Fired because she was transgender: the court agrees and sentences the school to pay compensation

His first words on social media are of satisfaction. “Justice has been done,” he wrote Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto, poet and teacher, fired in 2019 from the Kennedy peer institute, in Rome, because she was transgender. The sentence of the court of the Capital arrived on Friday which sanctioned the illegality of the dismissal.

In 2018 he had published a book with a preface by Dacia Maraini. In the book, in verse, she has told his story. Since then he has received attacks and even the sacking has come. She did not give up and filed a three-year lawsuit.

«The court of Rome has issued a historic sentence, with which it condemned to compensate me an educational institution, which he had hired me and fired me after three weeks in 2019recognizing in all respects gender discrimination as a trigger for the termination of the stipulated employment relationship,” she explained on Facebook.

«For the first time in court the specific weight of the gender discrimination within an employment relationship, which unfortunately in our country is still widespread and not adequately addressed. In every way they tried to discredit my person and my professionalism. Their defense was that I was not a good teacher and sexually explicit person. They tried but failed. Their testimonies have not been able to demonstrate the opposite, on the contrary they have proved useful in reinforcing how much my lack of professionalism was not the reason for the dismissal”.

For the teacher it is a personal and collective victory. “I won. We won. A gate has been opened and it is from here that we can let in the light. I am a teacher worthy of respect. I am a respectable transgender woman. As it should be in any case. It is up to us to decide in which direction to change our society. I will always be on the side of those who fight for their rights every day, so as not to see them trampled on again”.

The sentence says that the declarations “do not appear significant of an effective failure by Professor Vivinetto to fulfill her teaching commitments”. The termination of the contract after a few weeks appears premature “for reasons relating to her poor teaching ability, without giving the teacher the opportunity to settle in and acquire full knowledge of the teaching plans customized to apply to their pupils. Therefore, according to the judges, it can “be considered adequately proven that the reasons which led the respondent company to terminate the employment relationship with Vivinetto are attributable precisely to her condition as a transsexual”.

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