President Joe Biden on Monday recognized the 10-year anniversary of the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy that forced gay, lesbian and bisexual military service members to hide their sexuality.
Then-President Bill Clinton signed the policy into law in 1993 as a compromise to end the existing ban on gay people serving. In total, over the 17 years the policy was in effect, an estimated 13,000 service members were discharged, according to data the military provided to The Associated Press.
In December 2010, then-President Barack Obama signed a repeal bill, but it didn’t take effect until Sept. 20, 2011.
“Ten years ago today, a great injustice was remedied and a tremendous weight was finally lifted off the shoulders of tens of thousands of dedicated American servicemembers,” Biden said in a statement issued by the White House. “It was the right thing to do. And, it showed once again that America is at its best when we lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”
Though an estimated 13,000 service members were discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the total number of service members discharged due to their sexual orientation or gender identity is estimated to be much higher: More than 100,000 are thought to have been forced out between World War II, when the U.S. first explicitly banned gay service members, and 2011, when “don’t ask, don’t tell” officially ended.
“As a U.S. Senator, I supported allowing servicemembers to serve openly, and as Vice President, I was proud to champion the repeal of this policy and to stand beside President Obama as he signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act into law,” the president said in Monday’s statement.
Biden said that many of those veterans received what are known as “other than honorable” discharges, which excluded “them and their families from the vitally important services and benefits they had sacrificed so much to earn.”
In fact, the Department of Veterans Affairs issued a policy clarification on Monday stating that veterans who were given other than honorable discharges based on homosexual conduct, gender identity or HIV status may be eligible for VA benefits, such as home loan guaranty, compensation and pension, health care, homeless program and/or burial benefits, among others. The department said the clarification offers guidance to VA adjudicators and to veterans “who were affected by previous homophobic and transphobic policies” who “have not applied for a discharge upgrade due to the perception that the process could be onerous.”
Biden added that he is honored to be commander in chief of the “most inclusive military in our nation’s history,” which he said welcomes LGBTQ service members. He noted that, during his first week in office, he repealed the Trump administration’s ban on transgender service members enlisting and serving openly in the military.
He also said that under his administration, the military is led by LGBTQ veterans. For example, in July, the Senate confirmed Gina Ortiz Jones as under secretary of the Air Force, making her the first out lesbian to serve as undersecretary of a military branch.
It also confirmed Shawn Skelly as assistant secretary of defense for readiness, making her the first transgender person to hold the post and the highest-ranking out trans defense official in U.S. history.
Biden appointed Pete Buttigieg — who served as a Navy Reserve lieutenant in Afghanistan under “don’t ask, don’t tell” — as transportation secretary, making him the first openly gay Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate.
“On this day and every day, I am thankful for all of the LGBTQ+ servicemembers and veterans who strengthen our military and our nation,” Biden said in the statement.
He added that the country must “honor their sacrifice” and continue to fight for full equality for LGBTQ people, including by passing the Equality Act, which would provide the first federal protections from discrimination for LGBTQ people in employment, housing, education, public accommodations, credit and jury service, among other areas of life. The bill passed the House in April but has since stalled in the Senate.
During a news conference on Monday, Shalanda Baker, a former Air Force officer who was discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” 20 years ago, said the policy prevented her from seeking help while she was in an abusive relationship.
“I’ll never forget my time at the academy or the early years thereafter when I struggled to find my footing in a military that did not accept the whole of me,” said Baker, who is now a secretarial adviser on equity and deputy director for energy justice at the Department of Energy. “We cannot forget the lives of so many who walked the path just like mine. Those who risked and lost their lives for this country and who served in silence. I want to thank them for their service, so that it may never be forgotten.”
The Madrid prosecutor’s office opened an investigation on Monday after a crowd of about 200 people sporting Nazi paraphernalia marched in the Spanish capital’s gay-friendly neighbourhood of Chueca on Saturday shouting offensive anti-LGBT slogans.
The protesters shouted “Out of our neighbourhood” and “Get out of Madrid” prefaced by derogatory words for gay people, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
Homophobic hate crimes have been in the headlines in Spain since a man was beaten to death in July over his sexual orientation. The government said this month it would create specialised groups within the Interior Ministry and the police force to prevent hate crimes and support victims.
Around 200 people gathered on Saturday in the gay-friendly neighborhood of Chueca, known as the center of Spain’s annual Pride celebrations, where they shouted insults such as “get fags out of our neighborhood” and “get those sidosos [AIDS-ridden people] out of Madrid,” as they marched toward the city’s landmark Puerta del Sol square.
During the two-hour demonstration, the group set off flares, carried signs with far-right symbols and expressed their contempt for unaccompanied migrant minors and migrants more broadly. As well as the homophobic chants, demonstrators yelled “Here are the nationalists,” a reference to those who supported dictator Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
The participants – who were escorted by riot police and several National Police vans – also waved Spanish flags and symbols of Juventud Nacional (National Youth), an organization linked to the far-right party España 2000 (Spain 2000).
The US Department of Justice is to review Trump-era policies on housing trans inmates in federal prisons.
After the Donald Trump administration, like it sought to across housing, health and education, rolled back trans rights when it comes to the prison system, the Biden administration might just change that.
The federal Bureau of Prisons, the agency that cares for incarcerated Americans, saw its policies pulled into the spotlight when the leader of an anti-government militia, who is trans, was sentenced to 52 years for helming the 2017 bombing of a Minnesota mosque.
Emily Hari, sentenced Monday (13 September), will now see which of the 122 federal prisons she will carry out her jail time decided by the Bureau of Prisons Transgender Executive Council.
The council consists of psychologists, prison experts and correctional officials, but they are currently using a Trump-era manual when it comes to housing trans inmates – meaning that Hari may be forced to serve her prison sentence in a men’s prison.
Under the Trump administration, the Bureau can only assign trans people to the correct prison “in rare cases”, according to the Associated Press.
This was an about-turn from the Obama era, where the council was advised to “house by gender identity when appropriate”.
Justice Department officials told the news agency that they are looking into reviewing these policies, “including providing gender-affirming housing where appropriate”.
“[The Bureau of Prisons] is in the process of reviewing the current version of its policy regarding transgender inmates,” they added.
The council will now decide where Hari is housed, where factors such as her health and safety, history of disciplinary action and the security level of the prison itself are considered.
Of the 156,000 federal prisoners in the US, only 1,200 are trans – a number, while small, is a damning indictment of the higher incarceration figures for trans Americans.
According to Lambda Legal, an LGBT+ advocacy group that provides legal advice, nearly one in six trans Americans – and one in two Black trans people – have been in prison.
Inside, they face disproportionate levels of violence and abuse, both at the hands of fellow inmates and, at times, prison staffers, the group added.
In one harrowing case, a trans military veteran in New York sentenced to a month in jail found herself transferred to a men’s prison in 2019. There, she faced weeks of verbal and physical humiliation.
The Supreme Court allowed a Texas law to go into effect this month that bans abortions after six weeks of gestation.
In the recent legislative session, Texas lawmakers introduced a slew of bills that sought to limit transgender people’s bathroom access and prohibit changes to birth certificates. Many of the bills take aim at young trans people’s access to health care and participation in high school sports. Similar bills have been introduced in at least 19 other states.
Though seemingly unrelated, some LGBTQ rights advocates and abortion rights advocates see parallels.
“The barrage of policy attacks on transgender youth flows from the same hateful, coercive ideology spurring on attacks against abortion rights and voting rights. These attacks on personal liberties are not — and have never been — happening in a vacuum, but rather each as part of a conservative campaign of control,” Ruth Dawson, principal policy associate for the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights research group, told NBC News in an email. “LGBTQ justice and sexual and reproductive health care are inextricably linked, because they both involve individuals’ autonomy in their most intimate decisions.”
‘A coordinated attack’
Abortion rights advocates and LGBTQ advocates pointed out similarities among recently introduced bills.
“The bills themselves share the same kind of idea. They are really restrictive infringements on bodily autonomy, on individual rights and the state taking an aggressive, moralizing police role,” Jules Gill-Peterson, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University, said.
The bills misinterpret or misrepresent medical data, she added, and “claim to do things they don’t, like protect women and children.”
For example, Arkansas passed a law in March that bans access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors, including reversible puberty blockers and hormones. However, puberty blockers have been used for a variety of medical purposes in cisgender young people for decades, said Kara Mailman, senior research analyst at abortion-rights organization Reproaction.
Proponents of the law argued that transition care for minors is “experimental” and that trans minors often change their minds about their genders and detransition later in life. Medical experts say neither of those claims are backed by scientific evidence.
Major medical organizations — including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society and the American Psychological Association — support gender-affirming care for trans minors and oppose efforts to restrict access. And research has found that access to gender-affirming care such as puberty blockers reduces the risk of suicide among trans youths.
“So much of what they claim is dangerous is heavily tested and extremely safe,” Mailman said.
The same groups pushing for limitations on abortion are also advocating for new laws that limit transgender people’s access to health care, Sasha Buchert, senior attorney at the LGBTQ rights group Lambda Legal, said. “It’s a coordinated attack.”
Gill-Peterson agreed. “Anti-trans and anti-abortion legislation are often very similar in terms of the literal bills that come to state legislative floors. They are part of the same political strategy, and they are being funded and ghost-written by the same kinds of groups.”
This year, the conservative organizations Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Policy Alliance partnered in an initiative, Promise to America’s Children, that opposes the Equality Act and provides lawmakers with socially conservative model legislation.
One piece of legislation listed on the site as exemplary is California’s “Protecting Children From Experimentation Act of 2021,” a bill that would criminalize providers of “gender reassignment medical interventions on minors” with up to five years in prison.
The site invites visitors to sign a “promise” that includes “protecting” children’s minds, bodies and relationships to parents: “We believe that America’s children are the nation’s greatest resource. While a culture — and sadly, a government — around us seek to sexualize children for the sake of a political agenda, we seek to protect children and nurture their minds, bodies, and relationships,” the website states.
Among signatories to the promise are Republican lawmakers from over a dozen states.
The Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Policy Alliance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
‘Political grammar’
Proponents of laws restricting abortion and transgender rights present them to the public in a similar manner, according to Gill-Peterson. She said anti-trans bills employ the same “political grammar” tried and tested in anti-abortion politics, which is defense of “an imaginary child in danger.”
“We have seen this since the Reagan revolution,” she continued, “that the unborn child becomes the rallying cry to restrict rights.”
Texas’ new law, for example, refers to “protecting the health of the woman and the life of the unborn child” in its justification.
Gill-Peterson said the groups and politicians advocating for the bills find them to be politically expedient. “Is this a good bill for fundraising? Is it good for the base? Does it turn out the vote? Does it distract people from other issues?”
She described the manipulation of the image of the child in the anti-trans laws as “particularly cruel.”
“This rhetoric of child protection is being used to support politics that target children for severe harm,” she said.
For example, a bill in Texas would classify any gender-affirming care as child abuse, and a Tennessee bill would prohibit several kinds of gender-affirming care for minors, including simply talk therapy.
Nine states — eight this year — have banned trans athletes from participating on the sports teams that align with their gender identity.
The final version of Florida’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed in June, omitted requirements that transgender athletes in high schools and colleges undergo testosterone or genetic testing and submit to having their genitalia examined.
While such legislation purports to be about child protection, Gill-Peterson said, those who are most affected by the law are the most marginalized, with already precarious access to resources.
“It’s no question that a lot of these clinics, especially Planned Parenthood, are also offering gender-affirming care services,” said D. Ojeda, a policy advocate at the National Center for Transgender Equality. “I think that is why the opposition have targeted these two issues.”
Gill-Peterson also sees the spate of anti-trans bills as part of a more widespread political scapegoating of transgender people.
“There is a lot more social stigma and violence directed at trans people right now,” she said.
“Anti-trans politics is a major plank of ethnonational, authoritarian political movements around the world,” she said, citing examples from Brazil, Poland and Hungary.
In June, for instance, Hungary’s Parliament passed legislationbanning content in schools deemed to promote homosexuality and transgender issues.
‘War of attrition’
Alex Petrovnia, director of the TransFormations Project, said his trans rights organization is tracking at least 77 anti-trans bills, including over two dozen bills in Texas.
“We expect to see a lot more bills in 2022,” he said.
“They are playing a war of attrition; they are unrelenting. The goal of this is to outlast people. Unless we continue to fight these, the bills will slip through, and we won’t notice,” Petrovnia said. “It’s not about one fight; it’s about 77 this year.”
In the face of an overwhelming number of bills, some advocates and progressive academics are calling for LGBTQ rights and abortion rights groups to work together.
“We cannot address these injustices as if they are siloed; it is crucial that we see and fight these attacks for what they are — part of a broader pattern of coercive, conservative ideology,” Guttmacher’s Dawson said.
One way to do this is to ensure the language used to describe issues is as inclusive as possible, according to Reproaction’s Mailman.
“We’ve used women-centered language for so long,” Mailman said. “Trans people are also part of the community that has abortions. It has kept a lot of trans people from feeling at home in these abortion spaces.”
Ojeda said passage of the Equality Act would help both the trans rights and abortion rights movements.
The Equality Act is a piece of federal legislation that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in numerous arenas, including employment, housing, education, public accommodations, credit and jury service.
Ojeda said it would be “vital in combating these terrible bills at the state level,” adding that the Equality Act “would be an ultimate line of defense.”
In fact, on Wednesday, a coalition of 47 women’s rights and abortion rights groups — including NARAL Pro-Choice America, National Women’s Law Center and Time’s Up Now — announced “unequivocal support for the federal Equality Act” with a statement of solidarity. The groups also pushed back on “false claims that women’s rights groups are divided” over the legislation.
“As women and girls continue to face discrimination and harassment that interferes with their ability to live safely and securely, and as states mount unprecedented attacks on women’s rights and the rights of transgender students, federal legislation protecting people of all genders could not be more important than it is right now. That is why we, the undersigned, express our unequivocal support for the Equality Act,” a statement issued by the groups said in part.
Gill-Peterson said that the impending legal fight over Texas’ abortion bill is an opportunity to rethink strategy around abortion and trans rights and to think more expansively about how to ensure everyone has access to the health care they need.
“Even if we restore the previous norm around abortion access, it will not have solved the prior problems of income inequality and racial discrimination in health care” that prevent many people from accessing abortion services, Gill-Peterson said. “What would it look like for people in favor of abortion rights and in favor of trans rights to combine their visions for reproductive freedom, health care justice and racial justice?”
Sonoma County Art Trails Open Studios are happening today and tomorrow (Sept. 18-19) and next weekend (Sept. 25-26). All around the county, 121 artists – painters, sculptors, ceramicists, glass artists, jewelry makers and more – are awaiting your visit.
Plan your Art Trails itinerary today with our Collectors Guide or get a sense of which studios you’d like to visit by checking out the Sonoma County Art Trails Online Gallery. You can also visit the Art Trails Preview Exhibit at Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 282 High St., where you can see one piece from every Art Trails artist all in one place. So grab a friend and hit the road for Sonoma County Art Trails! So much art, so much fun!
Here’s just a taste of what you’ll see at Sonoma County Art Trails. Works from artists (in rows from top left) Susan Proehl, T Barny, Gen Zorich, Linda Barretta, Terry Sauve, Suzanne Edminster, James Reynolds, Serena Hazard, Teri Sloat, Robert Weiss, Peter Krohn, Michael Constantini, Vicki Folkerts-Coots, Mylette Welch.
Madcap antics from Ginger Beaver and awesome piano playing from Trevor Dorner. And vice-versa!
And now you have three more chances to see it!
6th Street’s production of Murder For Two, which previewed Sept 16 in the GK Hardt Theatre, is adding extra dates–Friday, Oct 8 and Sat, Oct 9 at 7:30 PM and Sunday, Oct 10 at 2 pm!
It’s a blend of Agatha Christie-like intrigue, vaudeville, slapstick and two terribly talented actors—not to mention a piano.
A small-town policeman, who dreams of becoming a full-fledged detective, discovers the murder of a crime novelist. With the nearest detective an hour away, the officer jumps at the chance to prove he’s up on crime-scene protocol.
But whodunnit? Did the novelist’s scene-stealing wife give him a big finish? Is his secret lover, the prima ballerina, the prime suspect? Or did the overly friendly town psychiatrist make a fatal frenemy? The officer has to find the killer before the real detective arrives—but the biggest mystery of all is…who stole the ice cream?
Ginger Beavers plays 13 suspects in this perfect blend of music, mayhem and murder.
A music director of multiple productions at 6th Street Playhouse (Sweeney Todd, West Side Story, Oliver et al.), Ginger is also an accomplished comic actor (Madame Armfeldt in A Little Night Music, and Dottie Otley in Noises Off).
Trevor Dorner has made a name for himself playing iconic musicians who rock out on the piano. He toured nationally as Jerry Lee Lewis in Million Dollar Quartet. He’s well acquainted with the script for Murder For Two, having played the Suspects in more than one other production.
Passengers on the Holland America Cruise Line would recognize his handsome face from multiple cruises..www.trevordorner.com IG: @trevordorner
Beautifully directed by Laura Downing-Lee, and stage managed by Jeff Basham, this crazy and delightful comedy is guaranteed to make you laugh and bring you back to 6th Street Playhouse for a second helping of Murder For Two.
Audience members will be invited to find the weapons from the classic board game Clue® hidden in our beautiful custom artwork panels created by Scenic Artist Amber MacLean.
German authorities have compensated nearly 250 people who were prosecuted or investigated under a Nazi-era law criminalizing homosexuality that continued to be enforced enthusiastically after World War II.
The Federal Office of Justice said Monday that, up to the end of August, 317 people had applied for compensation and it had been paid out in 249 cases. So far, it has paid out nearly 860,000 euros (just over $1 million).
Fourteen applications are still being processed, 18 were rejected and 36 were withdrawn, the office said. The deadline for applications is July 21 next year.
German lawmakers in 2017 approved the annulment of thousands of convictions under the Paragraph 175 law, which remained in force in West Germany in its Nazi-era form until homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969. They cleared the way for payments of 3,000 euros per conviction, plus 1,500 euros for every year of jail time those convicted started.
In 2019, the government extended compensation to people who were put under investigation or taken into investigative custody but not convicted. It offered payments of 500 euros per investigation opened, 1,500 euros for each year of time in pre-trial custody started, and 1,500 euros for other professional, financial or health disadvantages related to the law.
The law criminalizing male homosexuality was introduced in the 19th century, toughened under Nazi rule and retained in that form by democratic West Germany, which convicted some 50,000 men between 1949 and 1969.
Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969 but the legislation wasn’t taken off the books entirely until 1994.
In 2000, the German parliament approved a resolution regretting the fact that Paragraph 175 was retained after the war. Two years later, it annulled the convictions of gay men under Nazi rule but not the post-war convictions.
The compensation also applies to men convicted in communist East Germany, which had a milder version of Paragraph 175 and decriminalized homosexuality in 1968.
In all, some 68,300 people were convicted under various forms of Paragraph 175 in both German states.
In the early hours of Friday, June 11, three men were assaulted and subjected to homophobic abuse near a pub in Liverpool, England, by a group of teenagers, one of whom had a knife, according to police.
“Due to the abhorrent verbal abuse the victims were subjected to, we’re treating this as a hate crime,” Detective Inspector Chris Hawitt said in a statement at the time, calling the attack “despicable” and saying the Merseyside Police would not “tolerate people being targeted in this manner because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
A few weeks after the incident, the Merseyside Police released a report saying that the “increase in incidents involving LGBT+ victims has, sadly, mirrored an increase in crime experienced as lockdown restrictions were eased.”
The LGBTQ community organized a rally with the help of people who work in nearby bars and several organizations after three men were assaulted and subjected to homophobic abuse near a pub in in Liverpool, England, in June 2021.Stefan Price / LCR Pride Foundation
In response, the local LGBTQ community organized a protest rally. People who work in nearby bars and several organizations helped put it together, according to the Liverpool-based LGBTQ organization LCR Pride Foundation.
“Hate crime is still a shock,” said Andi Herring, the foundation’s CEO and co-founder. “For me it’s determination that these people won’t win, and we’ll carry on doing what we said and tackle it.”
The Liverpool assault is one in a string of anti-gay hate crimes that happened over the summer in the United Kingdom.
West Midlands Police arrested three men last month after a same-sex couple was attacked in the Gay Village of Birmingham, England. Police said two men, both in their 30s, were attacked Aug. 15 with bottles after being subjected to homophobic abuse. One was left unconscious and the other suffered “nasty cuts,” according to a police report.
Crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity have increased almost every year since at least 2015, according to government data from England, Wales and Scotland. In England and Wales, sexual orientation hate crimes rose by 19 percent and anti-transgender crimes by 16 percent from March 2019 to March 2020. In Scotland, the number of hate crimes related to sexual orientation rose by 5 percent from April 1, 2020, to March 31.
The U.K. government, in a statement last year, attributed the uptick to better crime recording by law enforcement and improved identification of what is considered a hate crime. The police also report spikes in hate crimes after major political or terrorist events.
While some British LGBTQ activists agreed that queer people are more comfortable reporting hate crimes to police than they were in the past, they said the isolation from the pandemic and the increase in political hate speech and violence are energizing people with anti-gay feelings.
“If there are people in power who are bigoted … that legitimizes people to be hateful in their everyday life,” said Rebecca Crowther, policy coordinator at the Equality Network in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Crowther said that in addition to the mental health toll the pandemic-related lockdown had taken on people, she has witnessed a rise in hate crimes in Scotland, adding that mistrust between the community and the police still exists.
After an attack involving two men in Edinburgh in July, three men were arrested and charged in connection with the alleged assaults and homophobic crime, according to Police Scotland.
“It’s become the ‘Twilight Zone’ up here,” Crowther said.
Herring said he also attributes the increased hate-crime numbers to more survivors understanding what a hate crime is and a growing confidence that they will get the support they need after reporting.
In the same month, the U.K. government scrapped plans to allow transgender people to self-identify and announced that a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria was required to legally transition. The government also said it planned to open three gender clinics in 2020.
Eighty-five percent of British people surveyed said they would be supportive if their child, sibling or close relative came out as lesbian, gay or bisexual, and 71 percent said they would feel the same about a family member coming out as transgender or nonbinary, accordingto an August YouGov survey. Seven percent of people in Britain identify as LGBTQ, the survey reported.
Crowther said visibility and allyship affects a community’s friendliness toward LGBTQ people. When Edinburgh bars and public spaces shut down because of the pandemic, residents saw less LGBTQ markers like rainbow flags, according to Crowther.
“It sends a message to the wider public that you are a welcoming space and won’t tolerate hate,” Crowther said of LGBTQ equality symbols.
As the countries reopen, Herring said combating anti-gay sentiments should happen all year around. He said everyone has a responsibility to report hate crimes they witness.
“I can see everything moving in the right direction,” Herring said about ongoing education efforts and Liverpool venues that want to become official safe spaces for the LGBTQ community. “It’s not just a reaction to one crime; it’s about the bigger picture.”
A university that fired a professor after she came out as trans must reinstate her with tenure, a US appeals court has ruled.
The trans English professor, Rachel Tudor, won her sex discrimination lawsuit against Southeastern Oklahoma State University, claiming she was denied tenure and ultimately fired after she came out.
The university had argued that the hostility engendered by the six-year legal battle with Tudor, and the school’s concerns about her work, meant it shouldn’t have to reinstate her – but three judges at the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected that argument, according to Reuters.
The court said that because Tudor won her 2015 discrimination lawsuit it was clear that she would have been granted tenure if she wasn’t trans, ruling out the university’s arguments about her academic record.
“A tenured university professor holds an insular position that can effectively operate without the need for extensive collaboration with colleague or schools administrators,” circuit judge David Ebel wrote.
That amount was reduced to $300,000 by a judge in 2018, who cited the caps on damages under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964. The same judge, district judge Robin Cauthron in Oklahoma City, also awarded Tudor $60,000 in “front pay” to reflect her lost future earnings – despite her seeking more than $2 million in front pay.
In 2018, Cauthron denied Tudor’s request to be reinstated to her job with tenure, accepting the school’s claim that many other faculty members opposed her return and that it did not have the funds to pay her salary. Tudor appealed this decision, and the 10th Circuit ruling said her evidence was clearly sufficient for a jury to rule in her favour.
The panel of judges referred to evidence of the school’s dean and vice president making comments about Tudor’s appearance and lifestyle, the fact that a faculty committee had voted to grant her tenure, and testimony from experts affirming that Tudor is more qualified than other, tenured, professors in her department.
And the judges also agreed with Tudor that there was not the kind of “extreme hostility” that would make her reinstatement impossible.
“There are plenty of workarounds and solutions making reinstatement possible in cases where some animosity exists, such as a remote office, a new supervisor, or a clear set of workplace guidelines,” the judges wrote.
