Gainesville voters will soon decide whether to amend the city's discrimination policy amid controversy.
The city election will be held on March 24, and the ballot will include a proposal, Amendment 1, to remove local anti-discrimination protections. Instead state-level protections would apply.
For Amendment 1 supporters, the vote will decide if male sexual predators will continue to have legally protected access to public areas designated as women only, like bathrooms.
For those who oppose the amendment, the future of civil rights in Gainesville is at stake, in particular the rights of transgender, lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
The amendment would nullify Chapter 8 of the Gainesville Code of Ordinances, titled "Discrimination."
Instead, protections would be provided by the Florida Civil Rights Act at the state level, which outlaws discrimination based on race, color, creed, religion, gender, national origin, age, handicap, marital or family status.
In effect, this would remove protected status for transgender, lesbian, gay and bisexual Gainesville residents and loosen protections for other classes.
Also, the amendment would prevent the city from creating any new protected statuses.
The objective and impact of this amendment is heavily contested in Gainesville.
Citizens for Good Public Policy, the group that proposed the amendment, seeks to remove the Equal Access To Places of Public Accommodations article under Chapter 8.
The article gives transgender people the right to use whichever restroom fits their gender identity, among other provisions.
Transgender people feel that their gender, man or woman, is at odds with their sexual characteristics and express this by cross-dressing, adopting gender-specific mannerisms and, sometimes, undergoing reassignment surgery.
Sexual predators, claiming to be transgendered, could abuse the article and use it to scope out public restrooms for victims, said Jim Gilbert, a spokesman for Citizens for Good Public Policy.
"This is about the safety of Gainesville citizens, of my wife and child," he said.
However, once a group receives protected status it is unconstitutional to remove specific protections, which are considered discrimination as decided by the Supreme Court case Romer v. Evans. Therefore, the amendment was written to remove the whole discrimination chapter, not just the specific equal access article.
The rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, enacted a decade ago, are not a target of the amendment, he said.
"I would consider that collateral damage," he said.
Gilbert believes that the Gainesville City Commission is not trying to prevent discrimination as much as is trying to look like a leading progressive city in America, which is why the amendment prohibits additional provisions from being made, he said.
"Amendment 1 will prevent such social experimentation in the future," he said.
But Equality is Gainesville's Business, an anti-amendment group, has a different take.
To them, the issue is about civil rights, not sexual predators, said Shelbi Day, spokeswoman for Equality is Gainesville's Business.
The amendment will take away rights from Gainesville citizens while doing nothing to protect them from sexual predators, according to Day.
Judy Best, a volunteer for Equality is Gainesville's Business, feels the ordinance couldn't be abused by sexual predators.
"That's a legal matter, but this is all about discrimination," she said. "It's always been."
For Zoe Falcone, a Gainesville male-to-female transgender person, the amendment could affect important life decisions.
Falcone is a UF botany major and is considering graduate school in Gainesville.
But the charter amendment, along with state Amendment 2, which banned same gender marriage in Florida last year, makes Falcone feel that transsexuals are unwanted in Florida.
"If this amendment passes, I'll be on the first plane out of here once I graduate," she said.
The proposed amendment is a result of the transgendered community being widely misunderstood, she said.
"The Gainesville transgender community is really just a bunch of normal people with a special issue," she said.
The amendment would stop the commission from pursuing its plans to add protections for veterans, pregnant woman and the overweight said Jeanna Mastrodicasa, a city commissioner who opposes the amendment.
"Our local economy is based so much on tolerance," she said.
Gainesville's economy relies on creative people, and tolerance encourages those people to move here, she said.
"We're talking about discrimination against people as collateral damage," she said.
