ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

“A New York woman filed suit against a West Village restaurant for being thrown out of a women’s room there by a bouncer who, she said, did not care she was really female,” the New York Times reported on Wednesday. The woman, Khadijah Farmer, 28, said that she was at Caliente Cab Company, a restaurant, with her companion and a friend after the June 24 New York gay pride parade.  She went the women’s room, and while she was there, a male bouncer came in:

He began pounding on the stall door saying someone had complained that there was a man inside the women’s bathroom, that I had to leave the bathroom and the restaurant. Inside the stall door, I could see him. That horrified me, and it made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I said to him, ‘I’m a female, and I’m supposed to be in here.’ After I came out of the bathroom stall, I attempted to show him my ID…and he just refused to look at my identification. His exact words were, ‘Your ID is neither here nor there.”

The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund has filed the lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, accusing the restaurant of discriminating against Ms. Farmer because her appearance did not comply with society’s norms concerning gender identity.

A 2002 amendment to the New York City human rights law protects the rights of city residents whose gender expression differs from their sex at birth. The New York State civil rights law does not include this protection. The legal defense fund, “argues that it should be interpreted as protecting New Yorkers against sexual stereotyping, in which people are expected to conform to gender-appropriate behavior.”

Yale Law School Professor Kenji Yoshino, said Ms. Farmer’s claims were much stronger under the city law: “The New York City statute is so much more directly on point.”

Ms. Farmer said she often is mistaken for a man, but her New York State identification card lists her as female. The Times writes:

Although Ms. Farmer is not transgender, the legal defense group considered the suit to be a strategically important case with the potential to set a precedent, said Michael D. Silverman, the organization’s executive director and general counsel. The lawsuit’s claims are being made under both city and state law.