she lost her job over free chest binders. Georgia just paid her $250,000.

via Metro Weekly, Rough Draft Atlanta and CBS Atlanta.

Gemma Skuraton went to work at Georgia Southern in 2016 as a health promotion coordinator. By 2020 she was director of student wellness and health promotion, based on the Armstrong Campus in Savannah. She had good evaluations in 2023 and 2024. This is a boring resume, which is the point.

Then the campus started subtracting.

what the campus took down

The Pride flag came down from the student counseling center. LGBTQ resource listings were deleted off the student services website. Posters advertising counseling and medical services for people with gender dysphoria were taken down off the walls. None of this was announced. It was just gone, the way things go now, one small removal at a time until a student walks in and finds nothing that says they were expected.

There was a grant application in the works to provide free chest binders to trans students. A binder is a compression garment. Bought properly it fits and it is safe, and the reason a campus health office wants to hand them out for free is that a kid who cannot afford one will improvise with tape or a bandage and crack a rib doing it. This is harm reduction, the same category as free condoms in a bowl by the door.

Shay Little, the vice president for student affairs, had endorsed that application. In May 2025 she rejected it. That was a few weeks after Governor Brian Kemp signed Georgia's transgender athlete restrictions on April 28.

Students noticed all of it and did what students do. They protested, and they called reporters.

she was fired in july

Little accused Skuraton of putting them up to it. In July 2025, Skuraton was fired.

So she sued, naming the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia and Little, and she did not argue it as a gay rights case. She argued the First Amendment and Title IX: that a public university cannot fire an employee for speaking on a matter of public concern, and cannot retaliate against someone for opposing sex-based discrimination. Those are the boring provisions. They are also the load-bearing ones.

georgia paid $250,000

Georgia paid. The settlement is $250,000, split as $144,365.36 to Skuraton and $105,634.36 to her lawyers at HKM Employment Attorneys. The Board of Regents also agreed to reclassify her termination as a voluntary resignation, pull the termination letter from her personnel file where the law allows, and give her a neutral reference. The defendants admitted no wrongdoing, which is the phrase attached to every check anyone has ever written to make something go away.

Her attorney, Artur Davis, said the part worth keeping. "Gemma Skuraton lost a job but she kept her moral compass. This result is a reminder that while political tides change, the Constitution and the federal legal protections for vulnerable students and their advocates are still standing."

Two things are true here and we would rather you hold both. She should not have needed a lawyer. A woman lost her career for defending a bowl of free binders, and no settlement gives back the year she spent unemployed with a termination letter in her file.

And: it cost them a quarter of a million dollars of Georgia's money to find that out. Every administrator in that university system now knows the price of firing the person who says no. That number will be in a room the next time someone suggests it.

The flag is still down. She still won.