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I am working on a review in response to the invitation to make a submission to my home state's whole of government LGBTIQ review - see https://engage.vic.gov.au/LGBTIQstrategy. Below is my first, unpolished draft on one bugbear, which I've written about elsewhere. Before it is submitted, I will polish this considerably, including checking my other writing on this. ☺ I may also publish other extracts - the intro includes a few quotes from the great Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and is coming together quite nicely.
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The suggestion /
expectation that TGD people out themselves by giving pronouns, or state that
they are TGD, requires challenge - and better thought:
- The overwhelming majority of cisgender people don’t
do this, so it is an extra
requirement imposed on TGD
people.
There are SOME exceptions amongst the MINORITY of cisgender people who are BOTH progressive AND on social media, and this information is included in Amnesty International’s urgent action campaigns, but until meetings of engineers and people in the construction industry automatically exchange their pronouns even when the meetings are solely cisgender people, and a failure to do so is treated as seriously as misgendering a TGD person is, this fits into the category that Dr Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) described as “a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself”.
(I trust everyone is aware that there are TGD people in engineering and construction, and absolutely every other job that exists - or, in the few that there aren’t, TGD people have the right to be able to choose to work there if so desired - even in the military or closely related organisations like the police.) - The thinking that this is something a reasonable
person could expect is simply WRONG.
Even in the 1980s I met people who didn’t need to educated or asked to not misgender others - including avoiding the use of gender. The so-called “reasonable person” that I was introduced to in the late 90s was a bigot - or stupid. The entire concept that someone else needed to know the details of someone else’s genitalia, sexual practices (which is what it is really about), or intimate medical history before they were capable of behaving with basic manners is ludicrous - and raises doubts in my mind about the sort of person who claims it is so necessary that it should be universally imposed on all TGD people, even those who pass in binary gender roles. What sort of person is so afraid and personally insecure that they want to impose that level of suffering on other people? What sort of person is so cynical in their understanding of the capacity of humans to be decent that they assume that a reasonable person requires this?
During the debate on the amendment to our Equal Opportunity Act to include the gender identity attribute, one MLA made a comment of saying she didn’t meet with TGV as she did not need to do so in order to do what is right.
It is worth taking a moment to reflect on that.
And that was two decades ago.
There has been a great deal of consciousness raising and education since then, much of it by TGV, and I would suggest that most transphobes either know or sense that they are on the wrong side of history.
There are circumstances where clarification of pronouns is required, in which case accept it, don’t make a song and dance about it, move on - and don’t repeat the error.
Reasonable do not require universal pre-advice of TGD people’s status - and anyone who thinks otherwise is behind the times. If the law thinks so, the law also needs to catch up with reality. - Furthermore, the problem here is not actually the reasonable person, it is the unreasonable person - the people about whom MLK said “It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.” These are the people who, owing to their personal flaws and shortcomings, make the adoption of comprehensive policies that go beyond consciousness raising necessary - and these people are particularly prevalent, in my experience, in engineering.
- Personal flaws and shortcomings MUST
be taken into consideration, as these are one of the key reasons why laws and
workplace policies are necessary, and why resistance to those continues to
occur and recur. CN Lester has some excellent commentary on the need for
cisgender people to deal with their gender insecurities.
Ultimately, education and social attitudes will lead to change by preventing the active social conditioning by bigoted parents, organisations, teachers, pers, etc inculcating young people with their hate, fear and ignorance. However, just as better education has helped deal to some extent with problems such as racism, it is vital that such efforts not be cut off too early, as has been shown by the burial of Australia’s white supremacist problem, which has now re-emerged. My experience is that the naïve tend to think, on the basis of their limited social “bubbles”, that “no-one” has problem attitudes when in fact they are still prevalent.
I nominate engineering and construction as examples.
I will come back to this point. - A lot of thinking around TGD people necessarily
revolves around the time of transition in the workplace. This is one of the
critical times when TGD people’s welfare is most at risk - losing a job has
major adverse impacts on any person, but at a time of increased health needs it
can be fatal, particularly in any circumstance where legal protection is absent
or inadequate. Here, we now have basic protection, but it is important not to
take that for granted, nor to forget that the situation is different in other
states and other nations, and that availing oneself of that protection may
require resources that members of minority groups don’t have.
This thinking, however, falls to pieces when one considers other situations in the normal, modern work life - situations such as changing a job, or a company being bought by another, and situations where there may be a high throughput of people, such as multi-national corporations which have people working in multiple locations.
Having to out oneself is a distraction of the type that trying to deidentify applications and removing courtesy titles tries to address: it makes getting a new position more difficult - particularly for those TGD people who pass in a conventional or stereotypical gender.
It is a major stress for TGD people, and, based on my lived experience, a major disincentive to change jobs, which thus leaves TGD people stuck in employment backwaters.
In the case where a company has employees moving between nations, there is enough stress having to deal with people who come from cultures that are several decades behind ours in terms of attitudes towards TGD people without having to deal with the further undermining of the TGD person’s situation of having to give their pronouns possibly multiple times per day in situations where most people already know what they are.
Having to do so constitutes psychological abuse - from my lived experience, it leads to suicidal ideation: I’m only still here because of counselling, but saying that people on the receiving end of such abuse should get counselling is victim blaming - it is akin to saying rape victims should toughen up. - For my final point on this issues, I wish to
return to the topic of personal flaws and shortcomings. Julie Peters has often
commented that what drives a lot of transphobia is based around of of “accidentally”
becoming homosexual - which shows an inherent failure to accept science,
evidence, and reality. Nevertheless, that sort of flawed understanding is
behind much of the overt resistance to being genuinely inclusive of TGD people(particularly
on social media), passive-aggressive behaviour / micro-aggressions such as “accidentally”
misgendering TGD people.
It is important to understand because it means that one-off education or consciousness raising will not result in a permanent cure of such problems: there will be constant push back on, and constant attempts to undermine or get around, policies. Adopting and announcing policies will NOT suffice - particularly when the turnover of modern workforces is considered, which may include people coming from cultures which are still transphobic. Policies aimed at preventing abuse of TGD people must be continuously and actively implemented. Statistics in one year showing widespread acceptance may not apply the next.
Until the world is a better place, one free of white supremacy and racism generally, misogyny, misandry and sexism generally, ableism, and all other forms of bigotry, policies aiming at ensuring workplaces are decent must continue to be actively implemented.
