Evidently, Winn-Dixie is not the place for cross-dressers, according to an Avondale man who says the grocer fired him for wearing women's clothes away from work.

Peter Oiler, swinging hands with Shirley, his wife of 24 years, stood with American Civil Liberties Union representatives outside the Winn-Dixie Marketplace on Tchoupitoulas Street Monday to announce a federal civil rights lawsuit filed on his behalf.

The ACLU contends that Oiler, 45, was fired in January after 20 years with Winn -Dixie because he "did not conform to the company's stereotyped notions of how a man ought to look and act."

Oiler said he is a cross-dresser who considers himself to be transgendered.

He said he wears women's clothes as "a way to handle stress and discomforts that come up in life," but wore only men's attire on the job and refrained from wearing his pierced earrings at work.

Oiler was hired as a loader and most recently worked as a truck driver delivering groceries to the company's stores.

Oiler said he asked a supervisor to identify the person who told company officials that he cross-dressed, and "they said it was none of my business."

The lawsuit claims that Oiler's supervisors told him his cross-dressing could "harm the company image, and therefore the company was asking him to resign. He was told to look for another job."

Winn-Dixie spokesman Mickey Clerk, with corporate headquarters in Jacksonville, Fla., said the company does not comment on pending litigation. The company has one month to file a response to the lawsuit.

Oiler will be represented by local civil rights attorney Ron Wilson.

The suit, which seeks damages for lost wages and emotional distress, claims Oiler is being unlawfully discriminated against on the basis of sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The suit also claims Oiler was subjected "to terms and conditions of work to which similarly situated female employees were not exposed." "Most people defy gender stereotypes, sometimes subtly, like women who ride motorcycles. . .," said Joe Cook, executive director of ACLU of Louisiana.

The urge to cross-dress manifested itself before he was 13, Oiler said. But he said because he was one of eight children, "it had to be suppressed for a long time." Now that he has been able to act on the feeling as an adult, "it's pretty hard to put back," he said.

National ACLU representative Eric Ferrero said Oiler's workplace turned hostile last fall with "rumors and whispering that perhaps Peter was gay."

When company managers asked Oiler why the situation "bothered him" Oiler said it did because "I'm not gay, but I am transgendered," Ferrero said. And "the movement began that 'you're going to have to leave here.' "

Oiler said he wanted to be an honest employee. "I was taught as a child that the truth is more important," Oiler said.

Oiler's experience is "relatively common," Cook said. "What's uncommon is that he is open and honest about who he is and that he's standing up to one of America's largest corporations and demanding to be treated fairly."

Oiler said he received raises and promotions during his two decades at Winn-Dixie and was considered an excellent employee. He said he considers his personal life away from work to be a private issue. But Winn-Dixie felt his cross-dressing was "harmful to their image," he said.

"I think we should judge people for their (job) performance," Cook said. "And Peter passed that test with flying colors."

Oiler did such a good job of hiding his cross-dressing that his wife said she didn't discover it until four years ago.

"He had bought some clothes and I found them in the closet," Shirley Oiler said. "And I said, 'Oh, no, you ain't gonna be wearing none of these.' "

But, she said, "We wound up getting a better understanding and a bonding."

The worst part of her husband's job loss is losing their health insurance and her husband's retirement pension, Shirley Oiler said. She said they had to use most of the check they received from company profit sharing to keep from losing their home.

Shirley Oiler blames part of her husband's firing on age discrimination. "The older employees," she said, "they seemed to get some kind of way to get them to leave."

Peter Oiler said he recently was hired by a small trucking company for less money than he was making at Winn-Dixie. He has not been on the new job long enough to get benefits, he said.

Cook said Oiler's case should scare people around town, especially during Mardi Gras and Halloween.

"New Orleans is the kind of place where people do a lot of cross-dressing," Cook said. "Go out next Tuesday and see." ##

Peter Oiler drives trucks for a living, 50-foot semis that growl down the Gulf Coast highways near New Orleans. He's 45 and married, as straight as a line pulled taut.

And yet he may be the gay community's next legal hero.

Two years ago, Oiler griped to his boss about a workplace rumor that he was, in fact, gay. The rumor faded, and late last year the boss wondered why it had bothered Oiler so much.

Because, Oiler explained, he was not gay. He just liked to wear women's clothes in his spare time.

Two months later, Oiler was out of a job.

Now he's at the center of a legal debate over the meaning of sex discrimination at work.

While clearly barring gender discrimination, federal employment law says nothing about sexual orientation. But some courts are suddenly suggesting the law covers a closely related concept: whether an employee conforms to a sexual stereotype -- whether, for example, a man dresses like a man. And if the courts are correct, federal protections for gays and lesbians in the workplace are ripe for dramatic improvement.

It all started with the U.S. Supreme Court 11 years ago. The justices ruled that a manager at accounting giant Price Waterhouse could sue for sex discrimination because her boss had apparently told her to act "more femininely" if she wanted to make partner.

It was the kind of advice the boss would never have given a man, the court said, so she could argue that the firm had denied her a promotion because of her gender. Hence, sex discrimination.

At that point, few people appreciated how the ruling might help gay and lesbian employees. Instead, gay rights advocates concentrated on state and local legislation barring what federal law did not: employment discrimination based on sexual orientation.

But many of the new laws -- including California's -- failed to address the issue raised by the Supreme Court: whether employers could fire men for being too effeminate and women for being too macho.

It took until this year for the issue to surface again. In February, the U. S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco said in a case involving the rape of a transsexual prisoner that "discrimination because one fails to act in the way expected of a man or woman is forbidden under Title VII" of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at work.

Other courts followed the lead. Last July, a federal appeals court in New York said Title VII may bar "discrimination based on sexual stereotypes" and "gender norms" that many gays ignore. Federal courts in Boston, Chicago and Massachusetts offered similar theories.

And then came Peter Oiler.

Oiler joined Winn Dixie supermarkets in 1979 and trucked groceries from the company's warehouses to its stores. By most accounts, he was a good employee and earned three promotions.

After he revealed his dressing habits, though, his boss told him that "his activity could harm the company image," according to legal papers, and asked him to resign.

Oiler refused, explaining that he liked his job and never wore women's clothes at work. The issue percolated up the corporate ladder until finally, in January, Oiler was fired.

Last month, he filed a federal lawsuit claiming sex discrimination. He argued that female employees at Winn Dixie wore men's clothes off duty without consequence. But the company fired him, says his complaint, "because he failed to conform to the corporation's stereotyped notions of how a man ought to look and act."

Winn Dixie declined to comment on the suit.

And how, exactly, would gays and lesbians benefit if Oiler wins?

Obviously, many wouldn't. Lots of gay men, for example, act and look as macho as any heterosexual. Think Rock Hudson.

But some flout gender stereotypes with their mannerisms or dress, and it is this outward nonconformity that can get them into hot water with a bigoted boss. So even though federal law does not protect workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation, if Oiler wins, it may protect them from abuse based on gender stereotypes, which yields the same legal result.

The question, then, is whether the courts' expansion of the definition of sex discrimination to include gender stereotyping is a sneaky way around federal law -- judicial activism, as it's derisively called.

Probably not. The courts are merely figuring out what the heck the Supreme Court meant in the 1989 case involving Price Waterhouse. And though their choice of sexual partners may be the most basic way in which gays and lesbians violate gender stereotypes, courts just won't upend piles of precedent saying Title VII does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Which leaves us with a federal civil rights law that may protect a married truck driver who wears women's underwear rather than a gay man who doesn't. And that seems as good a reason as any to change an absurdly outdated law.