Opinion ID: 2973902
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Myers’s Sex-Discrimination Claim

Text: Myers’s final claim on appeal is that the district court erred in granting summary judgment to Cuyahoga County on her sex-discrimination claim. Myers argues that Caraballo and Vazquez 11 sought her termination because she did not conform to their sex and gender stereotypes. Myers claims that the County either considered her to be a masculine woman who did not sufficiently conform to their expectations of what a woman should look and/or act like; or they suspected that she was originally born male and viewed her as a man who violated their expectations of persons born male by identifying as female, transitioning genders from male to female, and expressing a feminine personality and disposition. J.A. at 23 (Compl. at ¶ 6). Myers transitioned to being a female person around 1973 or 1974, and so she had always been female while she was employed by Cuyahoga County. The County was aware that Myers was a transsexual, however, because during the initial hiring process with the County, Myers had explained that her many-year absence from the workforce and her name change were due to her sex change. As with her other claims, Myers did not conduct any discovery pertaining to her sex-discrimination claim, and relies only upon Cuyahoga County’s deposition of Father Ziemba in which Ziemba stated that Myers’s transsexualism was a topic of office gossip and that he once overheard a private conversation between Caraballo and Vazquez in either 1996 or 1997 in which Vazquez referred to Myers as a “he/she.” J.A. at 347-50 (Ziemba Dep. at 16-19). Title VII protects transsexual persons from discrimination for failing to act in accordance and/or identify with their perceived sex or gender. Barnes v. City of Cincinnati, 401 F.3d 729 (6th Cir. 2005); Smith v. City of Salem, 378 F.3d 566 (6th Cir. 2004). “Sex stereotyping based on a person’s gender non-conforming behavior is impermissible discrimination, irrespective of the cause of that behavior; a label, such as ‘transsexual,’ is not fatal to a sex discrimination claim where the victim has suffered discrimination because of his or her gender non-conformity.” Smith, 378 F.3d at 575. Myers’s prima facie burden for her gender nonconformity claim is the standard prima facie burden for Title VII plaintiffs claiming that they have been terminated as a result of illegal 12 discrimination. Myers must show that (1) she is a member of a protected class; (2) she experienced an adverse employment action; (3) she was qualified for the position in question; and (4) she was replaced by a person outside the protected class or she was treated differently than a similarly situated non-protected employee. See Smith, 378 F.3d at 570; Newman, 266 F.3d at 406. In her appellate brief, Myers does not address whether or not she has established her prima facie burden, but rather she argues that the district court erroneously granted summary judgment to Cuyahoga County because it was requiring her to use “magic words” in her complaint and subsequent proceedings. Appellant Br. at 22. This is the incorrect legal standard for a plaintiff attempting to survive summary judgment. In order to defeat summary judgment, Myers, who had the opportunity to conduct discovery to develop her case but chose not to initiate discovery, must show that a genuine issue of material fact remains as to her sex-discrimination claim. From our review of the record, we conclude that Myers is unable to meet that burden. The district court is correct that there is no dispute that Myers has satisfied the first three steps of her prima facie burden. The district court granted summary judgment to Cuyahoga County, however, because it concluded that Myers had failed to meet the fourth step of her prima facie burden because she had not shown that she was treated differently from similarly situated individuals outside the protected class. Again, the district court did not recognize that Myers could meet the fourth step by showing that she was replaced by person outside the protected class. See Newman, 266 F.3d at 406. However, Myers has not alleged, let alone provided any evidence showing, that she was replaced by a gender-conforming person. Furthermore, at oral argument, Myers’s attorney admitted that she did not know whether or not Myers’s replacement was genderconforming. We will therefore assume for the sake of argument only that Myers’s replacement was 13 gender-conforming and that she has met her prima facie burden. Nevertheless, we conclude that Myers has failed to demonstrate a genuine issue of material fact that Cuyahoga County’s proffered non-discriminatory reason for terminating her — her plentiful disciplinary infractions — was a pretext for sex discrimination because she is gender-nonconforming. As explained above, Cuyahoga County’s articulated nondiscriminatory reason for terminating Myers is her well-documented history of disciplinary offenses. The burden then shifts back to Myers to show that this proffered reason is a pretext for illegal sex discrimination. “‘[A] plaintiff's prima facie case, combined with sufficient evidence to find that the employer's asserted justification is false, may permit the trier of fact to conclude that the employer unlawfully discriminated,’ although such a showing might not ‘always be adequate to sustain a jury's finding of liability.’” Weigel, 302 F.3d at 378 (quoting Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Prods., Inc., 530 U.S. 133, 148 (2000)). Unfortunately for Myers, she has failed to produce sufficient evidence to create a genuine issue as to pretext. Myers has been unable to show either that the County’s articulated reason of her disciplinary offenses has no basis in fact, that the disciplinary offenses did not actually motivate the County’s decision to discharge her, or that the disciplinary infractions are insufficient to motivate her discharge. See Manzer, 29 F.3d at 1084. The only evidence in the record that could be considered evidence of pretext is Father Ziemba’s deposition testimony that he once heard Vazquez, when speaking privately to Caraballo, refer to Myers as a “he/she.” J.A. at 347-50 (Ziemba Dep. at 16-19). At oral argument, Myers relied entirely upon this incident to support her sex-discrimination claim. We agree with Myers that calling a transsexual or transgendered person a “he/she” is a deeply insulting and offensive slur, and we agree that using that term is strongly indicative of a negative animus towards gender 14 nonconforming people. In the context of all the evidence in this case, however, we cannot conclude that the statement by itself is sufficient to create a jury question on the issue of pretext. The “he/she” incident is the only incident Myers proffers as proof of pretext. That isolated remark was remote in time from Myers’s termination — the remark was made sometime in 1996 or 1997, several years before the problems with Myers’s performance in late 1998 and 1999 that led to her disciplinary offenses and ultimately her termination — and there is no evidence that the remark was related to Cuyahoga County’s decision to terminate her. See Weigel, 302 F.3d at 379. Additionally, there is significant evidence to support Cuyahoga County’s claim that the proffered reason for terminating Myers — that she was behaving in inappropriate and insulting ways towards her co-workers and clients — is credible and genuine. Had Myers been able to produce any evidence to call into question the legitimacy of Cuyahoga County’s stated reason for firing her, perhaps by discovering some evidence that the disciplinary complaints against her were exaggerated or solicited by Caraballo, then that evidence in combination with the “he/she” comment might have been sufficient to raise a jury question on the issue of pretext. But Myers has not presented a shred of evidence to undermine the credibility of the County’s explanation for her termination. Given the significant and unrebutted evidence of Myers’s disciplinary problems, the isolated “he/she” remark, without more, is not sufficient to create a jury question as to pretext. Myers is unable to defeat Cuyahoga County’s motion for summary judgment, and so we AFFIRM the district court’s grant of summary judgment on her sex-discrimination claim.