I wanted to start this series off with the person who inspired it. The Public Universal Friend, about whom I learned just the other day, was born Jemima Wilkinson on Nov. 29, 1752 in the Colony of Rhode Island. After suffering an epidemic disease, now widely regarded as being typhus, this person was near death with an extremely high fever. After recovering from this disease, this person adopted the moniker of “The Public Universal Friend”. This is a reference to the term for itinerant preachers within the Society of Friends (Quakers). These preachers were referred to as “Public Friends”. The Friend claimed from this point forward that Jemima Wilkinson was dead, and her body was granted a new soul, that of the genderless Public Universal Friend.
The followers of the Public Universal Friend founded the Society of Universal Friends, many of whom were unmarried women. This group acquired land in Western New York, on which they founded the township of Jerusalem.
The Friend and their followers were disowned by the greater Society of Friends at the time, specifically because of the Universal Friend’s rejection of gender. The Friend’s teachings were otherwise very much in line with those of the Society of Friends. Popular newspapers and other literature from the time harshly rebuked this idea that anyone of any gender could gain access to God’s light, eventually stirring up enough controversy to incite protests outside of the Friend’s sermons and speeches. This is the reason I have decided to include the Public Universal Friend in this series. They were persecuted for their gender expression, an experience with which so many people to this day can identify.
In closing, I offer this quote as a way of placing the Public Universal Friend within a historical framework: “Scott Larson…writes that the Friend can be understood as a chapter in trans history ‘before ‘transgender’.'”
Being transgender is pretty difficult. There are a lot of ways this can affect your life, and well being, physically, mentally, and financially. This last category is one that is often neglected, and yet is of the utmost importance. Being prepared for how your identity will affect your future finances can help you weather the storm just that much better. Here are a few issues that I have identified based on research and personal experience.
1. Depending on your family and support system, you could lose much needed financial support after you come out.
I hate to start off on such a crappy note, but it needs to be said. This is still a reality for a lot of transgender and genderqueer folks, especially younger people. If your finances are not your own, or you are otherwise beholden to someone who may object to your identity (i.e. living with your conservative parents), you need to plan how you will support yourself after you come out. Of course, I hope and pray that everyone will have a great support system, and will be fully accepted by their community after they have the courage to come out. But the sad reality is, that is just not going to be the case for some people. If you feel like there is a chance that you will lose much needed support after coming out, you should do your best to plan your future before coming out. Get a job, any job that will have you and works with your schedule. Save as much money as humanly possible. On top of that, you can start DoorDashing if you are old enough, or you could take a longer approach and start a blog or other business that could eventually become a source of income.
If someone is paying for your schooling, you need to consider how coming out will affect this, as well. If there is a risk of losing your support you either need to save enough to support yourself, hold off on coming out until you have an income that can support you (which I hate to recommend, but could make sense for some situations), or just accept that you may have to take a break from school to save some money. You could do like I did, take a break from college until you are 24 and your parents are no longer legally required to be a factor in paying for your education.
2. If you feel it necessary to medically transition, this opens up a whole can of worms. You may need regular medical care for the rest of your life, surgery (or surgeries), and time off from work to recover from each surgery.
If you are in the U.S., you may be familiar with the dismal state in which we find our current healthcare and insurance systems. I am currently insured under my mother’s plan through her work, but I don’t use it. It is very hard to find a doctor in my area that accepts the insurance. Even if I wanted to, I would still have to pay a copay that is way out of my price range. My mother, who makes well over six figures annually, complains about how high the copays are with this plan, that she chose. But she chose the cheapest monthly plan, and only insures me because she feels she has to as I am not yet 26 years old. Suffice it to say, I feel like I don’t have health insurance, because I can’t afford the insurance I have. It is for this reason alone that I have yet to pursue medical transition. I have had to chose between legal transition and medical transition, and I have chosen to save for the legal costs first.
3. You should be planning for the fees associated with legally transitioning.
I plan on doing a whole article on this topic alone, because it is that important. The legal transition process can be arcane and opaque depending on the state in which you currently reside and the state in which you were born. Personally, I currently live in California, which is primarily concerned with getting paid. If you have the money, and fill out the forms correctly, you can legally transition tomorrow. It will take awhile to process the paperwork, but it really is that simple to begin with. If you were born in California you could have your birth certificate updated during this process, but if you were not, like me, things get a little more complicated. Unfortunately, I was born in Virginia. This means that in order to change my name, and gender on my birth certificate I will have to submit a court order from California that demonstrates this change. This just adds one more thing to the laundry list of other documents that need to be changed, some of which can cost money to replace depending on where you live.
4. You may feel outsized pressure to build a secondary income stream, at least part time.
Capitalism has made relying entirely on one job at a time to support all of your financial well being a near impossibility for almost everyone who isn’t uber wealthy. Given this, those people who find themselves anywhere outside the gender binary may feel extra pressure to build some way to bring in money outside of their day job because they may struggle to find or keep a day job at all. Historically, members of the trans community have resorted to legal/illegal/extralegal means of making money i.e. different kinds of sex work, just to survive, and this continues to this day. While you may not find yourself doing sex work, you may still struggle to get and keep a job because up until June of 2020 it was perfectly legal (on the federal level) in the U.S. to fire, demote, refuse to hire, or otherwise discriminate against someone who is transgender. There were some states of the union that extended legal protections to the trans community before 2020, but there were plenty more that didn’t. Local sentiments about the trans community and awareness of this change in labor laws will take even longer to get up to speed with the times. You may feel unsafe in your workplace, even if no material punishment befalls you. You may be subject to insidious forms of harassment, such as deadnaming, misgendering, and being made the butt of inappropriate jokes. This kind of harassment is difficult to stop, especially if you end up in a workplace where management is ill informed on trans specific types of harassment. A secondary income stream could provide a small cushion while you leave this type of workplace and find a new, more understanding one. If you didn’t have a little something on the side, you may be forced to stay in this trauma inducing workplace, which is something I hope no one has to endure.
5. Family planning can get complicated, and thus, expensive.
Any family planning option that is outside of the standard heterosexual manner is automatically expensive because it enters the realm of the medical; anyone who has suffered from infertility can attest to this. If you find yourself wanting children of your own, you have a few options depending on your sex at birth. If you are able to produce viable sperm, you will have to find someone to donate an egg, and someone to birth the baby. If you have a willing, and healthy friend this option can be relatively close to the heterosexual, cisgender experience. But many people find that they have to seek out and purchase a set of eggs from a donor, and then have them incubated and placed via IVF into a surrogate. This is an incredibly expensive process. So much so, that it oftentimes prohibits people who would otherwise be wonderful parents from having children that are related to them by birth.
If you are willing and able to carry a pregnancy to term, things become a bit more complicated, and can depend entirely on your comfort with your own body. I personally will never birth children, for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is I have no desire to be pregnant. My fiancee did for a very long time, and we decided that should we pursue having children she would, ideally, provide the egg and carry them to term. But even if we did, sperm is not cheap, and not at all guaranteed to work. It is perfectly normal for a heterosexual, cisgender couple to find that it takes them close to a year to successfully conceive. This means that you could feasibly spend over $800 per month, for 12 months before pursuing other means such as IVF. A typical round of IVF could cost upwards of $10,000. Even if you have a kind friend that agrees to donate some sperm, you still have to have a contract drawn up to facilitate this transaction, adding legal fees to this process.
6. Your financial priorities change overall.
Finance first piqued my interest during a time in my life when I had no money. When I say no money, I mean no money, and no way of making money on my own. No computer, intermittent access to a working mobile phone, no job prospects, nothing. I found myself in a position of powerlessness, and decided that once I had money I never wanted to be broke again. A lot of people who find themselves on the margins of society find that money is never far out of mind. It is just our reality. It would behoove everyone, but especially those for which society has little or no tolerance, to take an active interest in how to effectively manage and use money. But from what I have seen cis and hetero people who take an interest in money management, finance, and business more broadly tend to approach these tools as a means of creating wealth, whereas people who find themselves marginalized tend to see money as a means of attaining that ever elusive sense of material safety. It is a small but, important distinction.
Things such as food, transportation, and reliable and safe housing are extremely important goals for which genderqueer people can spend their entire lives striving. These experiences of material deprivation scar you, and reshuffle your priorities, usually with safety and stability right at the top. This can prevent someone from taking material risks the way that cis/hetero people can. Risks such as buying a house, seeking education beyond the minimum legally required by one’s profession, and starting a family can seem too expensive for people who have different ideas of what is the worst that could happen, and may not necessarily have family that is able to lend them money, or other material support. A supportive community is the key to stability, and up until very recently, most of this country seemed hell bent on denying access to a supportive community to genderqueer individuals.
Wrapping it all up
Taken together, all of this paints a bleak portrait of the financial possibilities afforded trans people. But this portrait is an incomplete one, for centuries trans, genderqueer, and other marginalized communities have found methods to survive and sometimes thrive. You might be interested in learning more about finance and transgender people’s reality by reading this exceptional article by TransLash Media.
As transgender and genderqueer people become more comfortable expressing themselves in a professional setting, the culture, and habits of any workplace will need to adjust or risk, at best, alienating its employees, and at worst, committing outright harassment. Here are some pertinent statistics on the harassment that genderqueer individuals have experienced in the workplace:
A study, linked below, of aggregated surveys by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy found that 90% of transgender workers have been harassed on the job
The same study found that 47% of workers have experienced an adverse job outcome because they are transgender. This includes:
– 44% who were passed over for a job – 23% who were denied a promotion – And 26% who were fired because they were transgender
Moving Forward
With these harrowing statistics in mind we can turn to figuring out how to better support our trans coworkers. The foundation of feeling secure in the workplace should be a robust and routinely communicated sexual harassment policy and an anonymous reporting system. Most organizations have some sort of sexual harassment policy in place, yet sexual harassment still happens everyday. Which is exactly why the the leadership team is the best place to start with any improvement to company practices.
People respect people in positions of authority. It isn’t enough to just have some outside company come in and show some videos, and discuss some hypothetical situations with your team. As a leader, you are responsible for taking a hard line against harassment, and for articulating that every complaint will be thoroughly investigated so as to discourage false reporting, (which is so rare it hardly needs discouraging). This communication doesn’t need to be a long drawn out meeting, either. In fact, you would be better served keeping things as clear and concise as possible, so as to leave no room for misinterpretation. If it does nothing else, this small effort on the part of those in leadership positions, will communicate to anyone who may become a victim of harassment that they should come forward. Ultimately, anything that promotes a culture of acceptance is worth the effort.
How to Help Transgender Coworkers
Building an accepting workplace culture takes more than an email. Leaders have to demonstrate this acceptance in their day to day actions and conversations.
Keep in mind that repeated misgendering is a form of sexual harassment and should be dealt with as such. Meaning, misgendering and deadnaming should be explicitly included in any sexual harassment policy, and should warrant the same consequences as any other form of verbal sexual harassment would.
If someone has a nickname, any nickname, ask them if they are ok with it, preferably in private.
Take a look at your access requirements, and other forms in your organization. If they require the use of a legal name, this could be extremely distressing to your trans and gender expansive colleagues. On the flip side, the use of alternative names should be a standard policy across your organization. Meaning, if nicknames are allowed to be used for email addresses and other access points, you should definitely allow a trans person to use their correct name for these items.
Be sure to always address people by their chosen names, and proper pronouns. Please do not revert to using only their name.This is obvious to everyone and is still considered harassment as you are essentially refusing to acknowledge them in the same way as anyone else.
Be careful what jokes you repeat. Workplace culture has changed so rapidly that some older employees are not aware of what is appropriate. i.e. Buffalo Bill jokes, Ace Ventura jokes, ladyboy jokes. When they happen, call these jokes out and calmly explain that they are offensive to some people, and have always been. This is not a new thing, the only difference between now and the 1980s is that people are speaking up more.
Avoid tokenism – if you are putting together a diversity panel, or are looking to ask questions about “the trans experience”, “how you can help” or “how you can improve company culture in regards to transgender issues”, your one trans employee is NOT the first place to find this information. This is a form of emotional labor that many marginalized communities are forced into performing. LGBTQ+ people and people of color are not your source for all things relevant to their identity. They are not representative of their entire community. All it takes to shift this idea of the token “insert identity here”, is for white/cis/hetero people around us to do the work of educating themselves up front. Read books and articles written by trans people and people of color. Listen to our podcasts, follow our Instagram pages, support our causes. Get in the trenches with us, so you can be an accomplice, not just an ally.
Lastly, keep in mind the reality that your employees may be facing. This country is not a terribly accepting place. We have not made as much progress as some would have you believe. People face harassment and micro-aggressions everyday. In fact, before the landmark Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, it was completely legal to deny a promotion, refuse to hire, or terminate an employee for being transgender. Bostock v. Clayton County, which was only decided on in June of 2020, finally extended the Title VII protections against discrimination on the basis of sex to gender expansive individuals. Meaning that terminations like the one that Vandy Beth Glenn faced will finally be illegal. Let Vandy, who held a job with the Georgia General Assembly, tell you in her own words what transgender people face when cis people become “uncomfortable” with their transition.
[My boss] told me I would make other people uncomfortable, just by being myself. He told me that my transition was unacceptable. And over and over, he told me it was inappropriate. Then he fired me. I was escorted back to my desk, told to clean it out, then marched out of the building…I was devastated.
Wrapping it up
To sum up, if you have read this far you are better informed than most people out there. Use the suggestions here to shape your company culture going forward, even if you aren’t in a position of leadership you can still have a positive impact. Intervene when someone makes an inappropriate joke, or comment. Use people’s chosen names, and proper pronouns, and insist that others do as well. Stay informed on the issues facing transgender people. Focus on being kind to people instead of just how you come off when speaking to someone. There is no downside to a basic sense of consideration in the workplace.
If you are interested in learning more about the reality of being transgender you can learn more about the financial challenges trans people face, and I highly recommend you watch this video by Milo Stewart on how using they/them pronouns for people who do not use them is, in fact, misgendering. Their videos have greatly improved my understanding of gender as a concept and of nonbinary people, specifically.
When I was teenager, I came across some advice for dealing with other people’s perceptions of you. The general idea was to assess the person that you are concerned about by asking yourself a series of questions such as “Who is this person to me?”, “Are they the kind of person that I would like to be?”, “Do they share my personally held values, beliefs, and standards of behavior?”, “Do they have some kind of material power over me (i.e. a parent, teacher, or boss)?”, etc.
Based on your answers to these questions, you can evaluate the utility of their opinion. This method is often used to get people to disconnect from the comments on social media. By asking the above questions about the random person on Instagram, you can pretty quickly figure out that you probably shouldn’t concern yourself with that person’s perception of you. But what about when a trans person asks themself these questions about the people they actually care about in their life? What happens when they find that they don’t have many people that pass this test, even among their family and friends? Well, my answer is make trans friends (where and when you can)!
I grew up in and around cultures that firmly believe that instruction from your elders, and ancestors is vital to one’s social, moral, and philosophical development. However this focus on instruction is often used as a means of social control and manipulation, rather than in the interest of true personal development. For example, I was constantly instructed to “act like a lady” and close my legs, and cross my hands in my lap, and keep silent when adults were speaking. I see the appeal. An entire list of exhortations, and behavioral instructions wrapped up in a single admonition. Personally, I chafed against this method of enforcing social order. I would purposefully splay my entire body across multiple chairs when left alone, and then immediately snap back into place when confronted by an adult, even in public.
But as I aged, mild rebellion just wouldn’t do anymore, and I sought out a framework for moral and social development that would actually resonate with my sensibilities and outlook on the world. I found one of the biggest men’s interests magazines on the web and took the lessons on morality, virtue, and the development of personal standards of behavior available there and generalized them to “include me”. Little did I know that I resonated so much with this white/cis/het/Western canon focused philosophy of masculinity because it was extolling all of the positive virtues of the oppressive structure under which I spent my childhood, while completely ignoring the reality of this oppression. I genuinely thought that I could take the good without the bad.
This isn’t to say that there is absolutely nothing we can learn from writings like these. I credit that particular magazine with introducing me to the wisdom of the ancient Stoics and their philosophy. I also credit these types of publications for opening my mind to the interrogation of gender as an idea, and a concept within our human nature.
I liked analyzing the relationship that our society has to gender, and how that relates to the individual and their development as a person. But I was always stymied because I didn’t agree with some crucial aspects of the arguments being made.
I didn’t personally believe that gender was a binary. I knew that I definitely didn’t fit into most people’s ideas of gender. Yet, because I identified so strongly with a lot of what else they were saying, I didn’t realize that the people having these intellectual discussions on masculinity would object to the nature of my own relationship to masculinity [being trans]. So I felt lost, and disillusioned with men as a concept. There are so many websites dedicated to the understanding of one particular type of gender [i.e. white-cis] and yet I struggled to find an aspirational model of trans masculinity that spoke to me.
And I still haven’t. Even my own writing is not necessarily designed to serve the same function as the “mainstream men’s interest mag”, which are generally designed to serve as a part of a massive, uber-capitalist media conglomerate. I am simply on a path that, while definitely well trod, has markers that have been hidden, obscured, erased, and buried. I would like to explore this ancient path, and possibly highlight some of these guide posts.
Ultimately, I am left thinking about a line from an episode of the Gender Reveal podcast I recently listened to. There was a moment in Episode 94 with Kirby Conrod that extolled the virtues of making trans and otherwise gender non-conforming friends. At minute marker 36:30, Kirby asserts that the transition from friends that misgender you (or otherwise “other” you) to ones that correctly gender you is a natural process and one that may happen throughout the course of your transition. By surrounding yourself with people who get you, you insulate yourself from some of the social trauma that your initial transition inevitably causes. With the psychological safety that having friends that respect you affords, you can have a more accurate self-perception. This is what I mean when I say make trans friends. I mean make friends that are people you can look up to, and who live their stated values and beliefs. People who are thinking deeply about their own relationship to gender. People with whom you can share ideas without fear for your safety. It might sound basic on its face, but I encourage you to consciously try it sometime. It might be an informative exercise, regardless of outcome!
Hi there! My name is J.D., and the spark for what would become TransJoy Media was lit by a particularly bad day. I got to the place where I literally just Googled the phrase “trans joy” because I needed some. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so I decided to write myself into some trans joy. The results of this endeavor became one of the cornerstones of this site, which you can read here.
Before my public transition I was unaware of the concept of trans joy, so you could say the name TransJoy Media is really more of an aspiration than a dedication. Through my writing I hope to record some conversations I have with myself and others about growing and maturing as an intellectual, as a creative, and as a trans person in a (sometimes overwhelmingly) cis oriented world.
If you’re interested in having your work featured on the site, please fill out the form on this page.
