Court to judge on transsexual dismissal case

Date: 18/04/1996

By Fiona McHugh

EUROPEAN judges are to decide at the end of this month whether a British school broke EU law when it sacked a transsexual known as P for having a sex change.

In a landmark judgement due to be delivered on 30 April, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will decide whether or not the Union's 1976 equal opportunities directive covers transsexuals, or people with mixed sexual identities, as well as men and women.

Advocate-General Giuseppe Tesauro, in a non-binding opinion published in December last year, supported P's claim that her dismissal was a breach of EU law and pleaded with his colleagues to be “courageous” and do the same.

Tesauro said the Court should stretch the limits of the 20-year-old directive to take account of changing sexual attitudes and habits.

P, hired as a man, worked as a manager in a Cornwall school until she was fired in 1992, shortly after announcing her intention to have a sex change.

According to P, the school's directors started to treat her badly once they discovered that she was a woman. But the school claims that P was sacked because of her decision to have a sex change and not because of her gender.

Tesauro, agreeing with the transsexual, pointed out that had P remained a man, she would probably not have been fired. Urging the judges to read EU law in an unconventional way, the advocate-general said that lawyers all too often thought in terms of Adam and Eve.

Tesauro said he regarded as obsolete “the idea that the law should protect a woman who has suffered discrimination in comparison to a man, or vice versa, but deny that protection to those who are also discriminated against by reason of sex, merely because they fall outside the traditional man/woman classification”.