Keeping Honest People Honest

"Locks keep honest people out."

I forget who said that.  That person certainly had the right idea.  Also, I think he or she could have substituted the word "Laws" for "locks" and "honest" for "out".

That's what I find myself thinking every time I hear about a trans person who loses a job or, worse, applies for a job only to be told that it's already filled, yet the employer keeps the job listing posted.  Or, we experience something nearly every educated African-American or white person from a working-class background has encountered:  would-be employers who say we wouldn't "fit in with the culture" of the organizations in which we're applying for jobs.  The academic world loves to use that excuse.

Those sorts of things happen in places where there are gender identity and expression are covered in human rights laws.  In places where no such protection exists, interviewers laugh in the faces of trans people.

I was reminded of what I've just described by Diana, who has experienced her own troubles in getting a job.  She also posted a link to an insightful (at least to the readers of CNN Money) article by Blake Ellis.  It describes what we already know:  that we're far more likely than anyone else to be unemployed, homeless, engaging in sex work or to live in homeless shelters or with relatives (if they haven't disowned us).  But it at least gives some specific stories that illustrate--and, more important, humanize the phenomena described.

All of them are heartbreaking or infuriating, depending on who you are and your temperament. Jennifer Chavez has 40 years of experience in the auto industry, yet she has been blackballed by all of the auto dealerships in the Atlanta area, where she lives, as word about her transition got around.  Her former co-workers stopped talking to her and her former employer told her that a would-be employee turned down a position because of her.  Finally, after 300 applications, she got a commission-based job as a technician with Pep Boys, where she has the potential to make, at best, half of what she made on her old job. She's just barely holding on to her home.

What's really terrible is that her story is far from the worst case, even of the ones described in that article.  And, in addition to employment, medical expenses are a problem because almost no employer-provided health insurance covers the costs of transitioning (therapy, hormones and such), let alone surgery.

Kylar Broadus Testifies Before The Senate

An activist once told me, "It's all about visibility."

In this country, it's hard to beat testifying before the Senate to make one's cause, as well as one's self, visible.

That is what Kylar Broadus did last week.  That made him--a lawyer and professor from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO-- the transgender to do so. 

Appropriately enough, he testified before Senate Health and Labor Committee hearings on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act  (ENDA).

Although he is a lawyer and professor, he is not in an easy financial situation.  In the 1990's, he transitioned while he was working for an insurance company. For that, he was harrassed and fired.  "While my supervisors could tolerate a somewhat masculine-appearing black woman," Broadus recalled, "they were not prepared to deal with my transition to being a black man." As there were no laws on the books to protect transgender people in the workplace, he found that he had no legal recourse.

As you might imagine, a long stretch of unemployment ensued, from which Broadus says he has not fully recovered financially.

What I hope the Senators realize, as a result of hearing Broadus' testimony, is that if someone with his education and work experience can have such a difficult time, things are that much worse for someone who's poor or less educated, and probably even worse for a trans teenager who was kicked out of his or her home after "coming out."   I would love for the Senators to hear testimony from them, as well as more from Broadus and transgender people in situations like his.  

Unemployed and Homeless LGBTs: How Many?

The weather forecast is calling for the coldest night in six years.  

I can recall that cold spell.  It was like that winter:  It was brutal and seemed endless.  As I recall, the spring was just a brief respite--a truce, almost--between the cold and snow that seemed to blitz us every day, for longer than they should have,  and the blasts of  heat that came only a few weeks later.  

Back then, I was co-facilitating a group for young LGBT people.  What struck me then was how many of them had no place to go after that group.  A few went to the shelters; others wouldn't because of the violence that, when it didn't erupt in screams and blows, seemed to murmur in rumbles like fighting just on the other side of the line.  Almost no one chooses to go into a line of fire; no one should be foreced to do so.

Unfortunately, for some of those young people, the only alternative was another battle-zone:  the streets. Some spent the nights on them--under highway overpasses or in doorways, until they were chased out. At least three (that I knew of) went home--with whoever paid them, however little, for their bodies.  And one didn't even get paid:  All she got was to lie in a bed but not to sleep in it.  

Except for the times I've gone into a shelter, I never saw as many homeless people in one room as I did during those group sessions.  And, I certainly never saw so many young people who were so desperate.

I won't try to extrapolate what percentage of transgender youth are homeless or what percentage are unemployed, or whatever.  After all, nobody has an accurate count of how many of us there are.  Lots of us--like some members of that group--drop out of school and run away from home because of the beatings they got at school--or on the streets, or even at home.  They are known as boys or girls when they disappear from view of their peers and elders in their communities; they are not classified as transgender (or, for that matter, gay, lesbian or bisexual) in any of their identifying documentation.  They "fall between the cracks" of society's various systems.  

Plus, almost no one, it seems, agrees on who should be classified as LGBT.  If we count only the self-identified, we will miss many more because, if for no other reason,  so many fall "off the radar"--as some members of that group did--and therefore cannot be reached by researchers.  

From what I've just said, such statistics as the unemployment rates of LGBT people cannot be accurately measured  because young people who leave school and home have probably never worked, and therefore cannot be counted as unemployed.  Still others are, like a few members of that group, sex workers of one kind or another.  That's the only work some of them have ever done; tragically, it's the only work that some of them ever have the opportunity to do anything else.  Of course, anyone doing that kind, or any other illegal, work is, as they say, "off the books."

It's widely known that the US Census misses a lot of people.  Many others don't comply with it, and still others give only the barest minimum of information on the Census questionnaires.  So if one of the largest and best-funded operations of its kind can't even find all taxpaying citizens, how can anyone hope to do an accurate count people who never had the opportunity to participate in the legal economy?

So, no one may ever have an accurate count of us, never mind how many of us are homeless, unemployed or victims of crime, including murder.  I am almost entirely certain, however, that we are overrepresented in those categories.