Marginalized workers find a voice
The struggle of transgendered employees is emerging as a human rights issue
VIRGINIA GALT Workplace Reporter Tuesday, August 1, 2000
Workplace harassment of transgendered employees has burst out of the closet as a human rights issue, with ground-breaking new policy commanding employers to take notice.
Transgendered employees, including cross-dressers and those in physical transition from one gender to the other, make up a small "but severely marginalized" segment of the work force, says Pearl Eliadis, director of policy and education for the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
The provincial commission recently issued a statement on discrimination and harassment on the basis of gender identity, making clear that complaints will be taken seriously. The Canadian Human Rights Commission is also considering a recommendation from its national advisory panel that gender identity be added to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination. The issue has not crossed the radar of most employers -- or, indeed, the mainstream public -- human rights officials concede. However, ignorance does not justify harassment, and cross-dressing at work is not a ground for dismissal, the commission says in its policy document, which takes anti-discrimination guidelines to a new frontier.
"Political correctness seems to stop at the doorstep of the transgendered," says one Toronto woman who reports that she has been shunned and denied employment because of her male-to-female transition. "People who wouldn't dream of discriminating against people of colour, people with disabilities or obese people think it is perfectly okay to discriminate against the transgendered," she says. "We're such a visible target." Cynthia Petersen, who represents a number of transgendered clients in her practice with Sack Goldblatt and Mitchell in Toronto, says that it is "very common, when people start to transition, that they get fired or harassed." The transgendered community is just now starting to fight back, she says. Ms. Petersen says she could not discuss details of workplace harassment cases she has been involved in. But, she adds, the strong policy adopted by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, in response to complaints, is a helpful directive "in the sense that the law is evolving in this area."
In a landmark U.S. court decision two weeks ago, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville, Ark., was ordered to pay $2-million (U.S.) to former cashier Ricky Bourdouvales, who said she was harassed and fired after a boss learned she was undergoing a male-to-female sex change. Although she had received hormone treatments for several years, had breast implants and dressed as a woman, Wal-Mart insisted that the cashier use the men's washroom after she confided to a supervisor that she was in transition. She was mocked and called "he-she and it" in front of customers, according to news reports of the case.
Wal-Mart is appealing the award by a judge in New Brunswick, N.J., claiming the cashier was fired for just cause because of cash-register discrepancies. Ms. Petersen says it is not unusual for employers to find a pretext for firing transgendered employees. She says that her clients cannot qualify for sex-reassignment surgery in Ontario until they have lived, worked and been identified as the opposite gender for at least two years. But the process of coming out often "creates havoc" with people's work lives she says. Surmountable problems, such as access to a washroom, are posed as major impediments. The Ontario policy was written after the commission received a number of reports about "the severe marginalization and stigma experienced by transgendered people," the human rights body said in June, when it published its position. To assist those for whom transgendered issues are unfamiliar territory, the commission advises that the term transgendered refers to people "who are not comfortable with or who reject, in whole or in part, their birth-assigned gender identities. "It includes transsexuals, cross-dressers and intersexed individuals [those born with full or partial sex organs of both genders]," the commission says.
"The personal characteristics that are associated with gender identity include self-image, physical and biological appearance, behaviour and conduct as they relate to gender. Gender identity is fundamentally different from a person's sexual orientation." Transgendered people are extremely reluctant to go public with their problems because of the way they are regarded by society. However, the nature of complaints received by the commission made it clear that it was necessary to issue a powerful statement that transgendered people have "the right to equal treatment without discrimination," chief commissioner Keith Norton says. "Misunderstanding of transgendered persons, combined with hostility toward their very existence, are fundamental human rights issues," he says. "As the organization charged with the administration and enforcement of the [Ontario Human Rights] Code, the commission has the responsibility to forward the policy that the dignity and worth of every person be recognized and that opportunities be provided without discrimination because of gender identity."
Saturday, Sep 25, 1999.
The third way
Boys won't always be boys, and girls won't always be girls. But what if they don't know what they want to be? The answer, as many of them are discovering, lies somewhere in between.
Stephanie Nolen Saturday, September 25, 1999
It's not that Matt Lundie wants to be a man, particularly. He just doesn't want to be a woman.
"Just enough so people don't pick me out as a being a freak" -- that's his goal for the next year.
He has done two years of engineering studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, and he is taking the next year off to start another project. Next week, he moves to Winnipeg. In six months, he will begin to take male hormones and, a few months after that, he will have a mastectomy: both of his 38C breasts will be removed and his chest reshaped in a male contour. That will be it for the scalpel, though: "I don't have any need to modify my genitals."
He's having just enough surgery to get him what he wants: not a facsimile of a male body, just a less female one.
Matt was born Fiona, in a small southwestern Ontario town. For 21 years, he lived confused. "Even as a child I knew the expectations placed on me weren't realistic," he says, calm and resolute. "Until puberty, I thought I was a boy. The social messages of my whole childhood, of being told the boy's washroom was down the hall, was that I didn't fit, not in either mould."
Then he arrived at university and began to encounter variations on gender identity in the gay community. Last year, he tried something new: "I didn't gender identify."
He was still Fiona, but offered no other clues. That felt better, better than being a woman, anyway, but it wasn't great. When people couldn't figure him out, they reacted with confusion, awkwardness and often hostility. He got sick of dealing with that every day. So now, at 23, he's starting a new life as Matt.
"I don't believe gender is concrete, and people shouldn't be limited by their biological sex. But I can't really live in between."
Yet if he feels neither concretely male nor female, then why Matt over Fiona? "I like male clothes," he says with a small chuckle, then turns serious. "And the box you put men into has a bit more room."
He tried life in the other box. "Around Grade 11, I made an honest effort to be a traditionally gendered girl. I grew my hair; if you saw my prom picture, you'd think I was my sister or something." It didn't work. "I knew I didn't fit the mould of a woman, but I didn't know I had options. Now I know that neither of those two options fit who I am, so I'm going to stake out a third."
Sex is biological reality, but gender -- the behaviour and characteristics associated with each sex -- we construct. And it is gender, perhaps more than any other human characteristic, that shapes the way in which people interact.
Today, transgendered people such as Matt are poised to follow the path travelled by gays and lesbians 25 years ago, when only a small number were "out" and stereotyped into a few accepted roles. Similarly, mainstream society has grown accustomed to one face of the transgendered: the archetypal transsexual, who transitions in midlife from very masculine man to very feminine (if rather broad-shouldered) woman, all high heels and nail polish.
But a new generation of the transgendered is seeking to carve out a space in the middle. They say they are both male and female, or neither; they say the polar, two-choice options for gender don't fit. And they seek to live somewhere on the continuum in between.
"There is increasing openness to a spectrum of gender expressions," says Diane Watson, a psychiatrist who heads the gender-identity clinic at Vancouver Hospital. "It's always been there psychologically, but now there is some challenging of our social structure of two discrete boxes."
There has been a marked increase in the number of such people coming to the clinic in the past few years, she says. "There are some clear-cut, high-intensity transsexuals, but there are more and more of those who feel female and masculine, and want to find some niche. There are a fair number in our clinic who are looking for a safe place in the middle, who are not interested in surgery."
These patients may not be seeking gender-reassignment surgery (the "sex change" operation). Some biological women have their breasts removed; many males and females pursue hormonal treatment to alter their secondary sexual characteristics (such as facial hair and musculature). Some simply crossdress; the clinic offers individual and group therapy "for people who don't know where they fit or don't know what to do," says Dr. Watson. Today, a quarter of her patients have total reassignment; most find they need to make some physical change. "Only a very small minority can say, 'To hell with what everyone says, I'm just going to be who I am.' "
One in 30,000 people is fully transsexual - believe they were born with the wrong biological body and want to live fully as the opposite sex - Dr. Watson says. One in 5,000 to 10,000 is to some degree transgendered - altered or want to alter their birth-designated gender through appearance or medical intervention. "We're likely underestimating the number of transgendered," she adds.
Transgender is increasingly a political label, brandished by self-proclaimed "gender outlaws" in the academic, arts and queer communities. Transgender is also, however, a medical concept; the World Health Organization classes "gender dysphoria" as a psychiatric disorder.
Its cause is unknown. Research from the Netherlands, where most of the endocrinology work is being done, has tentatively linked it to brain development. A human embryo starts to develop genitalia at 12 weeks; the area of the brain that determines gender identity does not develop until 16 weeks. Fluctuations in levels of androgens (male sex hormones) in the womb in that period may affect the development of the brain; there is also a tentative suggestion that the cause may have a genetic component.
Dr. Watson wonders whether, in the 12 years her clinic has been working with the transgendered, there have not been "transsexuals in the middle who had to choose and who pushed themselves toward reassignment, where in a more understanding culture they might have lived somewhere in between. There is an enormous amount of denial of cross-gender identification; if you let it out, you've got to make the whole leap, go the whole route to surgery."
Peter Dunnigan knows there are things he would have done differently. At 39, he finds himself thinking wistfully of children. His journey from Kathy to Peter, 18 years ago, included a hysterectomy. "Now, I look back and think, wow, wouldn't it have been nice to be a parent," says Mr. Dunnigan, who recently finished training as an addictions counsellor in Toronto. But he says he would not have been accepted as a transsexual male at Toronto's Clarke Institute if he wanted to keep his uterus. "I feel they robbed me," he says softly. "Why can't I use this body to have a child and still be who I am?"
A conviction that he had to be a fiercely male male brought Mr. Dunnigan some unpleasant years after his sex change; he got big tattoos, drank excessively, was finally charged with assault after a nasty fight with his girlfriend. Today, he has a new calm. His small apartment is furnished with wooden treasures he has lovingly refinished; he spoils his tabby cat. "But it was a hard lesson to learn, that I am who I say I am. It almost killed me."
This is what sheer force of will and a little judicious use of makeup can do for you: Dee Sparling was born male, has had no surgery, takes no hormones, modifies neither gait nor voice -- and lives full-time as a woman, with a demanding office job and a full social life.
"I identify primarily as Dee, as a human being," she says in a voice that, in someone else, would be a man's. "But the world demands you go at least part way to one or the other, so I identify as a woman. I don't go to great lengths to disguise my voice, I don't play the other games. This is my response to the options society gives me. I'm comfortable with myself but this [presenting herself as a woman] allows society to deal with me as more than an abstraction."
She reckons that, when people see her, no more than one in three believes she is a biological woman. That's all right. "I make an effort to look nice, I don't want to startle people." So Ms. Sparling, 33, wears makeup and subtle jewellery, and good office clothes -- yes, skirts and heels. After a tortured youth ("I thought I was going to hell") and years spent as an occasional crossdresser, she has been living as a woman for two years. Mostly, it's been fine. "More people are willing to accept you than you ever dreamed."
She has a wisdom, a serenity and a confidence about her to carve out that sort of space. She makes it seem as effortless as it is bizarre; within minutes, one forgets that there is any question of her gender -- not that she seems so much a woman, but the question is not relevant.
With J.D., it is harder to forget. "I'm like a walking lava lamp," is how she puts it. A biological woman from a French-English-aboriginal family in Gatineau, Que., she is a sometime gardener, sometime drag king. Sometimes, she is a lesbian -- except if she is feeling like a man, in which case she is a straight man. "My gender feels fluid to me. I respond to the energy people put out in either a 'male' or 'female' way -- but I wish there were other words."
At 35, J.D. is six feet tall, with long black hair she wears in a braid or pony tail. She favours jeans and big shirts; she calls dresses and makeup "drag." She is, indeed, hard to peg, yet there is nothing that makes her obviously different. "I get 'Sir' at least once a day. Then people see my eyes -- I have these really girly eyes -- and they're like, 'Oh, sorry.' "
She does have girly eyes, copper-coloured with huge thick lashes. Everything else about her, though, changes from moment to moment: a woman's coy smile, a man's confident stroll. "It's not easy being a freak," she says with that smile. "But I'm learning to be amused that people can't get my label. It's an either/or, black/white world, and if you're not one, you're the other. I see people get angry, see the expression on their face as they get downright hostile. It's bewildering, because I think of myself as a gentle, kind human being. People really are hung up on these boxes and I just can't fit into them."
She intends to do nothing to make that process any easier. "I feel I'm already in the middle, in my brain chemistry. Surgery is just buying into the social construction of gender."
That's a radical idea, and one not enormously popular with transsexuals.
"That's really an academic thing," says Mirha-Soleil Ross, with a dismissive hand gesture. "I really resent the idea that people who are choosing to live across or between genders are more revolutionary than the old transsexuals. Everybody is transgendered now. My dad, if he crossdresses twice a year, he can get his membership card. Transgender is a political agenda pushed by people who are privileged."
Ms. Ross is a poster girl for the old-school transgendered: a ferociously sexy woman with long, dark curly hair, a raspy Bette Davis voice and a winsome Québécois accent. She favours cargo pants, combat boots and little tanktops that show off a curvy upper body.
She was born a boy in a small, working-class town outside Montreal. She "never passed" as a boy; her voice, mannerisms and behaviour were all wrong. At 16, she read a book about the treatment of transsexuals, "got freaked" and decided she'd better do her damnedest to pass as a gay "boy" (an effeminate, youthful style cultivated by some gay men). "I knew I would never pass as a straight man for five minutes."
She managed to pass as a gay man for four years. They weren't happy ones; other gay men weren't interested in her. "They would realize there was something non-male there, my body was too androgynous. And I thought, what's the point if nobody wants to sleep with me?"
In 1990, at 20, she began to live as a woman. "I know what it's like to live in between, so I decided to use medical technology to be a little more integrated into the category 'female.' " She let her hair grow, had electrolysis, took female hormones. She paid for this with prostitution, because she knew that no gender-identity clinic would approve her for a funded transition. "They want you to be functional, and I wanted to become a feminist woman with a shaved head, in a leather jacket and boots. They don't consider that functional. Plus, I was not sure I wanted genital surgery" -- and clinics traditionally take that as a crucial indicator that someone is truly transgendered.
This year, however, Ms. Ross has decided she does eventually want the surgery, when she can raise the necessary cash (at least $8,000). "I've gone as far as I can go as a woman with a penis. I grew out of it, that's all. I find a penis very limiting."
Ms. Ross "passes" as a non-transsexual; no one reads her as a man, although legally that's what she is (a transsexual must have genital surgery to officially change sex). Nonetheless, she says, she has travelled out of the country half a dozen times and no one has lifted an eyebrow at her passport. Today, she curates a transsexual/transgender film and art festival called "Counting Past 2" in Toronto and organizes a weekly drop-in meal for low-income and street-active transsexuals.
And she has a beau. "My boyfriend is gynandromorphophile," Ms. Ross says, flashing a wicked grin as she tosses out the big, clunky word. (That's the academic term for a straight man sexually attracted to a feminized man.) "That can sound pretty chic; it's great at a cocktail party."
In truth, Mark Karbusicky is a shy, self-effacing 28-year-old cook in a café who is clearly madly in love with his loud, bolshy girlfriend. Before her, he'd never dated a transsexual, never given the issue much thought; he met Ms. Ross 2½ years ago in the bookstore where he was working. They bonded over a mutual interest in veganism and animal rights and, before long, they were dating. She says she slipped the issue of her gender identity into conversation, running through a list of things she had to do that day ("oh, and go to a transsexual meeting -- by the way, I'm a transsexual") and it never fazed him.
"I enjoy her as much as I do any woman," says Mr. Karbusicky. People always want to know about their sex life; he's resigned to the curiosity. "Sex wasn't a problem. People always think I'm gay and I find that amusing because I'm really not. For me, she's clearly a woman and, just because she has a penis, I don't feel that makes her a man. It was just a matter of broadening my mind."
Other cultures have a place for the transgendered. Many aboriginal North American groups recognize "two-spirited" people and award them esteemed positions as healers and visionaries. In India, male-to-female transsexuals are institutionalized in a sort of religious cult called hijra,who sing and dance at festivals. In Burma, Oman and Tahiti, a special social status is given to those who identify across gender lines.
Not here -- although gender roles in Western culture have been blurring for years. With Marilyn Manson and the latest wave of fashionable androgyny has come much more public discussion of gender identity. "It's largely something being done by young people, because they're doing it, not because they're writing about it," says Michael Gilbert, a professor of philosophy who teaches gender identity at York University in Toronto, and a crossdresser. He calls it "gendermucking" -- deliberately toying with people's perceptions of one's gender: men in nail polish and skirts, women in very butch clothes, neither of them trying to pass. "Lots of it goes on at raves, on [Toronto's] Queen Street on the avant-garde edges. We have a bipolar system, but they are saying, 'No, I'm not comfortable on either pole and would prefer not to be there.' "
Not that it's easy: the rate of attempted suicide among transgender youth is estimated at 50 per cent; every one of 12 transgender and transsexual people interviewed for this story, save one, has attempted suicide at least once.
"It's very, very hard to live in our society in a non-specific loophole," says Dr. Watson. "People become very anxious with a person they can't peg."
Anxious, and in Matt Lundie's experience, aggressive. "We're socialized to deal with people by gender," he says. "We are always taught that there are men and women; this is how you interact with men, this is how you interact with women. When someone does something out of the expected, you don't know how to deal with it." Can it be that bad? It's bad enough to make him afraid to walk alone at night. "I need the chest reduction for my personal safety."
A quest such as Mr. Lundie's, to live in the middle, presents a new dilemma for clinics such as Dr. Watson's. "The clinic is starting to shift in philosophy," she says. "We were hesitant about giving hormones if people were not sure they wanted surgery, because you were promoting someone to the netherlands in between. Now there is less paranoia about it. If [horomonally induced] feminization is helpful to your peace of mind, then that in itself is a positive result. We're becoming a little less concerned about someone surviving in the middle.
"But ethically, it's still a big issue: To what extent are we the gatekeepers, versus allowing individuals to choose with informed consent, to be the individual they feel they are?"
GENDER 101: A LAYMAN'S GUIDE
Sex: Physical sex of the body, either at birth or after reassignment. Gender: Behavioural, cultural or psychological traits typically associated with one sex. Gender identity: The sense of belonging to a particular sex, biologically, psychologically and socially. Transgender: Umbrella term used for anyone who alters or wishes to alter, through appearance or medical intervention, her or his gender of birth. Transsexual: Person who believes they were born into the wrong biological body; usually someone who has undergone some or all of the steps (hormone treatment, surgery) to change his or her gender. Intersex: Having ambiguous sexual organs and reproductive system, caused by a variety of genetic and hormonal irregularities. Also known as hermaphroditism; in extreme or mild forms, occurs in an estimated one in 2,000 births. One in 500 people has a genetic karotype other than XX or XY. Crossdresser: One who wears the attire associated with the other sex. Formerly known known as "transvestite." Some people crossdress for sexual stimulation; others for recreation or exploration. Drag Queens and Kings: Those who dress as the other gender, for certain occasions, often when performing. Androgyne: Also called Third Sex or Epicene. Those who feel they are neither male nor female, or are both.
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