Whose Safety? Whose Inclusion? A Detransitioned Woman’s Experience of Workplace Transgender Policy

Sexism is ok, lesbian hate is ok, but gender identity and pronouns are protected.

Decades ago, when I was working in food service, our trainings focused on “filling in the missing item” and “selling up” (Would you like fries with that? A large fries?) These days food service workers receive political indoctrination. Initially, the intent to create a welcoming and equitable environment was likely sincere, but as the discussion below illustrates, zealous policing for transgender inclusion has the opposite effect for some employees.

In this interview, a young woman describes her experience of identifying as a trans man, finding feminism, having her consciousness raised about transgender ideology, and then being effectively subjected to gender identity re-education through workplace norms and mandated trainings. For obvious reasons, she has to remain anonymous and her workplace, a chain food service establishment, undisclosed.

How do you describe yourself? Is it appropriate to say “detransitioned woman”?

I think “re-identified woman” would be more accurate given the current colloquial usage.  

What was your gender identity? Were you a trans man or something else? About how long did you identify as a trans person?

I identified as a transman. There were periods of time when I would ruminate on masculinity and question how much I was really embodying it; how far along the transmasc scale I fell. But I had the very unambiguous goal of passing as a man and living stealth. I always thought nonbinary or gender fluid identities called into question the veracity of entire concept of transgenderism. I truly wanted to look like a man because I believed I was one on the inside.

I came to this conclusion at thirteen, and by the time I was sixteen, was going by preferred pronouns and my chosen name at school. This continued until the end of my first year of college, when I was twenty. So I understood myself to be a man trapped in a woman or girl’s body for seven years, but presented as, and tried to pass as male, for four of those years.

Can you say a little about your de-identifying process? I’m assuming there was some degree of psychological and/or emotional adjustment. 

I found radical feminism online the month before I graduated high school. It had a huge impact on me and I was ravenous to learn more. I now realize that at that time, around 2015, was a sort of golden age for young radical feminist women to connect and support each other in a way that I don’t see anymore. I ended up in private group chats with a mix of women, some of whom had deeply developed feminist consciousness, and others, like myself, who were just starting to make connections and ask more questions. These private online spaces were entirely good faith; we blundered often but there was no fear of behaving correctly or incorrectly, just women there to share a different perspective than mine.

One of these groups was full of detrans/re-identified women, and women who were trans but questioning their gender, (or the concept of an internal gender identity), and consuming radical feminist content. By the time I was added to that group, I had a feminist understanding of why misogyny would drive a woman to the solution of transition, but thought that I truly had some kind of underlying psychiatric issue for which medical transition was my only path forward. 

I got to the point where I accepted that there were women who had what is referred to as “gender dysphoria,” like me, but could manage it without transition. I got to the point where I accepted that women could truly dress and behave in any way and still be women, something that was anathema to me before being in a vulnerable space with these women. I still thought I was different from these gender nonconforming women, who could survive their self hatred and bodily alienation, with support from other women. A large part of this mental disconnect was rooted in the fact that almost all the women in the group were lesbians or bi and I couldn’t conceive of myself like that.

Then one day, at the age of twenty, I experienced sexual attraction to a woman for the first time in my life. In fact, that was the first time I had ever felt arousal in relation to any specific person, and it was an epiphany for me. I knew I had never felt that way towards a man, that my entire conception of my sexuality up till then had basically been me mirroring what I saw around me. 

When I truly considered being with a woman, I knew it was meant to be woman to woman; that impersonating a man, (no matter how real that felt to me), in that situation would feel wrong. The very notion that I would attempt to be sexual or romantic with a woman “as a man” made my skin crawl, because of my understanding of the institution of heterosexuality at that point. I had a lightbulb moment, “I’m a lesbian!” And finally I could see that those gender nonconforming women, supporting each other in surviving their self-loathing, were just like me. Once that piece of the puzzle fell into place, I didn’t see myself as “other” anymore.

Many things stayed the same. I had already stopped binding because of the damage I had done to my body. I wore the same men’s boxers and men’s clothes. My physical mannerisms didn’t change at all. Many people still read me as male, and I was fine with that, because I knew who I was. 

Only a few things changed. I announced, once, that I was changing my pronouns back to female, but did not correct anyone on it, because I felt it was an unfair expectation and because I didn’t care that much how they saw me. I shaved my head, because I wanted one tangible manifestation of my lesbianism, when I had no lesbian women, culture or space accessible to me at that time. I started using the women’s bathroom. I also started speaking a lot more, because now my voice was not going to be the one thing that broke the illusion that I was male.

For the first few months, whenever someone called me “she/her,” or referred to me as a woman, it made me anxious, simply because for so long, it had been my responsibility to convince the world I was a man. When I was trans, every time someone looked at me and saw a woman, it was a reflection of my failure to pass, and my response was to self monitor and self criticize; to find what was wrong and how I could fix it. 

This reaction took me months to unlearn and even years later, it might pop up from time to time. Going into women’s bathrooms, I felt imposter syndrome. I felt off kilter when women washing their hands would say hello or smile at me, because I was so used to keeping my head down and getting out as quickly as possible in the men’s room. Years after I re-identified, I accidentally walked into a men’s bathroom and I immediately fell back into that behavior, before I even realized that was not the right bathroom. It’s hard to explain how ingrained these self-critical thought patterns become over time.

It’s been seven years now since I’ve re-identified, and I’m finally in a place where I’m just a gender nonconforming lesbian, albeit one with the pretty unusual experience of trying to live as a man for a few years.

Economically, would it be fair to say you are working class? I understand you are working multiple hourly wage jobs to support yourself.

I live paycheck to paycheck. In my opinion, I am working class, as is typical for most of the women I know, who are my age. I have been in the situation before where I had to start a crowd funder to pay my rent because I had taken time off work when I had COVID. If something ever happens with my car, I have to run up my credit card and slowly pay it off. If I want to take a few days off work to go visit friends and family, I need to plan months in advance so that I can still pay all my bills. 

I currently have two jobs; both pay hourly. My food service job typically schedules me between 18-24 hours a week. Usually, I work that job 6-7 days a week to try to get 30-38 hours a week, which is possible if I’m willing to pick up other employee’s shifts at the last minute. My independent contractor job makes better money, but it’s extremely unstable. Some weeks I can work that job 6 hours; other times I end up working 12 hours.

The result of all of this is that some days, between both jobs, I might work 14 hours in one day. As of writing this right now, I have not had a day off from work in 18 days.

Can you describe the culture of the work environment where you were required to do the diversity training?

When I first started working at my food service job, because I’m not feminine, everyone asked me my pronouns. I dodged the question for two weeks while everyone called me “they/them,” and I avoided the pronoun pins that were offered to me over and over by management, which I declined under the pretense that I would lose them anyway. Eventually, management cornered a friend of mine, who helped me get this job and asked her what my pronouns were. She also tried to give a non answer, but basically said that she had been calling me “she/her,” so management spread the word that those were my pronouns. This was not the experience of any of my other gender conforming coworkers.

I work for a company that markets itself to the public and staff as being very inclusive and progressive. We have training modules on DEI [Diversity Equity and Inclusion] often, which are mixed in with frequent training we have to do for new responsibilities and health and safety. The corporate tone is that these are all of equal importance and relevance: Hazardous Materials Handling is just as important as how to ban a customer from our store for “misgendering.” Unsurprisingly, the recourse for women who are experiencing sexual harassment from either fellow staff or customers is basically a footnote in our training. 

I have been told by two different coworkers that “you say you’re a lesbian but you don’t know if you’ll end up with a man or a woman,” because they're queer. Our frequent DEI training has emboldened them in their lesbian-hating and misogyny. They truly believe that they are progressive and their behavior is beyond reproach because it has the DEI stamp of approval. 

The result of all this is that I avoid mentioning that I’m a lesbian at work, despite it being a “safe and inclusive” workplace. When others joke around about queer topics or what they believe is feminism, I bite my tongue. When I’m on break, I always sit with my back to a corner because I’m scared that I might get a text from a lesbian or feminist friend, that would out me as a “TERF.”

Do you have gender conforming co-workers who also avoided pronouns, but were left alone?

No. My coworkers fall into 3 categories. The first and biggest category are people who call themselves queer or bi, but are almost all in heterosexual relationships. They are gender conforming. Some wear pronoun pins and some don’t, but they’re all happy to volunteer their pronouns and help inform you about other staff’s preferred pronouns. 

Then we have a few straight people who behave the same as those in the first category. I have never seen any of them be asked about their pronouns. I’ve actually been in the absurd situation where the queer people are volunteering pronouns, I’m being called a “they/them,” and it doesn’t even occur to anyone that the “non queer” staff are not offering, or being asked, their pronouns. 

Lastly we have a handful of trans people. They are a mixed lot with regard to gender conformity, but none of them pass and all of them have pronoun pins. They are infrequent with offering their pronouns, but all the other staff are on a hair trigger, correcting and informing everyone else how to correctly refer to them. We have been trained to do this as a way of making the workplace “more safe and inclusive.”

A few weeks ago, a new bundle of training modules came out, the usual mix and match of HR and job responsibilities. There was a module that was explicitly about making the workplace safe and inclusive. We were given hypothetical scenarios and had to pick a multiple choice answer of how to handle the issue. Several of these scenarios were about “misgendering” and “deadnaming.” We were instructed how to support our coworkers, should they be “misgendered” or “deadnamed” by other staff.

Basically, if someone was repeatedly “misgendered” we should correct them, ask other staff to correct them, report it to our supervisor, then farther up the chain, should the problem persist. At the end of the training unit, we were told that if someone was not complying with the use of “nonbinary pronouns because it goes against their personal beliefs,” don’t even report it to your direct supervisor. Contact the national HR hotline and they will find a way to intervene and “educate that employee about workplace inclusivity.”

It’s not as if I want to run around at work upsetting my coworkers, but knowing that the entire concept of gender identity is misogynistic, and everyone around me not only buys into it, but enforces unilateral support of it, makes me uncomfortable. 

So tell me about your most recent training session, that we discussed earlier.

We had a training module about handling unruly customers. We incidentally received this training after recurring issues with two creepy men coming to our store as customers on a regular basis. One male customer would take photos of the women who closed at night as they walked to their cars. The other was an older man who would try to chat up the women I worked with, and raise his voice when they tried to finish the transaction, and get back to work. That man would sit in our storefront, and just stare at the younger women I work with, for hours. In both cases we were told to a) just treat them like regular customers, and b) call the non-emergency police number on our cell phone if we felt unsafe.

I don’t recall the specifics [of the training] but generally, it talked about customers who disturbed the space for other customers, or who made us feel unsafe. There was barely anything about how to handle sexual harassment from customers, (which is obviously a semi-regular occurrence), but there were several pages on how to:

• advocate for correct pronoun usage by customers for yourself; 

• advocate for correct pronoun usage by customers for your fellow coworkers;

• at what point to get a supervisor involved if a customer is misgendering staff repeatedly; 

• how to ban a customer from the store for misgendering, if the last three steps have not been successful.

So sexism is ok at [workplace]. Sexual predation is ok at [workplace]. Lesbian hate is ok at [workplace]. But gender identity and pronouns are protected at [workplace].

It doesn’t sound like the trainings were related to, or prompted by, the actual incidents of sexual harassment and predatory behavior. 

It’s ludicrous. The purpose of these ongoing training modules is to make sure that everyone feels comfortable at work, regardless of sexual orientation, race, religion, disability, ethnicity, etc.; but every time something like this comes up, I actually feel anxious because my fear of being noticed as a gender nonconforming woman who doesn’t buy into the misogyny of gender identity is heightened. It’s obvious that I’m a lesbian, but at work I almost never mention it because of the political assumptions people make, given the current social climate. We were told in today's training that we can’t use derogatory language to refer to ourselves, even if we’re part of the group in question, because it could make other people uncomfortable. That seems like a great idea for a workplace; it makes sense to me. But it’s fine for all my coworkers to assume I’m “queer” like them?

About a year ago, someone said they wouldn’t see a Johnny Depp movie because they didn’t want to support a wife beater. The next sentence out of his mouth was, “but I hope JK Rowling dies because she's a TERF.” I was so upset and uncomfortable, especially because this was a man saying this about a woman. If that’s what they think about her, what would they think about me? When it happened, I was shaking with rage, literally biting my tongue to not say anything that would get me in trouble. I barely spoke for almost thirty minutes, just keeping my head down and doing my work.

On my next break, I went into the washroom to text my friends about it. I wrote contemporaneous notes and was considering sending them to HR, but I knew I would end up singled out in the fallout. I knew he would likely face some minor consequences, and I would be forced to mirror the outrage of my coworkers, so I regrettably chose to do nothing.

Do you have any sense of what your co-workers think about these training modules and rules about pronouns? Any other dissenters, afraid to speak up?

There was one woman who worked there but has since left. She didn’t have a complex political or personal issue with it, she just thought it was irrelevant to our jobs. She and I would talk often about how all of our coworkers are leftist college students and would refuse to interact with certain customers based on a political slogan on a hat or the type of car they drive. We were basically on the same page; that all our coworkers think and act the same and are incapable of empathy or critical thinking towards people they view as outsiders. It was so bizarre that our coworkers seemed to recognize this to some extent, because they would ask us to deal with these undesirable customers, citing the fact that we were “older.”

Do you have a union at your job, where you might be able to bring up this issue?

No.

Any other action you could take? How are you handling things?

People have told me to just find another job but I have health insurance where I work, so that’s not really an option. People have also told me to get a lawyer involved. Even if I had the money, where am I going to work after that’s all settled? People have told me to play games with management, (ex. I’m closeted trans, or I’m agender, etc), as if that wouldn’t impact my day to day relationship with my “queer” coworkers, in a place where I spend 30-40 hours a week.

So far I have done the training modules in private [online] and found ways not to talk about them with my coworkers. When we have been asked to input our pronouns into work profiles, I found a way to leave it blank. I was asked a few times to double-check that I had updated my work profile because it was blank, but eventually after I said I had done it multiple times, they let it drop. 

Emotionally, I try to focus on the fact that this is a job; these people are not my friends. I can be friendly and supportive regarding our work, and not let myself get pulled into conversations about polyamorous dating or how our health insurance works for electrolysis. It works, but after a few years, it’s really getting old. I’m looking for a new job, but it’s hard to find something that doesn’t conflict with my independent contractor job and has health insurance. And once I get this new dream job, there’s no guarantee it won’t be a similar work culture.

If you could anonymously let HR know what you think about these training modules, what would you say?

I would tell them that they have taken an already political workforce (mostly college students) and emboldened them to force uncomfortable and inappropriate conversations in the workplace, through their DEI training. By sponsoring local drag events and celebrating Trans Day of Visibility at work, they’re forcing women to either partake in celebrating misogyny or be seen as the bad guy. 

I just want to go to work and not discuss politics, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Rather than feel safe and included, I feel that I must either bite my tongue or pay lip service to sexist and anti-lesbian concepts, to maintain a peaceful working relationship with my coworkers. I would tell them that their obsession with trans/queer inclusion has blinded them to the misogyny in the workplace and they have actually contributed to making the workplace hostile for women.

Considering my history with alienation from womanhood, the whole thing is just upsetting. I view the entire situation as one manifestation of misogyny and anti-lesbian values that I have to walk into on a daily basis.