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TagsBY JILLIAN RISBERG
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
A transgender man is suing a drug treatment center in Camden after he was fired from his job there for being a biological woman.
El'Jai Devoureau, 39, of Deptford alleges that Urban Treatment Associates questioned his gender once he was hired on June 7, 2010 as a “urine monitor” to watch men submit samples for drug analysis.
Devoureau subsequently refused to answer questions about whether he had undergone sex-change surgery, "which is his right under New Jersey law," the suit asserts.
According to legal documents, program director Van Macaluso was tipped off that Devoureau was born female. She claimed that his June 9 termination came on the heels of being told: "He was not a man, he did not have the parts of a man” and the job was reserved for a genetic male.
"They were happy to have me work there until they heard about my (gender) transition," Devoureau, who had sex reassignment surgery in 2009, said in a statement Monday.
The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York filed the lawsuit and said it was the first of its kind.
Michael Silverman, the group’s executive director, said that transgender people make up approximately 700,000 of the nation's 312 million residents. "People need to be judged on how they do the job and not on who they are,” he told the Courier Post.
The gender "assigned" to transsexual persons at birth "is not an accurate representation of their sex," according to the suit. Devoureau has "permanently transitioned to male and his government-issued identification documents reflect the fact that he is male."
Urban Treatment’s attorney, Michael Sweeney, was unavailable for comment but in a separate complaint filed by Devoureau in January with the state Division on Civil Rights, the center challenged that the dismissal was discriminatory and said the employee was just the wrong sex.
According to Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, New Jersey is a national leader in transgender equality and a worldwide model in protecting transgender people from discrimination. He called it a brazen disregard for the law.
"I would have absolutely told them to retain the employee and think about how to address transphobia and heterosexism in their environment,” Jillian Todd Weiss, a professor of law and society at Ramapo College and a consultant on workplace transgender issues told the Associated Press.
“You don't ask someone: 'What do your genitalia look like?'" she said.
"That was a very poor choice on the employer's part."
