"My litigant is a transgender man, but in mainland China, nobody really know what that means," the man's lawyer told BuzzFeed News.
Mr. C, a young trans man from southwest China's Guizhou Province, says he was fired seven days after he was hired as a sales consultant by Cimi Checkup, a local medical center last year.
Mr. C doesn't want his full name to appear in the press because his family members "all work for the government," as he told BuzzFeed News reporter via messaging app WeChat.
The alleged reason for his firing is simple enough: Mr. C was wearing men's clothing in the office. "They say I'm lesbian and that I damage the company's images," Mr. Chen, on the left in the above picture, told The Paper, a progressive-leaning, though still state-controlled, Chinese news outlet.
"My litigant is a transgender man, but in mainland China, nobody really know what that means," Mr. C's lawyer, Huang Sha, told BuzzFeed News. "His ID card [which shows his his gender] is female, but he dresses like a man, so the sales manager suspected that Mr. C is gay." Huang said they have recordings of more than one similar conversation between Mr. C and his former manager.
According to a survey published by Aibai Culture and Education Center, a Chinese LGBT non-profit, a majority of the more than 2,000 participants have encountered discrimination and unfair treatment in workplaces.
Mr. C's case is the country's first transgender labor discrimination case, according to Li Yinhe, a prestigious sociologist whose partner is also a trans man. Li also noted that the result of the case might have a significant impact on the country's LGBT communities ability to defend their rights in the workplace in the future.
Courtesy of Huang Sha
Mr. C filed the case to the local labor arbitration committee asking for salary and compensation of his financial losses on March 7. The committee accepted the case last Monday with a ruling to be delivered within 45 days.
Only one clause found in China's current Labor Law mentions the word "sex" or anything like it: "Laborers shall not be discriminated against in employment due to their nationality, race, sex, or religious belief."
Without a specific law protecting gender equality, Mr. C didn't even know that his former employer had violated China's Labor Law until he attended a legal panel on gender diversification arranged by Wider Pro Bono Legal Service Center in Shenzhen in January. It was there he met Huang Sha, who would later take on his case.
Representatives at the annual National People's Congress have suggested expediting the enactment of a new "Employment Non-Discrimination Law," which is currently being debated by the government. If enacted, the law would protect different gender identities and sexual preferences in employment in a broader and more specific sense, by forming an employment equality committee and providing laborers with higher compensations. However, Huang does not see the enactment of the law coming any time soon with many obstacles including public opinion and official negligence.
"This is an invisible issue for the government," Huang said. The lawyer raised a recent example in which a Chinese reporter asked an official about gay couples' rights after the country's Anti-Domestic Violence Law went in effect; the official denied that domestic violence even exists between same-sex couples in China.
Courtesy of Huang Sha
via BuzzFeed - World http://ift.tt/1XIi4e1
Put the internet to work for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment