Our client Brenda Wernikoff has agreed to accept a judgment against the City of Boston in which the City pays her $20,000 to resolve her claim that she was falsely arrested and subject to discrimination for using the women’s bathroom at a homeless shelter. The lawsuit alleged that the City failed to train its police officers how to treat transgender people. The City offered to have judgment entered against it shortly after we filed the complaint.

Ms. Wernikoff is a transgender woman. (She was assigned male gender at birth, but she identifies as a woman and is legally female.) Boston ordinance 12-9.7 makes it illegal to discriminate against a transgender woman like Ms. Wernikoff from using women’s bathrooms. (Read the ordinance here.) On May 19, 2010, Ms. Wernikoff was using a stall in the women’s bathroom at the Woods Mullen Shelter. When Ms. Wernikoff emerged from her stall, BPD officer Loletha Graham-Smith arrested her for using the women’s bathroom. At the police station, male police officers degraded Ms. Wernikoff by ordering her to remove her top and jump up and down, causing her bare breasts to jiggle for the officers’ own amusement.