
On Discrimination
By Jessica Xavier
As a transpolitical activist, I have worked very hard for the past five years to end discrimination against transgendered people - especially employment discrimination. Former ICTLEP Executive Director and founder Phyllis Frye
is absolutely correct when she identified employment discrimination as the
most important issue for us middle class trannies. If you can keep or get
a job, all things become possible - your gender transition, surgery, your
new life. Without it, forget it. Hence our obsession with our inclusion
in ENDA and in state bills that currently would only prohibit
discrimination based on sexual orientation.
I've listened to many - too many - employment discrimination stories
of mytransgendered peers. They've been fired. They've been denied employment.
They've faced hostile work environments, filled with what any reasonable
person might call sexual harassment but isn't, due to three US Appellate
Court decisions that denied transsexuals protection under Title VII. Some
transsexual women I know have even been assaulted on the job. Real
people. Real issues. Real discrimination.
Blessed with tolerant employers, I became an advocate for what is
loftily
called
Equal Justice Under Law, writ large in marble over the front entrance to
the US Supreme Court building in Washington. Others, of course, prefer to
call my dream of equal employment opportunities special rights, and due to
the current political climate, they seem more entitled to their opinion
than I am to a job. Nevertheless, for the past five years, I have
investigated, documented and even written testimony regarding acts of
discrimination involving transgendered people. Each sad story made me
angrier and work even harder, but through it all, I thought I was immune
to it.
I was wrong. At the time I'm writing this, it's been seven full
months
since I've
been laid off from my full-time job as a database administrator, after my
former company lost the contract that paid all of my salary. I keep
telling myself how lucky I am, since I know trannies in far worse
positions than me. I saw my lay-off coming, and prepared for it by saving
for six months. It seems far more common for transsexual people to lose
our jobs with little or no warning.
I've gone off unemployment for a short time to do a bit of consulting
work, but now I've nearly exhausted my unemployment, and I am becoming
increasingly concerned about my financial situation. I've written about
sixty resumes and gone on ten interviews - an enviable resume-to-interview
ratio. But still no job. That tells me that I have a good resume with
good skills and experience, that I can write a coherent cover letter, and
that I am applying for positions appropriate for my skills and experience.
But as soon as I show up for the interview - goodbye.
As much as I hate to self-victimize, I must confess that all this
discrimination, compounded by money worries, is really getting to me.
Failure to hire is nearly impossible to prove and very different from
being fired from your job, but it still hurts. At one time, I thought I
had passing privilege - that I passed as a nontranssexual woman. Many of
my friends told me that I did, and although I told them I doubted it, I
now realize that subconsciously I began to think I did. Even worse, I also
began to take it for granted. Now I feel much differently, and I wish my
charitable friends could go on these interviews with me.
On my last interview, the two women I interviewed with went as stiff
as a
board
as soon as they saw me. They stared directly at their yellow legal pads
as they asked me questions, refusing to make any eye contact with me. On
another interview, I had to out myself, since the doctor who interviewed
me knew several of the doctors I had worked with at the hospital where I
had gender transitioned. I knew at least one of these doctors disapproved
of my transition, and that both would not remember my new name. So I had
to come clean - better from me than from them. The doctor, who was black,
handled it very well, telling me he also knew something about
discrimination. But I never got called for a second interview.
Generally, you can tell by the length of an interview and by the
nature
of the
questions whether its merely perfunctory or you're in serious contention
for a position. But I've experienced more than a few overt reactions which
told me there would be no call back. I remember an interview early in my
gender transition, when I had foolishly left a scientific paper with my
old name on my CV, and one of my three interviewers spotted it. Again I
had to out myself, and as the looks of shock spread around the room, I
naively said that I hoped my transsexuality did not affect their decision.
Of course it did - the company didn't even bother to send me a rejection
notice after the interview. Later, I called them back and was told they
had not one but two openings for the position I had interviewed. These
two positions were later advertised twice by the company, and remained
unfilled for over a year. Yet I was not hired, despite ten years
experience in the field.
Living in Washington, DC I've also interviewed openly as a
transsexual
woman
with several gay and lesbian organizations, or organizations where openly
gay and lesbian people are employed. You would think my chances would be
better, but no - transpeople, especially MTFs, face discrimination here as
well. Transphobia crosses all sexual orientation lines, and even
fair-minded gay and lesbian people seem to have difficulty working beside
the straight world's stereotypes of themselves. In the more political gay
and lesbian organizations, I have gotten the sense that trans people are
simply not to be trusted, due to our advocacy for inclusion in gay and
lesbian civil rights initiatives. In a recent address, NGLTF Executive
Director Kerry Lobel bravely noted that a national gay and lesbian
organization has yet to hire an openly transgendered full-time employee.
Little wonder.
Yet another of the many ironies of my transgendered life has been to
advocate for inclusion in gay and lesbian - sponsored anti-discrimination
bills while searching for a job and encountering discrimination myself.
Well, at least it makes you somewhat more credible. From my advocacy
experience, the highest incidence of employment discrimination seems to
fall on the blue collar trades, and there it often includes harassment and
even violence. It's easy to make the classist assumption that those with
less education are less tolerant of us, but as a professional, I have
encountered another rationale for discrimination against transsexuals. We
in the professions are expected to exercise a certain standard of
professional judgement, to make the correct decisions in complex
situations. Yet thanks to the American Psychiatric Association,
transsexuals still bear the stigma of mental illness - Gender Identity
Disorder. So quite understandably, it becomes impossible for most
employers of professionals to be assured that a transsexual woman like me
possesses that professional judgement. How can they possibly be expected
to trust, let alone hire, someone who's done such a crazy thing - gender
transition - that leads to an even more insane act - sex reassignment
surgery, which includes parting with one's penis? In the white collar
world, discrimination against transsexuals is simply less salient because
it's more polite.
It's also very telling to note the different reactions to
discrimination
across a
transgendered community already divided by class, race, class, full-time
living status, sexual orientation and gender vector (MTF/FTM). As my good
friend Nancy Sharp has pointed out, there is also another dividing line
between those of us who have experienced discrimination first-hand and
those of us who haven't. Those of us who have usually turn to those who
haven't for support, which is simply not forthcoming - something which I
find completely morally reprehensible. Sadly, ours is not a community
that treats its victims of discrimination with any measure of
understanding or respect, let alone compassion.
By far, the most common reaction seems to be blame the victim. Some
crossdressers seem to think that anyone who gender transitions is making a
big mistake. To them, living full-time is a starry-eyed dream, and thus
getting fired or denied employment is your justly-deserved comeuppance.
Some of the so-called "experts" on gender transition in the workplace will
ask if you've proven yourself to be invaluable to your employer. If you
lose your job, they immediately pass judgement and conclude that you
haven't proven yourself essential to the success of your company, or
worse, that you've simply become just a pain in the ass to them. Of
course, this classist "strategy" assumes that we all are professionals
with equal abilities and work for the same white-collar corporations eager
to take advantage of our difficult situations. As with professional
nontranssexual women, the double standard should be duly noted.
Perhaps worst of all is the selfish conceit, quiescent apathy and
pathetic acceptance of the status quo that is usually found in lieu of
real support for the victims of discrimination and advocacy efforts for
change. The not-so-subtle subtext in MTF support groups for
discrimination victims is that "she doesn't pass" and thus shouldn't have
gender transitioned in the first place. And the tranny victim usually
internalizes all of this unspoken nonsense as the gospel truth, buying
into this poisonous conventional wisdom and thus completing her own self-
victimization. This specious nonsense gets passed around ad infinitum, ad
nauseam in our support groups, creating an atmosphere toxic to anyone's
self- confidence, an essential ingredient for getting a job.
And I am not immune to it. Each time I've been read during an
interview, it's chipped away at my usual extraordinary self-confidence. And I know when
it happens - my interviewers will squirm in their seats, fidget with a
pencil, stare at their paperwork - anything to avoid making eye contact
with me, or to shorten the interview to as little as five minutes, just to
get me out the door. And afterwards, I go home and cry, and wonder what
gesture, what word, what piece of clothing gave me away. Was my hair too
wind-blown? Was some piece of makeup out of place? Was my voice too low?
Was I too assertive or too self-confident?
I know I'm not alone. I know that other trannies looking for work
have
asked
some of these questions, too. But I'm more than positive there's one
question that all of us who've experienced discrimination have asked
ourselves, over and over again. Why me? I've asked myself that question a
hundred times, even though I know the answer: discrimination happens, and
that one day, I swear, I will help end it. Whether it's based on race,
religion, sex, sexual orientation or gender variance, discrimination is
wrong. Discrimination hurts people. Sure, you can discuss it in all the
abstract academic, economic, political and sociological terms you want and
make it sound very scholarly, statistical, artificial, far removed from
the human reality of hatred and ignorance that causes it. But when you're
caught in its jaws, you can only take discrimination one way - personally.
And so, every unemployed day, for no reason in particular, I get out
of
bed and
spend my empty hours haunted by the same question. Why me? Being one of
those obsessive types who believes that everything happens to us for a
reason, I tried these reasons on for size and they all seem to fit.
Perhaps I too was becoming too far removed from the actual experience of
those for whom I have advocated. Perhaps I needed a reminder of the very
real, very human pain that so many trans people suffer when discrimination
rips our lives apart. Perhaps I needed yet another exercise in humility.
Perhaps it's just more punishment for self-acceptance. Or perhaps, I just
needed to write this essay.
Author's note: Eleven months after my layoff, after exhausting my
unemployment and losing my health insurance, after sending out 120 cover
letters and resumes, and going on 25 interviews without receiving a single
job offer, I've given up looking for a full-time job. I'm now working
without benefits as a part-time consultant to several gay and lesbian and
AIDS service organizations in Washington, DC.
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