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Saturday, March 24, 2007
It's official: Largo, FL is afraid of change
Exactly one month ago today I wrote about Dave Barry's Underground Weirdness Magnet hypothesis, that invisible force that draws all strange news makers from around the country to Florida. Well now it looks as if Florida, and specifically the city of Largo just across the bay from me, has a giant Underground Bigot and Discrimination Magnet as well. Largo's city manager, Steve Stanton, was fired in the wee hours of this morning after several hours of deliberation at a public meeting of city commissioners. From the St. Petersburg Times (also at CNN.com):
LARGO - Steve Stanton couldn't overcome the odds. Largo city commissioners voted 5-2 to fire him early this morning, a month after he revealed he planned to become a woman.
The vote was identical to one taken Feb. 27 and came after a six-hour meeting including four hours of public testimony, most of it urging the commission to save Stanton's job.
The public was allowed to speak for a few of those hours, and from what I can gather the majority of the public in Largo and elsewhere support Stanton and his decision to undergo gender reassignment. Regardless, after 14 years of faithfully serving the City of Largo to the best of his ability, he was fired because five of the seven city commissioners are nothing more than bigoted morons who are scared to death of what they aren't familiar with. There was even the obligatory "we don't take too kindly to your type of folk" comment from an equally ignorant citizen:
"We're a disgrace," said resident Jimmy Dean. "It seems a couple people here want to make Largo into a weirdo town."
I've never been more angry or embarrassed to call myself a Florida resident and I am literally counting down the days until I can joyfully destroy my Florida driver's license and voter registration card. I could write pages about why what happened to Steve Stanton is not only morally wrong, but scientifically wrong as well. Many of the bigots over in Largo will disagree, but there is no sound evidence from the social or behavioral sciences that demonstrates transgendered individuals are any less able to perform any variety of job functions. Anthropology is especially relevant here because one of the first lessons we're all taught in an Introduction to Anthropology course is that "gender" is a cultural phenomena that varies widely between and even within societies.
To automatically assume that Stanton's job performance would suffer because he's wearing a dress instead of a necktie is to not only ignore decades of research and progress in the social sciences but to further discriminate against a segment of society that some view as unacceptably different. There was once a time when discrimination against individuals who happened to have dark skin was sanctioned by local, state, and federal governments and written into laws. We soon learned that "race" is culturally constructed and has no biological basis. The gay, lesbian, and transgendered communities face a similar uphill battle which they have not yet completely won.
So to Largo City Commissioners Mary Gray Black, Andy Guyette, Gigi Arntzen, Harriet K. Crozier, and Gay Gentry: you should be ashamed of yourselves for voting to remove a completely qualified individual for a reason that cannot be described as anything but bigoted. You failed to demonstrate that Steve Stanton's job performance was suffering prior to his removal, and you failed to demonstrate that his job performance would suffer after his gender reassignment surgery. You may have placated some citizens in Largo, but you have let the city down and have embarrassed the large majority of Floridians who have long abandoned discriminatory practices. Your goal was to prevent Largo from becoming a laughing stock because your city manger was going to change gender. Wake up: you are now a national laughing stock because you catapulted your city decades into the past when it was OK to hate someone because they were different.
267 days to go...
Posted by Will at March 24, 2007 02:24 PM in In the News