Employers: Support your Trans Employees
The Trump administration is trying to make transphobia an electoral wedge issue with its recent push to define gender as a strict binary determined by the appearance of genitals at birth. The science, contrary to what White House hate speech is claiming, affirms that human bodies and minds experience gender in a wide variety of ways. The Trump administration can’t stop trans people from existing, but the proposed changes would make life a lot harder for so many of us.
Employers have a lot of power to protect their trans employees from these attacks and help us retain our sense of well-being and ability to focus on our jobs.
Here are concrete things you can do if you hold leadership in your workplace:
Provide quality, inclusive health insurance.
Provide employer-sponsored health insurance that includes coverage of gender-affirming medical care like hormones and surgical procedures. Ensure that your HR team understands in detail how your health insurance provider works with transgender plan members so that they can help trans staff navigate the system and get the care they need. Situations like denial of pap smear coverage to someone with a cervix and an M gender marker are still common — be prepared to advocate on behalf of trans staff with your insurance company so that insurance headaches don’t take your staff away from their jobs.
Provide financial support for trans staff who need and want to change their legal name and/or legal gender marker.
Allow staff excused absences for any time that might be required by jurisdictions for court appearances or other administrative hurdles. If someone on staff is a notary public, offer the use of this resource in your policy since some jurisdictions require notarization on these forms.
Make sure your bathrooms are accessible for everyone.
Depending on your cultural context, that could mean making all your bathrooms gender-neutral, or it could mean having both gendered and gender-neutral bathrooms. Either way you’ll need signage that affirms that everyone is welcome to choose what bathrooms they want to use and everyone is expected to let others use the bathrooms in peace.
Create a culture where people say what their pronouns are and respect each other’s self-determined pronouns.
Put your pronouns in your email signature and other places, like your Slack profile, where colleagues will see it, and encourage others to do the same. Some people might want to put their pronouns on their business cards and others might not want to; allow it when requested.
Review your data management practices: Only ask your employees about gender when you really need to, and design the question to fit the need.
First, ask yourself: why is gender relevant here? Often we’ve been taught that gender is relevant in a situation where it really isn’t. Example: uniforms. Why ask people about their gender when you could just ask them if they want the skirt, dress, and/or pants options? If you don’t really need to ask about gender, don’t.
When gender is relevant, ask yourself: are we talking about the employee’s actual gender, or their legal gender marker? Actual gender — that’s how someone identifies — is relevant in situations like your internal systems to track equity as well as your annual reporting to the EEOC. Legal gender marker is what it says on someone’s driver’s license, birth certificate, passport, and other identity documents, and it may or may not accurately reflect their gender but it may be required for some administrative tasks.
These clarifying questions will surface updates you may need to make to your database settings, like updating the gender field from an either/or to a write-in (recommended) or check-multiple field. You may need to add a legal gender marker field to keep track of that information, since someone’s gender doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about what their legal gender marker is. Only record legal gender markers when absolutely necessary and keep them confidential.
Sometimes people grow their self-understanding while working for you and need to transition at work; plan in advance to make it easy both for transitioning employees and for administrative staff. In places where you ask your employees to self-report their gender, make it as easy for them to update this information as it is for them to update their home address. Put procedures in place so that staff who are undergoing a name change can get their email address and other external-facing listings of their name updated efficiently and without ado.
Take very seriously the need for confidentiality when an employee’s legal name and/or gender marker might out them as trans.
Some people want to be open and some people very much do not want to be, but either way, keep employees’ legal names and gender markers protected and train the staff who have access to this information so they understand what’s at stake with this information. Keep this in mind with your procedures for booking flights for employees and other situations where external parties might require a legal gender marker.
Most important of all is to foster an overall culture of acceptance that gender is a matter of identity.
Be breezy about it! People experience gender in a wide variety of ways, and that’s no big deal.
Humblebrag: Participants love my Preventing Gender Fender Benders curriculum, and it’s available via e-learning or you can hire me for live and interactive sessions in-person and via webinar.
This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means. Transgender people in your workplace might have needs or recommendations specific to your organization — listen to their perspectives and do your best to act on them! You can also hire me for expert advice on applying these concepts to your workplace, in increments as short as 30 minutes. Email me at info@practicemakesprogress.org to set up time to talk.
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