Excited Utterances

The male brain (google images) Last week, El’Jai Devoureau in New Jersey filed a discrimination lawsuit against his former employer. El’Jai claims he was unfairly fired from his job as a urine monitor when his boss found out that he is transgender.  Only a man is allowed to do the job, which is to monitor men taking urine samples at a drug treatment centre, in order to ensure that people recovering from addiction do not substitute someone else’s urine for their own during regular drug testing.  But that is not the issue – it is perfectly legitimate for certain jobs to favour one group over another – for instance preferring women nurses in maternity wards.  The issue here is whether or not El’Jai is in fact a man. He was born physically a woman, but has identified himself as a man all his life. In 2006 he had sex-change surgery, and now has a new birth certificate and driver’s licence that confirm his gender as male. El’Jai argues that he is a man, and his firing co...

The end of law school is in sight- my exams start next week and by the end of April I will be a Western Law graduate!   In order to obtain my licence to practice law in Ontario, the next step is for me to write the Bar exam in June and complete 10 months of articling- then I’ll be admitted to the Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC) and will finally be a qualified lawyer. But as Ryan Manilla has learned, meeting those two requirements doesn’t guarantee admission into the law society. Manilla is a graduate of Osgoode law school who was recently rejected from the Law Society for failure to meet its “good character” requirement. According to the Toronto Star , Manilla was president of his condo board but got into a dispute with members over fee increases. He sent threatening emails to other members, and boasted that he got a thrill out of making other members squirm . He was kicked off the board ; he forged a letter pretending to be a private investigator alleging kickbac...