Hire The Dolls
I've been in corporate America long enough to know how the game is played. Fifteen years of conference rooms, performance reviews, and carefully worded emails have taught me exactly how much you can say before people start getting "uncomfortable." And honestly? It’s exhausting making everyone comfortable while i’m out here just trying to survive.
The numbers don't lie, and they're fucking grim. According to the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, found an 18% unemployment rate among trans respondents, up from 15% in 2015, while general population rates were much lower (e.g., 8% non-trans adults in a 2022 KFF survey). The same survey found that more than one-third (34%) of trans people are experiencing poverty. For trans women of color, every single statistic gets worse. These aren't abstractions or talking points for me. These are people I know. People in my DMs asking if my company is hiring because they've been job searching for eight months. People choosing between rent and hormones. People sleeping on couches because their family kicked them out and they can't afford first and last month's deposit.
You want to “Protect the Dolls”? Get us housed. Get us employed. Get us healthcare that doesn't require us to drive three hours and pay out of pocket because insurance won't cover it. Because here's the thing about equity versus just protection: protection is reactive. Equity is structural. Protection says "don't hurt us." Equity says "give us the same shot at stability everyone else gets."
I kept thinking about Rosie the Riveter. That whole "we can do it" moment when women had to prove they could handle jobs everyone swore they couldn't. And Christ, that's exactly where we are today. History repeats. Except this time we're not just proving we can do the work, we're proving we deserve to exist in the building. That we can use the same bathroom without it becoming a federal case. That our names on our email signatures won't cause some VP to have a meltdown. That we're not a "liability" or a "distraction" or whatever euphemism HR uses this week. We're doing the work while watching companies plaster rainbows everywhere in June and then go dead silent when another state passes legislation to erase us. We're doing it while calculating exactly how out we can be without losing everything we've built.
I've watched this play out in real time. I've seen incredibly talented people passed over because the hiring manager had "concerns." I've watched companies tout their diversity initiatives while somehow never quite getting around to actually hiring more trans people like me. I've sat in meetings where leadership congratulated themselves for having pronouns in Slack profiles while doing absolutely nothing to address the fact that our healthcare plan excludes trans-related care.
This is why I keep coming back to equity. Not equality…equity; which addresses the fundamental barriers that keep us from accessing the same opportunities as everyone else. It means fixing hiring practices that screen us out before we even get an interview. It means healthcare that covers what we actually need. It means housing policies that don't allow discrimination. It means pay equity and advancement opportunities and not having to be three times as qualified to be considered half as worthy.
If you're trans and you're struggling right now, if you've been job searching for months and getting nowhere, if you're exhausted from having to prove yourself over and over, I need you to hear this: you're not the problem. You're not broken. You're not unemployable. The system is designed to keep us out, and that's not on you. You've been doing everything right in a structure built to make you fail.
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