Trans Workers Research Articles

Union Membership, Retention, and Perceived Safety for PK-12 Trans School Workers of Color

ABSTRACT In this study, we use data from a sample of 296 trans PK-12 school workers in the United States and Canada to consider the impact of union membership on an educator population who may be disproportionately harmed by systemic inequalities. Using intersectionality and trans studies as frameworks with a QuantCrit analytical lens, we examined union membership for trans workers of Color across race/ethnicity, country, gender, and years of experience. We measured retention and emotional and physical safety and found that union membership predicts retention, emotional safety, and physical safety for trans school workers of Color. Our results suggest unionization not only benefits all trans workers, but it buffers the problematic retention and safety concerns for the most vulnerable: trans workers of Color.

“Establishing Policy Is Just Step One of Twenty”: How Educational Policy Protections, District Practices, and Leadership Matter to Trans PK–12 School Workers

Background/Context: While trans adults in the U.S. and Canada report higher levels of discrimination and harassment than cisgender adults, but the existing literature lacks comprehensive descriptions of trans school workers’ believes about what would improve working conditions, satisfaction, and safety. Purpose: We interrogate systemic forces shaping PK-12 trans educators’ workplace experiences through two research questions: (1) What educational reforms did trans PK–12 workers believe would improve working conditions? (2) Did greater policy, organizational, and leadership support contribute to improved job satisfaction and safety? Research Design: The critical quantitative study employed cross-sectional, online survey data from 341 trans school workers in Canada and the United States. We used frequencies to descripe respondents’ rankings of reforms and logistic regression analysis to examine whether respondents’ reports of greater policy protections, organizational supports, and affirming leadership constributed to greater workplace safety and satisfaction. Conclusions/Recommendations: Trans workers reporting safer, more satisfactory school workplaces also indicate their workplaces have multiple tools across socio-ecological systems to disrupt cisnormativity. Policy protections topped workers’ rankings of beneficial reforms, but logistic regression analysis revealed policies mitigated only the most egregious physical safety concerns. Greater organizational supports and affirming leaders consistently contribute to satisfaction and safety. Policies, organizational practices, and leadership approaches working in tandem contribute to safe, satisfying workplaces for PK-12 trans school employees.

Crystallized Trans Identity: How Authenticity and Identity Communication Affect Job and Life Satisfaction

This study analyzes survey data from 206 trans workers to test the premises of crystallized self theory by exploring how perceived authenticity and identity communication (i.e., explicit outness, implicit outness, and covering) relate to job and life satisfaction. Perceived authenticity was positively related to explicit outness (overt communication sharing trans identity) and implicit outness (advocacy for trans issues), and negatively to covering (communication distancing from trans identity). Further, in the structural equation model, explicit outness was positively related to job and life satisfaction, covering was negatively related to job satisfaction, and implicit outness had a negative relationship with life satisfaction. Finally, indirect effects between perceived authenticity and life satisfaction via explicit outness and perceived authenticity and job satisfaction via covering reveal the nuance of crystallization. Findings support and reveal tension in the crystallized self, offer practical implications and demonstrate the importance of workplaces better supporting trans individuals.

The cost of crossing gender boundaries: Trans women of color and the racialized workplace gender order

AbstractHow does persistent and cumulative gender regulation produce economic insecurity? Trans people face markedly high levels of workplace discrimination, unemployment, and poverty, and therefore offer unique insight into this question. Prior research theorizes how trans workers get repositioned in a binary, patriarchal gender order, but we lack a conceptual model to explain the labor market experience of people who are systematically sanctioned as gender deviants. By analyzing work history interviews from 23 trans women of color based across the United States, this article argues that crossing gender boundaries is a racialized experience that can come with an economic cost. After transitioning, trans women of color face three forms of economic sanctioning: exclusion, a racially gendered glass ceiling, and constrained employment options within a segmented labor market. Thus, work organizations premised on a hierarchical classification scheme have the option, not only to reposition people on the basis of a classification change, but to deem them unassimilable.

Finding Work in the Age of LGBTQ + Equalities: Labor Market Experiences of Queer and Trans Workers in Deindustrializing Cities

Despite legal protections and growing acceptance in many industrialized countries, LGBTQ + workers continue to face considerable employment disadvantage. We explain this contradiction by detailing labor market processes that limit employment prospects for LGBTQ + workers in Sudbury and Windsor (both small cities with industrial histories). Drawing on 50 semistructured interviews and 662 community survey responses from LGBTQ + workers, we show how LGBTQ + employment opportunities are constrained by a constellation of multiscalar factors. These include the absence of good work opportunities outside of blue-collar work in deindustrializing labor markets, associated persistent cisnormativity and heteronormativity, and inconsistent protection from discrimination and social acceptance at work. As a result, respondents self-selected out of blue-collar workplaces, avoided and left jobs when they experienced or anticipated discrimination, and chose to remain in jobs with supportive employers rather than find a new job in a potentially homophobic or transphobic labor market. This article extends current understandings of labor markets economic geography by connecting production histories to persistent cisnormativity and heteronormitivity, and by showing how the search for emotional safety in cities with inconsistent social acceptance perpetuates economic disadvantage for queer and trans workers.

Does Workplace Discrimination Contribute to Sex Work for Trans and Nonbinary Workers?

Abstract Workplace discrimination contributes to economic precarity for trans individuals, and some evidence suggests that barriers to formal employment may contribute to engagement in sex work. This study examines whether particular types of workplace discrimination – including blocked access to jobs and termination due to trans status – represent a pathway into sex work for trans and nonbinary workers conditional upon social status, gender, and race. Our analysis relies on the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS), where we stratify multiple logistic regression models for trans men, trans women, and nonbinary individuals and introduce an interaction term between workplace discrimination and race. We exploit two time horizons in the data for a lifetime analysis and a past-year analysis. We find strong support that trans women and nonbinary individuals are more likely to engage in sex work when they have experienced workplace discrimination compared to trans men. Predicted probabilities show that workplace discrimination amplifies the likelihood of sex work for most trans workers of color compared to those who are white. By contributing to the literature on “bad jobs” and anti-trans workplace bias from an intersectional approach, this study informs debates on anti-discrimination policies and practices that facilitate economic security for trans workers.

Melancholy, respectability, and credibility in Sean Baker’s Tangerine

ABSTRACT A complex cinematic history of trans characters precedes contemporary representations of trans people — one of normalizing trans identity through class, gender, and race. In the context of contemporary American cinema, Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) demonstrates alternative strategies for representing trans characters and marks a turning point in trans cinema. Tangerine presents a grittier version of transgender experience than was seen in mainstream trans films released during the mid-2010s. The film challenges victimization narratives and the pathologization of the trans body, appealing directly to trans audiences. Moreover, the film’s trans-affirmative casting advocates trans agency, while its depictions of state and individual violence systematically critique conventional trans tropes in earlier trans films. However, the film’s paratexts re-affirm some of the industrial patterns that continue to marginalise trans industry workers. Prominent reviews and interviews with the cast and crew spotlight the redirection of this trans film’s cultural and financial capital away from trans workers and toward industry elites. Ultimately, Tangerine signals a complex turning point in trans media, whereby media industries increasingly value trans performers and consultants for their capacity to legitimize trans media, but trans industry workers continue to remain vulnerable within these industries’ complex power dynamics.

Trans People in the Workplace: Possibilities for Subverting Heteronormativity

This article explores possible subversions of heteronormativity through transgender performativity in the workplace. Drawing on insights from Judith Butler we focus on how employees construct (un)intelligible subject positions that can create ‘moments’ of subversion, which go against the disciplinary, powerful and normative gender binary. We explore this possibility through an analysis of qualitative material generated through encounters with 11 Italian trans workers. Our analysis shows that subversion manifests in diverse ways according to how individual performativities combine with organisational context. Within this diversity we highlight three moments of subversion: subversion through intrigue; subversion through incongruence; and subversion through betrayal. We argue that where transgender identity contrasts strongly with gender norms, subversion is most intense. The subversion of strongly heteronormative working contexts is difficult as moments of subversion are unpredictable, varied and can come at personal cost, but are necessary in order to accommodate different gender identities.

Work-related stressors and mental health among LGBTQ workers: Results from a cross-sectional survey.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals experience high rates of adverse mental health outcomes due to the stressors they experience in families, communities, and society more broadly. Work and workplaces have the potential to influence these outcomes given their ability to amplify minority stress, and their ability to influence social and economic wellbeing in this already marginalized population. This study aims to identify how sociodemographic characteristics and characteristics of work, including degree of precarity, industry and perceived workplace support for LGBTQ people, influence self-reported mental health among LGBTQ people in two Canadian cities. Self-identified LGBTQ workers ≥16 years of age (n = 531) in Sudbury and Windsor, Ontario, Canada were given an online survey between July 6 and December 2, 2018. Multivariate ordinal logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios (OR) to evaluate differences in gender identity, age, income, industry, social precarity, work environment, and substance use among workers who self-reported very poor, poor, or neutral mental health, compared with a referent group that self-reported good or very good mental health on a five-point Likert scale about general mental health. LGBTQ workers with poor or neutral mental health had greater odds of: being cisgender women or trans compared with being cisgender men; being aged <35 years compared with ≥35 years; working in low-wage service sectors compared with blue collar jobs; earning <$20,000/year compared with ≥$20,000/year; working in a non-standard work situation or being unemployed compared with working in full-time permanent employment; feeling often or always unable to schedule time with friends due to work; feeling unsure or negative about their work environment; and using substances to cope with work. Both precarious work and unsupportive work environments contribute to poor mental health among LGBTQ people. These factors are compounded for trans workers who face poorer mental health than cis-LGBQ workers in similar environments.

Short-Circuited Trans Care, t4t, and Trans Scenes

Abstract This essay discusses short-circuited trans care by focusing on failures of t4t as an ethos both interpersonally and within particular trans scenes. The author begins by recounting an experience working at a bar/restaurant that appealed to its identity as a caring trans community space as part of its exploitation of trans workers. This dynamic inspires the main argument, that t4t can become an ethos of scenes and institutions beyond the interpersonal while short-circuiting practices of trans care. Short-circuited trans care is then traced to t4t by drawing from Hil Malatino's work on trans care and t4t, Kai Cheng Thom's work on community dynamics, and trans literature to argue that practices of t4t often include abuse, expulsion, and assumptive care. This short-circuited trans care is linked to trans scenes by discussing the ethos of t4t in the history of Topside Press and trans cultural production. The author does not condemn t4t and to this effect offers a critique of tethering trans cultural production to prestige instead of care. Rather, the goal of this essay is to openly discuss aspects of t4t and trans care that are often obscured through the projection of a highly questionable “we” or universalized “trans community.”

Diversity and Inclusion Experience of Trans Workers: The Missing Link of Trans-Friendly Environment in Organizations

The transgender community, one of the most marginalized communities, faces a range of discriminatory issues in workplaces and educational institutions. The study seeks to investigate the extent of organizational support ensured by the workplaces to create a transgender-friendly environment in Bangladesh. The paper opted for a mixed study and surveyed 47 trans workers using a questionnaire. The responses yielded quantitative data that was analyzed using SPSS. The qualitative data was collected through focus group discussions with seven respondents. The study findings showed that the discrimination and exclusion experience is negative for trans workers of Bangladeshi organizations and educational institutions. While most of the respondents felt primarily excluded in the formal setting, they feel that they have been intentionally left out when they meet their coworkers in informal or social gatherings. The outcomes of the discrimination involved forced termination and absenteeism on the ground of their non-binary gender identity. It was also found that many Bangladeshi organizations still do not want trans workers to represent them. To the best of researchers’ understanding, the past research on the transgender community’s diversity and inclusion experience in organizations is rarely covered from the developing country’s perspective. This paper attempts to fulfill the study gap. Recommendations for good practices to ensure diversity is proposed to companies. Creating a more inclusive workplace is expected to create a robust economic and social impact for developing countries like Bangladesh. Keywords: Bangladesh, Discrimination, Diversity, Inclusion, Trans workers, Trans-friendly environment, Organizations

Furthering transgender inclusion in the workplace: advancing a new model of allyship intentions and perceptions

There remains a significant knowledge gap in HRM regarding the inclusion of transgender (henceforth ‘trans’) workers. We examine and apply the emerging concept of allyship (a specific form of active support and advocacy for minority groups) to trans workers, and in doing so we advance a new model of allyship intentions and perceptions. We test our model across two studies. The first extends theorising on perceived diversity and inclusion climate (PDIC) and social dominance orientation (SDO) to explain how non-trans workers can exhibit trans allyship intentions. When non-trans workers were presented with a scenario of a co-worker disclosing their trans identity, we find that SDO is negatively related with allyship intentions, yet PDIC moderates this relationship, such that the negative impact of SDO is buffered by the positive influence of PDIC. The second study builds upon theorising on psychological safety and authenticity to explain how perceived allyship facilitates the wellbeing of trans workers. We find, in a survey of trans workers, that perceived allyship is positively associated with psychological safety and authenticity at work; and is indirectly related to work engagement via the former and to life satisfaction via the latter. We provide critical insights into how allyship can be advanced to understand and support trans inclusion.

DE QUEM É O CORPO QUE COMPÕE A FORÇA DE TRABALHO? REFLEXÕES SOBRE TRABALHADORAS/ES TRANS NO CONTEXTO DA COVID-19

Este artigo é parte de um esforço para compor uma análise acerca das condições de vida das trabalhadoras e trabalhadores trans no atual contexto da pandemia da Covid-19. Nesse processo é importante destacar a anterior dificuldade da inserção das travestis, das mulheres transexuais e dos homens transexuais no mercado de trabalho brasileiro. E em contextos de crise do capital, exploração intensa do trabalho e aumento do desemprego, a situação se agrava ainda mais. Com a pandemia da Covid-19 ocorreram mudanças significativas na vida das pessoas trans no Brasil, principalmente entre as mais impactadas pela pobreza, pelo racismo e por outras formas de desigualdade social. Palavras-Chave: Trabalho; Transexualidade; Covid-19;

Cis-normativity at work: exploring discrimination against US trans workers

PurposeThis study aims to examine how gender variation in trans identities shape exposure to bias and discrimination. The authors then examine how trans identities intersect with race/ethnicity, education and social class to shape exposure risk to bias, discrimination and harassment in the workplace.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey with 24,391 trans-identified respondents. To account for the nested nature of trans people in state contexts, the authors use two-level logistic multilevel models. The authors are guided by Puwar’s bodies out of place as the theoretical grounding for this study.FindingsThe authors find significant differences in how trans women and men experience discrimination. The authors also find differences in race, education and social class. Finally, the presence of anti-discrimination policies presents mixed results.Originality/valueThe authors’ analysis reveals important differences in trans workers’ exposure to discrimination based on gender identity, social class, race/ethnicity and policy context, and draws upon a rich and large data set.

Beyond Tolerance: Policies, Practices, and Ideologies of Queer-Friendly Workplaces

In the United States, workplace protections for queer and trans workers have expanded; however, previous research has indicated that policy change alone is not sufficient to create supportive workplace cultures. The inequality regimes theoretical framework suggests examining policies, practices, and ideologies to understand inequality in work organizations. Drawing upon 75 qualitative interviews with queer and trans workers in the Portland, OR metro area conducted in 2013, we assessed the policies, practices, and ideologies that shaped how queer and trans workers experienced their workplaces. We found participants’ narratives about queer-friendly workplaces focused on: organizational policies and practices; disclosure, visibility, and recognition of queer and trans identities; and protection from discrimination based on sexuality, gender, and other intersecting marginalized identities. We found that trans workers experienced more challenges than cisgender workers in all these areas. In addition to articulating the impact of cisnormativity and heteronormativity, some participants experienced homonormativity, which emphasizes tolerance through assimilation and minimized the relevance of queer identities at work. We found that not all queer and trans people were equally able or willing to access this assimilation. Ultimately, while laws and workplace policies provide critical protections for queer and trans workers, practices and ideologies that encourage queer disclosure, visibility, and recognition and provide protection from discrimination are also central to achieving acceptance, a central goal for queer-friendly workplaces. This research indicates that legal and organizational changes are needed to support queer-friendly workplaces. These changes include: policies (e.g. legal protections from discrimination, organizational anti-discrimination policies, policies to support transitioning workers), practices (e.g. recognition of queer and trans identities, queer and trans employee groups, gender neutral bathrooms), and ideologies (e.g. rejection of cisnormativity, heteronormativity, and homonormativity).

Why Queer Workers Make Good Organisers

LGBTQ retail workers act as leaders in workplace organising efforts, and union organisers identify their contributions as strengthening campaigns. What explains this propensity of queer and trans workers to labour organising and the resulting successful outcomes? Prior literature has identified that other demographics of oppressed workers similarly show strong support for labour organising, and the campaigns they lead are more likely to be successful, but without detailing what mechanisms may explain this link. Through in-depth interviews with labour organisers and worker-leaders in NYC retail worker rights and unionisation campaigns, this article finds queer workers bring to organising efforts their (1) prior experiences of workplace harassment and marginalisation, (2) prior social movement activity, (3) indigenous social networks, (4) affective skills developed in queer countercultures and (5) their use of creative expression. These factors could similarly explain the workplace organising efficacy of other oppressed social groups.

Misfit medicine and queer geographies: The diverse economy and politics of cannabis in carceral Los Angeles

Fundamentally shaped by queer and trans activism and labor, Los Angeles’ cannabis markets offer an opportunity to understand how “diverse economies,” as defined by Gibson-Graham, are dynamic, contingent political projects that require contending with power and difference. With data from nearly four years of ethnographic observation and 70-plus interviews, I analyze how numerous Black, Latinx, Native, and Asian and Pacific Islander queer women and transgender economic actors in cannabis have developed labor relations, collective institutional forms, and reciprocal exchange to make cannabis dispensaries a space of care and solidarity. Starting with AIDS crisis-era medical marijuana activism, queer economic actors have built affective relations at the scale of the body with patients, owners, and each other in ways that transcend profit imperatives and bridge across difference. More recently, in the face of economic exclusion and the pervasive gendered division of intimate labor, queer and trans workers of color have turned to the body as a scaffolding for collective action across scales. Drawing from resurgent social movement unionism in the region, they have led intersectional campaigns to protect more-than-capitalist elements of the industry and challenge the carceral state’s drug war. Bridging feminist economic and political geography allows insight to the spatially and temporally contingent nature of diverse, queer economies and their embedding in broader relations of racial, carceral, and homonormative capitalism. At the same time, such an approach centering the active politics of diverse economies surfaces the potentialities for multi-scalar movements to develop and sustain alternatives to capitalism.