sex discrimination

It's illegal for employers to discriminate against people who don't conform to gender stereotypes, the Missouri Supreme Court held Tuesday in a decision seen as a major victory for LGBTQ advocates.

The court ruled in a case involving a gay individual, Harold Lampley, who alleged that his employer discriminated against him because he didn’t exhibit stereotypically male behavior and apperance.

Former KCTV Channel 5 anchor Karen Fuller has settled her age and discrimination lawsuit against the station’s owner, Meredith Corp.

The settlement was reached just before the case was set to go to trial in federal court in Kansas City, Kansas, next month.

A court filing on Monday said attorneys for the parties had “settled and compromised the claims in this lawsuit” and that the case was being terminated.

Dozens of Oak Park High School students walked out of class Tuesday in protest of the Trump administration’s plans to roll back Title IX protections for transgender people.

The Missouri Supreme Court is expected to decide within months whether state law prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. But the American Civil Liberties Union alleges in a lawsuit that the Missouri Commission on Human Rights has determined that LGBTQ people are not protected.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt on Friday defended the state's decision to weigh in on a case that could limit transgender rights.

Asked by reporters about Kansas’ decision to join 15 other states in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that it’s legal to fire people for being transgender, Schmidt noted that the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Kansas, has taken that position.

Kansas has joined 15 other states in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that it’s legal to fire people for being transgender.

Last week, the 16 states filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to overturn a federal appeals court's decision that it was illegal for a Michigan funeral home to terminate an employee who was transitioning from male to female. The appeals court ruled that Aimee Stephens’ firing violated Title VII’s prohibition against discrimination based on sex.

Former KCTV Channel 5 anchor Karen Fuller’s age and gender discrimination lawsuit against the station can move forward, a federal judge ruled this week.

U.S. District Judge John Lungstrum determined that Fuller had produced sufficient evidence that she had been fired because of her age or gender, and denied KCTV’s bid to throw out the case.  

Fuller was a news anchor at KCTV from 2003 until 2015, when she was abruptly let go. She was 47 years old at the time and her lawsuit alleges Meredith Corp., the station’s owner, created an “age ceiling” for its female anchors but not for its male anchors.

A black middle school student, who reported a sexual and physical assault, is at the center of a federal lawsuit claiming Lansing Middle School officials failed to deal with the issue properly because of his race. 

The lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kansas, stems from a February 6 incident when the Lansing Middle School student was allegedly verbally and physically attacked by another student — who, the lawsuit points out, is white.

In a decision with potentially far-reaching implications for discrimination law in Missouri, the state's high court on Tuesday agreed to hear two LGBT cases. 

One involves a transgender teenager who sued the Blue Springs R-IV School District in 2015 for denying him access to the men's bathroom.

The other involves a gay man, Harold Lampley, who claimed he was harassed by his employer because he didn't conform to stereotypical masculine behavior. 

The state auditor for Missouri is backing a bill to reinstate legal protections for whistleblowers in state government. The governor and General Assembly stripped those protections earlier this year.

A Missouri court ruled for the first time Tuesday that Missouri law bars employment discrimination based on a failure to conform to gender stereotypes.

While Missouri doesn’t prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, the Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City found that stereotyping can be evidence of sex discrimination, which state law does prohibit.