender they upheld. Plaintiffs like Ramona Holloway urged the courts to expand the definition of “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to include “persons not readily classifiable as male or female.” Other plaintiffs, including Grossman, framed their trans identity as an “unusual, but nonetheless perfectly legitimate medical problem” and urged employers not to react reflexively to medical conditions they did not understand. Appealing to the news media, Grossman’s attorney asked, “[a]re we to cast out transsexuals as lepers were once cast out?”