The leave records didn't add up, and neither did his bias case on appeal
A transgender bus operator who lost his job over his medical-leave records also lost his discrimination case on appeal.
On June 24, 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a suit brought by former Chicago Transit Authority bus operator Russia Brown against the CTA and his union, Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 241. He claimed both acted against him because of his gender identity. The court found he never produced the evidence to prove it.
The setup will look familiar to any HR team that leans on a third-party leave administrator. The worker joined the CTA in 2016. In June 2020 he applied for intermittent leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act - the federal law that gives eligible workers up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave a year - citing "random back pains." The CTA runs FMLA through a vendor, ReedGroup, which processes applications and tracks how much leave each worker uses. The expectation was straightforward: clear the day with ReedGroup first, then tell your garage. Telling only the garage counted, in the CTA's view, as falsifying leave.
His application stalled after a second medical opinion found he did not qualify, and he never completed the tie-breaking third opinion. By October 2020 he had logged twenty-four FMLA absences with his garage that never reached ReedGroup. A business manager caught the mismatch, the worker could not explain it, and in January 2021 a CTA supervisor fired him for falsification. The termination letter listed all twenty-four dates.
The discrimination claim turned on comparators. Under the McDonnell Douglas framework, he had to identify someone outside his protected group who did the same thing and was treated better. He named one operator who received a "last chance agreement," but the court said he never showed that operator was transgender or had committed the same violation. Working against him, the CTA had fired four other operators for the same FMLA falsification at around the same time, none of them transgender, and the union had not won them last chance agreements either.
The retaliation claim collapsed on timing. His protected activity - a 2017 question about bathroom access and a 2018 push for broader insurance - came years before his 2021 firing. A gap that wide, the court said, is "counter-evidence of any causal connection." A comment from the union's president did not rescue it. After a 2020 garage transfer, in remarks the president recalled as warning him that passengers there could be more aggressive, he told the worker, "all that bitchin you been doing ain't going to cut it down here. You're out south now." The court treated it as a stray remark with no proven tie to the firing.
The claim against the union failed as well. Title VII reaches unions, but the record showed the union pushing for the worker - seeking a last chance agreement, requesting arbitration, and filing a class grievance for affected employees.
The throughline is evidence. Time and again the court noted he asserted facts without pointing to the record, breaking a local rule. Summary judgment, the court wrote, is "the 'put up or shut up' moment in litigation." For employers defending these cases, the same standard cuts in their favor - if the documentation is there.
