In her work as director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Transgender Economic Empowerment Project, Drian Juarez supports a range of clients: Gen Xers in their 40s who are moving away from sex work to office jobs; individuals transitioning at work; and young, gender nonconforming individuals who are eager to seek employment in a binary-working world.
Though each person’s story is unique, the underlying narrative that unifies them is the struggle to secure basic necessities, from housing to work. It’s a narrative that Juarez, a transgender woman who once engaged in sex work in order to support herself and cover her surgery costs, knows all too well — and it’s one that she is working hard to rewrite.
“For me I feel that the future is fluid,” Juarez says. “Regardless of what is happening politically, it’s up to us…as mentors and as people to keep [transgender progress] going.”
What’s happening politically makes an already uphill battle for the trans community even steeper, with the latest move from the White House likely to have palpable effects on trans employment prospects. Last month, President Trump implemented a policy banning transgender individuals from the military, which he first announced via Twitter in July. The announcement caused an uproar. With an estimated 15,500 transgender individuals as employees, the U.S. military is considered the largest known single employer of transgender individuals in the country.
“It’s alarming that this option is now off the table,” says Lucy Diavolo, a 26-year-old trans woman in Chicago. “Even though so much of the trans community is politically to the left, it’s alarming to a lot of us to be shut out of this job opportunity.”
But as Diavolo writes, it is easy “to miss the forest for the latest blazing tree that the president has set on fire.” Discrimination, particularly with employment, is not new to the trans community: The unemployment rate of transgender individuals is three times the national rate, and it’s even higher for trans people of color. A 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey Report found that, of 28,000 trans adults surveyed across the country, 30 percent reported being fired, denied a promotion, or experiencing mistreatment in the workplace due to their gender identity, such as being verbally harassed or physically or sexually assaulted at work.
While there is no federal law prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual identity, there are 20 states plus the District of Columbia that such laws in place.
Experts say that removing military service — whether it was someone’s dreams or was a last resort — as a possible career path for the transgender community normalizes discrimination, creating a climate that amplifies the importance of empowerment programs in helping the trans community find work and be self-sufficient in an emotionally, mentally and physically sustainable way.
The Chicago-based Transworks Employment Program, run in conjunction with the Chicago House Employment Program, provides one-on-one career coaching, career development workshops, and mentoring to city’s transgender and gender nonconforming population, securing competitive employment for 96 percent of its clients in 2016.
Diavolo is a graduate of the TransWorks program. An Ohio native, Diavolo relocated to Chicago in September 2015 shortly after finishing university, a move driven by the job market and resources available to the trans community. (Ohio is one of only two states with employment non-discrimination laws covering only sexual orientation.)
Diavolo, who transitioned while she was in Chicago, was interested in pursuing a career in communications. Applying for a jobs was a “constant dance” where she was trying to figure out how much she needed to tell prospective employers, she says.
“[When I was applying for jobs] I wasn’t even sure what name to put on a resume or cover letter, how to make disclosures, or what my rights were,” Diavolo says.
She eventually found her rhythm writing celebrity teen gossip for a website, thanks to guidance and mentorship from TransWorks.
On a microlevel, empowerment programs like TransWorks aid in goal setting, job searching, resume-writing, interview preparations, and job readiness skills like knowing your rights or resolving conflicts at work. On a macro-level, they work to educate the local community and businesses on policies and procedures to work respectfully with others.
Access to such agencies can be hard for those living outside of major cities. Clair Farley, director of the Trans Employment Program, at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, says she receives dozens of calls per day from folks looking to move San Francisco from other parts of the country.
“We need to think about how we can start offering remote services or services over the phone to people who can’t afford to live in a city like San Francisco or maybe have only $200 in their pocket,” Farley says. Anecdotally speaking, Farley says there is a “mass exit” of trans and gender nonconforming individuals from conservative states like Texas or North Carolina to states like California where they have the protection and network they need only to survive but to thrive.
“[Then it becomes] not only how do we get folks jobs, but how do we find folks a place to live?” she adds. “That’s a big thing we are working on locally.”
Like TransWorks in Chicago, San Francisco’s TEEI provides career coaching, trans inclusion training for human resource departments and policy review for employers, legal aid, job readiness workshops, networking through community events like job fairs, help for those transitioning on the job, and other services that are a conduit for economic empowerment and sufficiency for the trans community.
But there is a bigger goal to Farley’s work, and to other agencies and programs like hers.
“Employment is about survival, but it is also about happiness,” Farley. “For some folks, it’s about giving back to the community, and it’s about doing what you’re love and you’re passionate about. My hope is that trans people have access to that just like everybody else.”
