News
2007-03-27
Florida official
defends firing transgender city manager
One of the five
commissioners who voted to fire a city manager in Largo,
Fla., who is seeking a sex-change operation said h
One of the five
commissioners who voted to fire a city manager in Largo,
Fla., who is seeking a sex-change operation said his
management style, not lifestyle, led to the dismissal.
Commissioner Gay Gentry said the city manager, Steve
Stanton, was a ''hard-nosed, my-way-or-the-highway''
boss who expected more understanding of his personal
situation than he showed to some of his roughly 1,200
employees in 14 years as the city's top official.
''Suddenly the
rules were changing and he was asking to be dealt with in
a different way than he was dealing with people,'' Gentry
said.
Commissioners
voted 5–2 early Saturday to fire Stanton from his
$140,000-a-year job in the city of 76,000, which
is west of Tampa. Stanton was forced last month
to reveal he was a transsexual who planned to live as
a woman and eventually pursue a sex-change operation.
Stanton defended
the employment decisions he made, including firing a
public-works employee who stayed home with his elderly
mother when a hurricane was approaching. ''Every one
of those employment decisions were correct and
proper,'' Stanton said.
Stanton and his
attorney said the commissions' two votes to fire him in
the last month are discriminatory, but they have not said if
he will sue. His employment contract says he can be
fired without cause at any time.
Stanton, 48, said
he plans to concentrate on the transition from life as
a man to life as a woman and will begin the process of
legally changing his name to Susan. He said the cause
of transsexual rights was advanced by the attention
surrounding his fight to keep his job.
''This is not
about Steve keeping his job exclusively. It was about
supplying information and education about something that
people just don't understand,'' Stanton said. (AP)
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