Flordia
— One of the five commissioners who voted to
fire a city manager in Largo, Fla., who is seeking a
sex-change operation said his management style, not
lifestyle, led to the dismissal. Commissioner Gay Gentry
said the city manager, Steve Stanton, was a ''hard-nosed,
my-way-or-the-highway'' boss who expected more
understanding of his personal situation than he showed to
some of his roughly 1,200 employees in 14 years as the
city's top official.
''Suddenly the rules were
changing and he was asking to be dealt with in a
different way than he was dealing with people,'' Gentry
said.
Commissioners voted
5–2 early Saturday to fire Stanton from his
$140,000-a-year job in the city of 76,000, which is west
of Tampa. Stanton was forced last month to reveal he was
a transsexual who planned to live as a woman and
eventually pursue a sex-change operation.
Stanton defended the
employment decisions he made, including firing a
public-works employee who stayed home with his elderly
mother when a hurricane was approaching. ''Every one of
those employment decisions were correct and proper,''
Stanton said.
Stanton and his attorney
said the commissions' two votes to fire him in the last
month are discriminatory, but they have not said if he
will sue. His employment contract says he can be fired
without cause at any time.
Stanton, 48, said he
plans to concentrate on the transition from life as a man
to life as a woman and will begin the process of legally
changing his name to Susan. He said the cause of
transsexual rights was advanced by the attention
surrounding his fight to keep his job.
''This is not about Steve
keeping his job exclusively. It was about supplying
information and education about something that people
just don't understand,'' Stanton said. (AP)
