Becoming Susan Shouldn't Cost Steve His Job

Blue clogs. Colorful, girly, thrilling.

For 7-year-old Steve Stanton, secretly slipping his feet into his older sister's clogs and clack-clack-clacking along the pavement to the candy store was pure magic.

"It just felt absolutely right. It felt so comfortable to do that," Steve, now 48, recalls. "I was constantly looking forward to the opportunity. When I got to the candy store, I took the shoes off. And I never talked about it."

Steve knew he felt different inside from other boys. And one day, after asking his mom what she would have called him if he'd been born a girl, he found a name for that difference.

"Susan."

"When she said 'Susan,' it kind of exploded with this tremendous energy in my mind. I can remember just shaking ... 'I am Susan. That's it.' It put a name to what I felt," Steve says.

His journey toward having his outside Steve yield to the Susan inside has taken four decades.

Those years included Steve's marrying, fathering a son and becoming the respected city manager of Largo, a city of 75,000 on Florida's Gulf Coast. They also included eventually telling his wife about Susan, taking hormones, finding occasional out-of-town opportunities to appear in public as Susan and developing a detailed strategy to transition smoothly from Steve to Susan at work.

But Steve's plans were short-circuited by a newspaper looking for a scoop. And, in the heat of a media frenzy and a mean-spirited public hearing, the Largo commission voted 5-2 to start the process of firing the manager they'd trusted for 14 years to supervise everything from the fire department to traffic signals.

This is the second such outrage in recent weeks: Julie Nemecek of Michigan lost her job at Spring Arbor University, which said her sex change is "inconsistent with the Christian faith."

What's unusual about these cases is they've made headlines: Most job discrimination against transgender Americans goes unnoticed.

It's wrong, though. And Congress will soon have the opportunity to outlaw most of it by passing the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, written to protect those of us who are gay, but wisely expanded to include transgender workers.

It's bizarre that Americans can still be fired for wanting the freedom to have their outward appearance match their internal sense of their gender. Our country celebrates other efforts to tinker with nature — the advances that allow otherwise infertile couples to become parents, restore the virility of 75-year-old men and offer women custom-sized breasts.

But, short of Congress' stepping in, ignorance will keep destroying careers. At the hearing on Steve's future, a Baptist preacher reportedly declared, "If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he'd want him terminated." Mayor Pat Gerard spoke up for fairness: "People talk about being embarrassed … I'm going to be embarrassed if we throw this man out on the trash heap after he's worked so hard for the city … We can go back to intolerance, or we can be the 'City of Progress.'"

When co-workers admit feeling uneasy about eventually meeting Susan, Steve informs them, "You are talking to Susan." Regardless of whether he keeps his job, he plans to transition completely to Susan in May, his "butterfly" moment, as he calls it.

Finally comfortable with his journey, Steve says, "Maybe God has a different plan than me going back and making sure the traffic lights are working."

Deb Price of The Detroit News writes the first nationally syndicated column on gay issues. To find out more about Deb Price and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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