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Realizing, Fulfilling 'Who They Are'  by Sue Anne Pressley
Washington Post, Saturday, Nov. 29, 2003; Page B01

Gaby Montenegro, who lives in Mount Pleasant, has felt the discrimination. A 22-year-old immigrant from Honduras whose birth name is Jose Antonio Ramirez, she was fired from her bakery job a few months ago after she began hormone treatments and her body started to change.

Since then, she has had difficulty finding work even as a restaurant dishwasher.

"The manager [of a local restaurant] said I can't be walking around like this," said Montenegro, who dresses as a woman. ""Why can't I wash dishes in the back of a restaurant? No one will see me. Sometimes I feel sad because of the discrimination."

David Pacheco has found an uneasy solution to that problem. By day, Pacheco, 22, works as a cashier at Georgetown University. At other times, however, he lives as a woman named Arlyn Mebark.

"Most of the people think most transgenders do sex work. Some of the girls do, but it's because they have no other choice," said Pacheco, who emigrated from El Salvador as a young child. "Those of us who don't desire to do sex work are often left with the double life, and that's what I'm living now."

The District's Human Rights Act of 1977 protects people on the basis of personal appearance and has been interpreted by a federal ruling to cover transgender people, said Lisa Mottet, legislative lawyer for the Transgender Civil Rights Project begun two years ago by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "But even though we have this interpretation," Mottet said, "businesses don't know it's out there."

Baltimore is the only area jurisdiction that protects people "for gender identity and expression," with a law that was passed unanimously in 2002, said Dan Furmansky, executive director of Free State Justice, a Maryland gay rights organization. The only states that protect transgender people specifically are California, Minnesota, New Mexico and Rhode Island, he said.

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