What I wanted to talk about today is employment. I am currently unemployed, and have known very few trans people offline who weren’t in the same situation. It’s difficult to really get a true sense of the employment situation for trans people, since most studies are small, and few if any actually separate the sexes (which would give us a much clearer picture of who in our community is unemployed). But here’s what we can say for sure: compared to the general population, it’s really bloody awful.
A survey on the subject was recently released by New York trans group Make the Road. There were a few key findings in that report, but the most shocking one was that 49% of their 82 transgender respondents had never been offered a job while living openly as a transgender person. Never. A 2006 report from the Transgender Law Center of 194 trans people found a 35% unemployment rate in San Francisco, at a time when the official rate for the area was at 4.7%. Over 60% made less than $15 000.
What is more damning is the role of the law in this–or rather, its absence. New York has had a trans-inclusive ENDA style law for employment since 2002, and San Francisco since 1994. At yet, the situation in both remains fairly well dire in both locales. Something to keep in mind for when a trans-inclusive ENDA eventually passes, the battle will still be just beginning nationwide.
I’m generally skeptical about statistics, but I don’t think that these are tremendously misleading. Maybe the scope of the problem is only half that for the whole trans population of the United States. Maybe only 25% of trans people have never been employed post-transition, maybe only 17% were unemployed in 2006 before the bubble burst. Maybe we’re only 3 times as more unemployed as the overall rate rather than 7. But those would still be devastating statistics, no?
We clearly need more and better information on this. And moreover, we need these statistics broken down by sex, and gender ID too. My suspicion is that trans women are far more likely to be unemployed than trans men, but that’s only based on anecdotal evidence.
Cis researchers have researched transness exhaustively. Medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, literary theorists, feminists writers and queer theorists have studied us, yet by and large they have concentrated only on cis-centred questions – why do trans people exist? What does it mean, for us, for the binary? How do they feel about their bodies? What do they do with them? Is it subversive or retrogressive? etc etc ad nauseum puke. And yet, the fundamental institutional elements of cissexism have barely even been noticed, let alone queried. For those of you who are academics or writers, who do research on transness or know those who do: think on this. Our needs as a community have been thoroughly ignored by your objectifying research. We don’t even know the entire shape of the problem, and this is equally true for the other endemic problems facing trans people – homelessness, imprisonment, rape, HIV infection and violence. People are slowly starting to do research on these things, but clearly there a great need for more.
For those of you who don’t do research, but may be in the position of interviewing a trans person for a job, think on these statistics, and think about how much more your trans applicant may need that job than the rest of the field, how few opportunities they may have had since starting transition. Cheers.