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EMILY METCALF: So my name is Emily Metcalf.
I'm a member of the Google privacy team, as well as a
member of the Gayglers, Google's gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender employee resource group.
And it is my honor today to invite three speakers from the
Transgender Law Center who are here today, Masen Davis, Ilona
Turner, and Nathan Harris.
They're all going to be talking about the state of the
transgender movement.
And without any further ado, I will turn it over to Masen.
Thanks so much for coming.
MASEN DAVIS: Thank you so much, Emily.
I really appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]
MASEN DAVIS: And we are thrilled to be here today.
I have been traveling around the country a lot recently
talking with community members, activists, and
policymakers.
And I have been struck by how excited people are at this
moment of history, especially as we wait for a pretty
important Supreme Court decision or two
in the next 10 days.
As early as tomorrow morning, we could hear what happens to
the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian and bisexual and
transgender people.
We should know what the fate is for the Defense of Marriage
Act and for Proposition 8 in California definitely within
the next 10 days.
It's been really exciting to see that we're at this point
in history now where we hopefully
will have this freedom.
And as I travel around the country, I'm struck by the
number of people who feel that it is just a matter of time
until people can marry who they love, which is awesome.
But I'm also getting this question, are we done?
And that's one question I want to pose to you all
today, are we done?
Because I'm also hearing from activists and community
members in organizations that are saying, once we have
achieved the freedom to marry, we are
done as an LGBT movement.
We have achieved equality.
Now I'll tell you, that's hard for me to reconcile sometimes.
At Transgender Law Center, we hear from over 2,500 people a
year at this point who are contacting us because they are
experiencing some level of discrimination and bias and
violence in school, at the doctor's office, at work, and
on the street.
We know that transgender people are twice as likely to
be unemployed and living underneath the poverty level.
That's four times as high when it comes to
transgender people of color.
We know that transgender people are much more likely to
be homeless and experience family rejection.
In fact, one out of five of us have had to go and live on the
streets at some point in our lives.
And we know that health care continues to be a real
challenge for us.
Many of us can't get a doctor when we need it the most and
have been turned away from health care facilities.
So when I hear this question, are we done yet, I'm really
clear that we are not.
But that we are at a time when we have to redefine what
equality means, what freedom means, what justice means, and
to determine whether we're into just us as people, or if
we're going to continue to fight for
justice for all of us.
So I'm thrilled to be joined by our legal director, Ilona
Turner, from Transgender Law Center.
Ilona leads our very small but robust legal team, helping
people fight for their rights in California, nationwide, and
even occasionally internationally, as we figure
out how to make sure that all of us have the basic freedoms
and supports that we need to survive and thrive.
So we're going to be talking to you today about some of the
critical issues facing transgender communities across
the country, especially issues impacting our youth, issues at
work, and issues accessing health care.
I'm Masen Davis.
I'm the executive director of Transgender Law Center and
thrilled to be joining Ilona today.
And before I turn it over to her, I want to make sure, too,
that we understand what we're talking about.
Because I assume some of you are experts and should be up
here, and other people may be newer to transgender issues.
The term "transgender" is used in a lot
of different contexts.
It means a lot of different things to different people.
So I want to let you know kind of what we mean when we use
the term "transgender."
And at Transgender Law Center, we define "transgender," or a
transgender person, as anybody whose gender identity, the way
they feel about themselves, their deep-seated sense of
their own gender, or their gender expression, the way
they look to the world, doesn't fit the stereotypes
associated with their sex at birth.
All of us have a gender marker put on our birth certificates
when we're first born.
Many of us don't have to think about it after that's done.
But the truth is, the expectations about who we will
be as adults are largely based on that first question, is it
a boy or a girl?
We put so much expectation about a person
based on that answer.
And for transgender people and the people who are contacting
us, that gender marker on their birth certificate
doesn't really reflect who they are, how they are, or
what they want to be in their lives.
So we do a lot of work with people who experience any kind
of challenge because they don't fit the narrow gender
stereotypes that we typically associate with men and women
in this world.
And with that, I want to turn it over to Ilona, because I
know together we're really hoping by the end of today,
we'll be able to highlight some of the critical issues
facing transgender people and also some real opportunities
right now to kind of change the game when it comes to
transgender equality in the United States.
Ilona.
ILONA TURNER: Thanks, Masen.
I'm going to talk about some of the issues that we hear
about a lot relating to transgender youth, especially
in schools.
As Masen mentioned, there are just unacceptably high rates
of family rejection, kids being pushed out of their
homes when they are transgender or gender
non-conforming, LGBT generally.
But the numbers in every case tend to be worse for
transgender youth.
So homelessness as a result.
In schools, kids facing harassment, violence, and then
when kids are dropping out, and that often leads to
dropping out of school.
And so that leads to the other problems that Masen was
highlighting of unemployment, underemployment, poverty,
homelessness as an adult, involvement with the criminal
justice system, you name it.
And these problems all build on each other.
So to really address that sort of systematic problem, the
most effective way to do so is really to start changing
things with these kids at an early age, make sure that
they're actually getting the support that they need and
deserve so that we can hopefully end those cycles.
And we actually have been seeing some really heartening
changes in recent years.
I think partly as a result of increased visibility of
transgender people and transgender youth, we're
seeing more and more kids coming out as transgender and
asserting their identity and their right to be who they are
at earlier ages.
And I think as a result of the increased visibility, we're
seeing more and more parents who, instead of, as they might
have done in previous eras, saying, no way or that's crazy
or let's get you counseling, they're saying,
OK, this is a thing.
I've heard of this.
What can I do to help you?
I might not understand it, but you're my kid, and I love you.
So those are some of the most touching calls that we get.
It's just really amazing sometimes to hear from these
parents and the journeys that they've gone through, people
from all different kinds of backgrounds and
conservative, whatever.
But when it comes to their kid, they're not going to let
anybody mess with them.
So we worked with one family recently, I'm just thinking of
a family, a mother, a single mother, actually, in rural
Missouri whose child is transgender.
The mother had never heard of this before.
But the kid was working with a counselor who helped
explain it to her.
And she was like, OK, well.
I mean, if you say so.
I love my kid.
The child was assigned female at birth but identifies as a
boy, goes by the name Trace.
And Trace went to school earlier this year.
He's nine years old.
And in his fourth grade classroom, just before
Thanksgiving this year, told his classmates
that he is a boy.
And the school's response was to immediately suspend him for
three weeks and, when he got back to school, to put him
essentially on lock down in a special education classroom.
He was previously just in a totally mainstream classroom.
And they wouldn't let him out even for lunch or recess.
He was the only kid in the whole elementary school who
was seen as this kind of danger for whatever reason.
And this mom, again, she's not an activist.
She probably doesn't know any other gay
people, *** people.
But she knew that she had to fight for her kid, that this
was unacceptable.
Because he was getting incredibly depressed.
He told her that he wanted to die.
It was just really, really traumatizing for him and for
their whole family.
And so she got in touch with us at Transgender Law Center.
And we were able to successfully advocate with the
school, wrote them a very nasty letter.
And they agreed to lift those restrictions on him.
And he was so much happier.
And they were so grateful, just to be able to reach out
and find that there's somebody in the country somewhere who
understands what they're going through and is able
to fight for them.
So that was really one of the most meaningful things that
I've been able to work on.
MASEN DAVIS: We got this wonderful letter, too, and
apparently Trace now wants to move to the Bay Area when he's
older and become a lawyer.
So that's a good sign.
ILONA TURNER: Yeah, they sent us a little photo of him, his
class photo, and he's wearing camo.
And then I was talking to him afterwards, and he said, did
you get the photo?
And I said, yeah.
And he said, don't I look handsome?
So that was great.
But unfortunately, these calls keep on coming in.
And a lot of the issues that we see are around transgender
students who are struggling at school because the school is
refusing to allow them to live as who they are, saying that
they can't dress in a way that matches their gender identity,
saying that they can't--
even if they are living full-time in accordance with
their gender identity, and their parents are on board,
and their doctor--
this is who they are, and everybody's on board, the
school may still say nope.
You can't.
We're not going to call you by the name that matches that.
We're not going to call you by the pronouns.
We're not going to update your records.
And we're not going to let you use the right facilities that
match that gender.
And we're seeing, unfortunately, a lot of really
serious consequences of this, parents who are calling us
about their children getting bladder infections because
they won't use the restroom all day.
We got a call recently from a parent of a high school
student in Ohio who actually just dropped out of high
school because she got a number of suspensions for
using the girl's restroom after the school said, you're
not allowed.
But she would go in with all her friends.
And again, it just really--
if you have a student who's living every day in accordance
with their gender identity, and you're telling them, you
can't use the restroom, or you can't be in the gym class that
matches who you are, that just isolates that student in such
a serious way.
It really subjects them to stigma and invites harassment,
essentially.
Because you're outing them as different.
The school is basically putting a neon sign above
their head that says, I'm different.
Ask me why.
And so we're seeing kids dropping out of school.
We're seeing kids being pushed out of school.
And so, in part as a result of all these calls that we were
getting, we're actually working on a bill this year
here in California.
We're sponsoring a bill called AB 1266 that would actually
put it into the state law that says that schools have to
respect the gender identity of transgender students and allow
them to participate in school activities and use school
facilities based on who they are.
So that's moving its way through the legislature.
MASEN DAVIS: And it's a big deal.
This is the first time this kind of bill has been tried
anywhere in the United States.
It is a new concept to some people.
And yet we are having transgender youth coming out
at younger ages who are just a seamless part of the school
environment, who want to just be themselves and want to be
able to make sure they have the credits they need to
graduate and be able to get out of school
and live their lives.
It's incredibly important to us, too, because we know from
some data that's been collected that 50% of
transgender youth have attempted
suicide by the age 20.
The amount of harassment that our youth are facing in
schools and the impact of that harassment is
life-threatening.
So we have every need at this point to make sure that we're
able to fix these issues, and so our trans kids are able to
be in schools without harassment and able to
graduate like everyone else.
ILONA TURNER: Yeah.
One last anecdote about harassment, just if I may.
We have another client, a trans boy high school student
from Southern California who was one of these people who
was just fully integrated, living as a boy in school.
Nobody knew that he was transgender until one of his
classmates happened to be in the office for something else,
the school office, and got a glimpse of his record that had
an F on it, Female.
She took a picture of that with her cell phone, blasted
it out to the whole school.
And so all of a sudden, everybody knows, and he starts
getting harassed persistently at school.
As a result of that, he gets in a fight with one of the
harassers, fistfight at school, and he gets expelled.
So we're pursuing a complaint with the State Department of
Education on his behalf.
But that just demonstrates how serious this problem is.
Harassment, it's not just about bullying.
It's not just, oh, you should toughen up.
I mean, this is really leading to a serious problem of our
kids not graduating and all of the lifelong problems that
that can cause.
I know that you guys-- we've heard that you guys, some of
you have been thinking about youth issues, is that right,
in the Gayglers?
This is an issue that you all have been
focusing on this year.
We'd love to hear some thoughts from you guys, if you
have any, about this issue of trans youth in particular,
strategies that you think might be helpful, questions
about problems that trans youth, in particular, face.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned that there's a family that came to
you from, I think it was Missouri or one of the other
states, and then Ohio.
I'm assuming they do so through finding your website.
And then you mentioned the other story of harassment
intensifying after a picture being taken by a cellphone.
And I think maybe it would be helpful if you talked about
how the internet is enabling or strengthening the movement.
And then we could think about some of the tools that we're
developing and how that can maybe support and
intensify the work.
ILONA TURNER: Sure.
MASEN DAVIS: Yeah, that's a great question.
So the internet has been absolutely pitiful--
pitiful.
[LAUGHTER]
MASEN DAVIS: It's so pitiful.
It has been so pivotal in the development of the transgender
community and the transgender movement because for years,
transgender people have been part of America in small towns
and all over the country, all over the world.
And many of us have lived in isolation.
We were scared of sharing our own secret.
We didn't know anybody like ourselves.
A lot of us didn't meet anybody until
perhaps later in life.
And the internet has really changed that.
There are so many resources out there now for somebody who
is exploring their identity, thinks, wait, maybe this is me
when they see a TV show and wants to
reach out for support.
It's enough of a support area that it's hard for us, to be
honest, sometimes in our legal cases, because people are used
to creating a community and being very open about what
they're going through.
And if we're litigating a case of discrimination, the
Transgender Law Center finds that our clients have used the
internet for so much of a support structure that it is
hard for them to hold back in what they post on
social media sites.
And for us, it's a concern because it might be
confidential or relate to their case.
But this is where so many trans
people are getting support.
It's incredibly critical.
And that's especially true for our youth, who may be 10 years
old in the bootheel of Missouri.
And 20 years ago, they wouldn't know a
soul for many decades.
Now they can go online--
their parents can go online--
find out information, find connections to support groups,
realize they're not alone, and feel empowered to come out
much more quickly and readily than they would and to be
themselves at a much younger age than we saw
even 10 years ago.
Even five years ago, at Transgender Law Center, we
were not getting the kind of calls that we get today from
parents before each school year or before summer camp.
And a lot of that is because the internet is
the place of support.
Now that said, it can also be the place of harassment.
And so to the extent that it can help, it can also hurt.
As youth may have social media sites that reflected their
original gender, and as they change, they find it hard to
get away from that as they go through their school years.
We get a lot of calls as well from people asking about their
privacy because somebody may have a website.
They may have had posts.
They may have had a documentary
they were a part of.
And now with the internet, there's very
little privacy, actually.
It's very hard for somebody to get away from their previous
identities.
ILONA TURNER: You may have heard of this.
MASEN DAVIS: Pardon?
ILONA TURNER: You may have heard of this concept.
MASEN DAVIS: And as you know, more and more information is
being added to the internet all the time.
And so we get calls from people pretty regularly
saying, oh my gosh.
I realized that there's this story I wrote when I was 10 on
this website, or this YouTube video or this comment
somebody's made about me.
How do I take this down?
And so this is really a great thing and a challenging thing
when it comes to the privacy and awareness
of transgender people.
Does that help?
AUDIENCE: That was great, thank you.
MASEN DAVIS: And it was great to connect with you all.
Like when somebody really has something, they're like, oh my
gosh, how do I get this down, or if somebody's being
harassed online, which happens a lot on the social media
sites, how to address that.
And I feel like that's an area for us we really have to
grapple with, to figure out what to do when somebody's
identity's being used against them online.
ILONA TURNER: Right.
We got a call recently from a parent in Sacramento,
somewhere in the Central Valley outside of Sacramento.
And it was a mom of a fifth-grade transgender girl.
And it was like, oh no, what's this one going to be?
Oh god, what's the school doing this time?
And she said, oh no, I just wanted to find out how to get
a replacement Facebook password.
Because the kid had an old Facebook account with the old
gender and wanted to substitute.
And we were like, OK.
But like, what's going on at school?
What's the trouble?
And she was like, oh no, they're super accepting.
The school worked with us and asked the kid when the kid was
transitioning how she wanted to make this work.
And she said, I want to have an assembly, and I want to
write a letter and have the principal read it, and I'll be
standing there.
And they did this.
And after the principal read the letter, the whole school,
students and teachers, all came up and hugged the student
all together.
I know.
So we get nice calls also.
MASEN DAVIS: So one of the reasons that youth and
education issues are important to us is that we see the
really negative impacts if somebody's not able to get a
decent education.
Even if people are able to do well in school, we find that
transgender people face real barriers to employment.
In fact, in California, we did some research a few years ago.
And we found that transgender people were twice as likely to
have a bachelor's degree compared to other people in
the state of California.
Which is awesome, right?
There's a real asset and resilience in this community.
And yet, as I mentioned earlier, we also found
unemployment and poverty rates that were
twice the general average.
And salaries between transgender people who have a
bachelor's degree and non-transgender people with a
bachelor's degree in the state, there was about a
$30,000 pay differential.
So we find almost universal rates of employment
discrimination and harassment when it comes
to transgender people.
Thankfully, we're not harassed every day walking down the
street and at work, or that would just be absolutely
exhausting.
Most of us find ways to deal with that.
But nationally, 90% have said they've experienced
discrimination at work.
California, those rates are a little bit better, given that
we've got some good nondiscrimination laws.
But still, 70% of Californians who are transgender say they
have problems at work.
So given that very few of us are independently wealthy, we
still need to be able to take care of
ourselves and our families.
So work is really critical.
And we want to figure out how do we transition the workplace
so that it can be more accepting of people who are
different, whether that is making sure that
sex-segregated jobs are accessible to transgender
people or looking at what are traditional modes of female
and male employment and making that more open to everybody,
not just transgender people.
So there's a lot of work to be done there.
Now it's rare to get really blatant discrimination.
Oftentimes, the discrimination and harassment people face is
much more subtle.
Because I think we are more sophisticated these days.
And to be honest, most people want to do the right thing.
They just don't know what that is.
But there are times when we get very blatant
discrimination that we have to act on, and where you can't
just fix it by education alone.
You want to talk a little bit about one big case that we had
last year that made a big precedent?
And then we can talk about its implications.
ILONA TURNER: Sure, sure.
So over the last couple years, we were representing a
transgender woman named Mia Macy who was applying for a
job with the federal government.
She had been working as a police detective in Arizona
for 13 years.
She was highly trained in ballistics tracking.
And she applied for a civilian job with a lab of the Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau, ATF.
And when she was applying for this job, she was
still living as male.
She was assigned male at birth, but coming to realize
that she was, in fact, a woman and starting to make that
transition.
And so she applied for the job, and they told her, oh
yes, you're a shoo-in.
You've already been trained on our equipment.
You're by far the most qualified person we could
imagine for this job.
So she's going through the--
they said, we just have to go through this paperwork and
background check, but it's a formality.
The job is yours.
So she packed up her family, moved from Arizona to Walnut
Creek, where the job was.
And shortly before the job was supposed to start, just a
couple weeks, she called up the lab and said, by the way,
I need to tell you I've just been getting my documents
updated, driver's license and so forth, because I'm
transgender, and so I'll be coming to work
as a woman, as Mia.
And they said, oh, OK, and got back to her just a few days
later and said, oh, so sorry.
Funding for this position has been cut.
There's no more job.
Although she later found out that, actually, somebody else
had been hired with far less experience.
So we filed a complaint on her behalf.
And that went all the way up to the Federal Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission,
the EEOC, last year.
And we got an amazing, groundbreaking decision from
the EEOC saying that transgender people are
protected from discrimination under federal law, under the
existing sex discrimination law, Title VII.
So there's currently no federal law that--
like we have in California a law that says that employers
can't discriminate based on gender identity or gender
expression.
It uses those words right there in the law.
But on the federal level, we don't have that yet, although
there's a bill that's been proposed, the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act, ENDA, to try to do that for both
*** orientation and gender identity.
But the really exciting thing about this case was that this
agency that exists to interpret the federal
employment discrimination laws said, no, transgender people
are protected now, already, under the existing sex
discrimination laws.
To discriminate against someone because they're
transgender is a form of sex discrimination, flat out.
MASEN DAVIS: And if I can piggyback on that,
that's a big deal.
It means now that transgender people and gender
non-conforming people throughout the United States
have legal recourse if they experience discrimination, as
long as they work for a company that
has 15 or more employees.
So in the majority of states that don't have LGBT workplace
protections, folks can go to their local EEOC office, file
a complaint, and have it investigated.
It's a really important opportunity for us, a moment
for us to educate employers, too, that they're on the hook.
And that even if you're in the deep South or in Missouri,
where I am from, now you have a legal obligation to make
sure that transgender people are able to be
treated fairly at work.
The other thing that's neat about this is that this
interpretation, now, is also being used in other parts of
the federal government.
So while it was intended to determine what sex means
around employment protections for Title VII, it's also being
used by groups like the Social Security Administration as
they are looking at their nondiscrimination ordinance
and interpreting sex to include transgender people.
It's being used by Health and Human Services as they look at
the nondiscrimination provisions for the Affordable
Care Act, where they're interpreting sex to include
transgender people.
It's also true for schools in the federal context.
So we now went from, because of this decision, very few
federal protections to actually having a lot more
legal recourse for transgender people when it comes to
discrimination impacting the federal government.
That's a real game-changer for us.
ILONA TURNER: Yeah, absolutely.
Thinking about what you said, that a lot of people--
so there's a lot of subtle discrimination against
transgender people, right?
But there also is a shockingly high amount still of calls
that we're getting where employers really just don't
seem to realize that they have any legal obligations and are
still, especially in certain parts of the country, saying
things like, if an employee comes out as transgender,
saying, oh, I just don't think that the other employees would
be comfortable having you here.
Or we have a client in South Carolina who was fired after
she came out as transgender.
She hadn't started transitioning yet, but her
supervisor let her go just a couple weeks after she came
out and said, I'm sorry.
We're a religious company, and I just think what
you're doing is wrong.
And then she was actually denied unemployment when she
went to claim that after she was fired because they put
that she was fired for cause, and the cause was "intent to
violate the company dress code."
So yeah, they're really willing to be pretty
blatant about it.
And that makes our job easier for sure.
Because that just--
yeah, we just say, look at that.
That's definitely discrimination.
Sometimes it's more subtle, though.
We get a lot of calls about harassment that transgender
people are facing on the job.
And sometimes it's subtle, and sometimes it's more blatant.
A lot of it has to do with pronouns.
Sometimes employers or co-workers have a hard time
remembering what pronoun to use.
And that's normal within a certain range.
Like people might make a mistake.
But if it happens over and over again, especially after
the person is corrected or instructed by their
supervisor, hey, that's not cool, that's actually really
offensive and hurtful to that person, then it crosses the
line into kind of legally actionable harassment.
We just recently settled a case on behalf of a police
officer here in the Bay Area who went through this.
He transitioned to male a few years back.
And his fellow police officers just could not accept this.
And a group of them would just repeatedly call him by female
pronouns, ask him to come out and pat down female suspects,
even though he's a guy.
And they would also out him to new staff.
So even people who had never worked with him when he was
presenting as female would start calling him by female
pronouns and doing the same harassment.
So really problematic, and we got a nice settlement for him
from the department.
MASEN DAVIS: Yeah, and making mistakes occasionally is fine.
We all understand that.
But what Ilona was talking about is oftentimes people
will say, I just have a block.
I can't accept who you are.
I just can't get this.
And that's when you really have a problem.
But there's a lot of unintentional stuff that does
happen in the office.
So I'm a transgender man myself.
I was born female.
I went through a lot of steps and work and years
to be who I am today.
And my last job before I was at the Transgender Law Center
was a much larger organization.
And I would come out to my friends as transgender.
I've done activism in the transgender
community for 15 years.
So it's not something I hide.
But it also wasn't my work.
So it wasn't the first thing I told people.
It wasn't on my forehead yet.
Now it is.
But I had a really well-meaning friend who I met,
one of my coworkers, who I still remember very vividly.
We were in our break room where all of our mailboxes
were and our coffee.
And we had just met, a really nice gay guy.
And he's like, so when did you have the surgery?
So do you have a genital part?
And I'm like, I am in my office, where everybody comes
to get their mail, with the coffee.
My genitals should not be a topic of conversation here.
He was really well-meaning.
He's become a real-- he was clueless at the time.
And he was trying to connect with me and show that he was
supportive.
And he really put a foot in his mouth.
That's what not to do.
He didn't mean to discriminate against anybody.
He wasn't trying to be harassing.
But it was definitely anxiety-provoking as I looked
around to see who all was there and tried to figure out
how to respond to that in our break room at work.
So some of this is to be really thoughtful about, is
this a question you would want somebody to ask you at work?
Are you asking about somebody's private medical
information?
Are you asking because you have a reason to know, or
you're just curious?
And generally, try to stay away from the just curious
questions, at least until you have a more intimate
relationship with that co-worker.
Does that makes sense?
Now, that's different than the time in the same job when I
got a call from one of my staff who had quit a couple
weeks beforehand.
And she had worked with me for a couple of years.
And she said, Masen, I felt like I needed to call you
because nobody wanted to tell you.
But for the last four years, you have a staff person, a
colleague, who's taking all of your new staff and interns out
to lunch and telling them that they're really working for a
woman and making fun of you every time you turn your back.
And I'm sorry nobody told you that for four years.
Nobody wanted to hurt your feelings.
But I thought maybe you should know.
I needed to know.
I'm so glad that they called me, and that they trusted me.
But this is somebody I worked with every day in a relatively
small department who was very actively trying to undermine
me with staff.
They were not doing that out of an area of mistake.
Maybe he had some curiosity.
But this was pretty clearly somebody who was not happy
that they were working with a transgender person and wanted
to make sure all of my colleagues knew that.
Now, that was the one time in my life I have called up HR
and said, we've got a problem.
I'm going to hope and assume that folks know better than to
do that these days.
But if somebody does share that they're transgender with
you, ask them, is that information you'd like to have
widely shared?
Is that private information about their background that
they're sharing with you, and to really respect that.
It's oftentimes a little nerve-wracking for a
transgender person to out themselves for the first time,
especially if they tend to just blend into the woodwork
which, to be honest, most folks don't think I'm
transgender when I first walk into the room.
So to really be aware of that and go to the, not do unto
others as you want them to do to you, but do unto others as
they want to be done to them.
So I'm wondering in Google, and Emily, if you could do an
Oprah again just for a second, where do you see some of the
unintentional harassment happening?
Or are there opportunities for that to happen
unintentionally, where a transgender person can have
their toes stepped on without folks realizing it?
Whether that's through the systems that you have or
interpersonal relationships.
And I know I'm asking for folks to take a little bit of
a risk here.
But I come from the assumption that unintentional bias
happens all the time for people who don't experience
the same kind of prejudice or oppression that some other
folks around them do.
Anybody willing to take a risk?
Where might it happen?
AUDIENCE: I'm actually an intern.
The thing I've noticed in the past two days is there's very
little gender-neutral bathrooms.
MASEN DAVIS: Very few gender-neutral bathrooms.
So as we talked about the issue of schools,
gender-neutral bathrooms or bathrooms at work
are a big deal, too.
And not everybody feels comfortable going into a men's
room or a women's room.
A lot of folks are afraid they're going
to face more scrutiny.
They may have had experiences with harassment.
They may not feel comfortable with
either of them as choices.
And we definitely see a movement to creating
gender-neutral bathrooms in a lot of spaces.
In Washington, DC, for example they passed an ordinance that
every single-stall restroom in Washington has to now be a
gender-neutral restroom that can be accessed by anybody.
And that's good for transgender people.
It's also good, oftentimes, for people with disabilities
who may need an assistant.
It's good with families with young kids.
There's a lot of reasons to embrace
gender-neutral bathrooms.
And we're finding more workplaces that are using that
as an option.
Now we never say that transgender people should be
forced to use a gender-neutral restroom, though.
Anybody should have access to that, and folks should be
using restrooms that match who they are and where they're
going to feel most comfortable.
Thank you for sharing that.
So that's one structure in a lot of companies that most
folks don't think about but can create kind of an
unintentional barrier for some of the employees.
Anything else folks want to share?
AUDIENCE: In Cambridge, one thing that I [INAUDIBLE] when
I first joined Google is that the Women in Engineering group
is very aggressive about trying to get new engineers
who happen to be female to join.
And so there was a very awkward, I
do not want to join.
This is the nth time you asked me, where I was getting kind
of [INAUDIBLE].
Well, why don't you want to join?
That's not really any of your business.
So it's unintentional, and they're just
trying to be nice.
So that's cool that they're doing that because in general
that is a positive response.
But it's unintentional weird things.
MASEN DAVIS: Thanks for sharing that.
That's a great example.
ILONA TURNER: Right.
And I think that just a raised awareness about the fact that
transgender people exist, that maybe everybody doesn't
identify the way that you might think that they do based
on your scan of them, that can make a big difference in just
being respectful and not pushing things like that.
AUDIENCE: But I think one really good thing that--
I was coming from a university where people are very aware of
this, and there's a lot of talk about it.
There's a lot of introductions.
My name is this person, and this is where I'm from, and
anything else.
But there's never, this is my preferred gender pronoun.
And that way people know.
Because it is confusing .
People don't know how to read me.
Like which one, right?
But if you just have that into your introduction, people will
know, and then they won't mess up.
MASEN DAVIS: We had a new staff person start this week.
And I checked myself yesterday, and I
said, you know what?
Actually, I realize I've been referring to you as he, but I
don't know if that's the pronoun you prefer.
Can you share what your preferred gender pronoun is?
And he said, wow, thank you for asking.
It is he.
But what's up with the Bay Area that
people don't ask that?
Because he comes from New York.
He's like, in New York, we're all asking that all the time.
It's part of just respect and not making assumptions.
So it is a great practice, too, especially if you aren't
certain of somebody's gender.
It's really OK to ask, right?
And some of us are uncomfortable with that.
Somehow we're supposed to know this, right?
But it's not always possible.
ILONA TURNER: Right.
And I think your question also points out that a way to do
that that's even more inclusive and respectful is to
start by sharing your own.
If you meet somebody that you're not sure, or you're in
a group setting, just to sort of make it a universal
question and information.
My name's Ilona, and my preferred pronoun is she.
And that opens it up and doesn't put all of the
scrutiny on that transgender person.
Like, oh, I'm assuming that you're different.
MASEN DAVIS: I appreciate people who have taken the risk
of sharing.
I think it's helpful, and I would encourage you all to
normalize some of that conversation, too, because
unintentional bias happens everywhere,
with so many folks.
And to the extent you can kind of share, hey, this is how
this impacts me, I think it will help Google to continue
to be a leader in this area.
And I also think, whether it's in the Gayglers or other work
groups, to talk through what are ways that Google and other
companies can address unintentional bias that can
emerge, whether that's interpersonal or structural.
So the last thing I want to talk about in workplace is
some of the strategies that we're seeing that are really
helpful at this point.
One is looking at corporate policy.
That's been really important, especially as large companies
have integrated transgender issues
into corporate policies.
It's been very helpful for folks.
As Ilona said, there's a real push towards Title VII and
making sure we have federal workplace protections both
through Title VII and the Employment
Non-Discrimination Act.
And we're seeing more and more states that are passing
strong, comprehensive nondiscrimination laws in the
states as well.
That's all great.
And we need to make sure things are really happening on
the ground.
So there are some really neat programs that are evolving
across the country right now in this movement, where we're
seeing homegrown job programs for transgender people.
Here in San Francisco, there's the Transgender Economic
Empowerment Initiative and is also included, they've got a
program related to it.
I think it's Transcode--
is that what it's called--
that's actually teaching transgender
people how to do coding.
We've got a lot of folks who come from the tech world.
And to the extent they've been able to help people get a foot
into the door in the tech field, that's been really
awesome, especially given that many of the tech companies
have been the most embracing of folks who are different,
including transgender people.
So nice job on that, I really love it.
And I just want to mention that as we're being more
successful, as we're seeing more visibility both with our
youth and in the workplace, and as we're getting more
passage of nondiscrimination laws, we're
also seeing more backlash.
Anybody pay attention to Arizona?
Has anybody seen Arizona in the news recently?
So Arizona had a pretty interesting bill that they had
introduced this year.
The city of Phoenix passed a city nondiscrimination law to
protect transgender people from
discrimination, which is awesome.
In a lot of states where they're not ready to pass a
state law, city laws have been really important.
Well, a legislator, John Kavanagh, in Arizona, did not
like the fact that there had been this
bill passed in Phoenix.
So he introduced his own law for the state which would make
it a criminal penalty for a transgender person to use a
restroom that did not match the gender marker on their
birth certificate.
Now, many of us cannot change the birth certificate gender
marker, depending on where we're from.
All of that's managed on the state level.
As somebody from Missouri, I could have them add my new
name and gender, but I can't have them take
away the old one.
In some states, you can't change it at all.
So your birth gender is your gender, as far as your birth
certificate.
Well, Kavanagh's bill would have put somebody in jail for
six months for using a restroom if it didn't match
their birth certificate gender marker.
Thankfully, there was an uproar.
And this actually passed the first committee.
This was a bill that really had some legs in Arizona.
It was very similar to the anti-immigrant bill that they
have there where, again, another "show your papers"
bill in Arizona.
Thankfully, folks were able to rally together and to make it
clear that this would be ridiculous.
The logic of that bill would say that I have to use the
women's room in Arizona, and I'll tell you, nobody really
wants that.
And we were able to stop that.
But what happened with Arizona and Kavanagh is a good symptom
of an issue we're going to see arise.
And it's true for almost every civil rights and social
justice movement in this country that the more you
progress, and the more you have success, the more
backlash you will see.
And we are starting to see this as we are seeing more
harassment of people who are out as transgender.
We're seeing more anti-transgender bills that
are being proposed.
And many of those have to do with restrooms because, to be
honest, the United States folks,
we do not like bathrooms.
We do not like public restrooms.
We think they smell.
We want to avoid them as much as we can.
It doesn't matter if you're a woman or a man.
It's just not a popular place.
And anti-transgender people realize this and have tried to
pair up nondiscrimination laws with restroom issues in a way
that's been really damaging for a lot of folks.
So I do urge you to keep an eye on this.
And with Arizona, he finally realized this was not going to
work and pulled the bill back.
But this is really the next frontier that we're going to
have to continue to fight as the success that we see also
has an equal and opposite reaction to it.
Do you want to talk about health care quickly?
ILONA TURNER: Yeah.
So just in a couple minutes, the last issue we wanted to
talk about was health care.
This is a major issue for a lot of transgender people,
just simply being able to access health care at all, in
some cases, being turned away, being denied health insurance
because they are transgender, which is viewed as a
pre-existing condition, transgender people being
denied sex-specific care that they need just because they
may have changed their gender marker with
the insurance company.
So we see transgender men being denied pap smears that
they need, transgender women denied prostate exams, and
some people being denied care for a whole range of bizarre
sounding reasons.
We had a client who was denied treatment for a broken bone
because the insurance company said, oh, that must be related
to the hormones that you're taking.
It must have weakened your bones, and so we're not going
to cover it.
And this is related to the fact that a large percentage,
the majority of health insurance plans in this
country right now, have explicit exclusions written
into them for health care that transgender people need.
MASEN DAVIS: Thankfully, this is changing.
There is a surge of activism to address this issue,
especially as the Affordable Care Act is about to be
implemented throughout the United States.
And there now have been four states and the District of
Columbia that have now said that it is no longer legal in
those states to have transgender-specific
exclusions in health care policies.
Thankfully, California is one of those states.
So this is a real sea change where we now have a good
percentage of states that are now starting to look at this
issue as they're doing implementation around the
Affordable Care Act and looking at opportunities to
make sure that all people are actually able to have the
coverage they need, including transgender people.
There have been some real interesting focus groups
around the country to learn about what people know about
the Affordable Care Act.
And what we've heard is transgender people are among
the most vocal because we have so much to gain or to lose
with what's happening.
So for folks who are interested in getting involved
in that or learning more, please come talk to us
afterwards.
We're tight on time, so I'm going to make sure we give our
last few minutes for any questions folks may have.
ILONA TURNER: I just want to add one last thing on the
health care front, which is that we're also seeing a lot
of action from employers, including Google was one of
the pioneers in this area.
And it's so helpful when that sort of thing happens,
especially from such a prominent company that can set
an example for other companies to say, this isn't impossible.
You can negotiate with your health insurance company.
You can make this happen.
And it makes such a difference in the lives of trans
employees, makes people more productive, happier.
It just should be a no-brainer, but it's really
helpful to have this kind of example.
MASEN DAVIS: So I hope you all will join me in realizing that
we're not done, even as we get hopefully a great ruling from
the Supreme Court in the next 10 days.
We have a lot more work to do around school and our youth,
around jobs, around health care, around a myriad of
issues impacting our community.
And as we get into the last five minutes of questions,
we'd love to hear any clarifying questions you all
may have here and also any ideas you have of how do we
spread the word to make sure people realize that we're not
done, that we have not ended at all the long march to
equality, but we have a lot more work to do.
And if you have thoughts about that, we would
love to hear it.
We're starting some social media campaigns at this point.
One is called More Than Marriage, #morethanmarriage,
really elevating a lot of the issues that have impacted
especially more marginalized members of the LGBT community,
making sure people are talking about the need still for
education and health care and immigration and so many issues
that have not had the same kind of media presence but
continue to be really critical for our communities.
So with that, I'll open up for questions and ideas.
EMILY METCALF: As you might know, Google's mission is to
organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible.
You mentioned at the beginning of your talk that a lot of
folks are finding out about transgender issues via the
internet at a younger and younger age.
What might Google or other tech companies be able to do
to help the younger generation find out what they need to
know to transition earlier in their lives?
MASEN DAVIS: That's a great question.
I think there are a lot of little things.
There's probably a bigger one, too, that I want some more
time to think about.
But some things that we've talked about in our office.
You all have--
I'm sorry, I apologize, I don't know what you call
them-- but the images that show up when you first do the
search engine.
When you first go to Google--
AUDIENCE: Doodles.
MASEN DAVIS: What do you call them?
Your doodles, yes.
I love the doodles.
I just didn't know what they were called.
I apologize.
But we've talked about how powerful it would be to have
an LGBT or especially a T doodle at some point, maybe on
some sort of day that we could commemorate.
That would open up this issue to so many folks.
How do we make sure that the organizations that are doing
really interesting work, and especially those working with
youth, that provide more public education, making sure
that they're able to be high up on the search engine
results, so people find that?
I think there's been a lot of improvement.
It used to be if you searched for "transgender," you would
not get advocacy groups.
I'll just say that.
You got a lot of adult content.
And that has already changed significantly over the years--
thank you--
so that people can now get some basic information.
But we have a lot of different sites out there that have
pieces of information.
We have yet to really have a lot of that in one place
that's easily accessible, especially for the kids.
So it might be interesting to think through how do we make
sure that that is much easier to find for folks.
And then the last thing I want to reiterate earlier, I think
the harassment issue is real.
So what can we do to address when people are being outed
online, if they're bring harassed in the social media
sites, how do we address that?
We feel a lot of urgency around that right now.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, guys.
Before the talk, you were chatting about issues like
symbology and branding, for example, for
Transgender Law Center.
Speaking more broadly, how do we develop iconography or
representatives, heroes of the trans movement.
What do we have to rally behind, what people, what
images, what symbology?
We don't have as much as the broader LGBT movement yet.
Are we moving in that direction?
Do we have poster children, heroes?
What do we have?
MASEN DAVIS: Do you have an answer back there?
AUDIENCE: There's an inherent tension for
organizations like TLC--
and I think you and I have had a version of this
conversation--
in terms of how bold its logo is in terms of they're sending
letters to people.
And having an envelope that necessarily outs the people on
the other end is problematic.
On the other hand, I personally feel really
strongly we need something that is the equivalent of the
HRC equals sign.
We need something that absolutely says, in
unambiguous terms, "trans," that unambiguously says
"proud."
And there are other organizations.
There are other non-organizations.
A woman named Jen Richards in Chicago has a project called
We Happy Trans, which is all about promoting positive
images of trans people post-transition.
And for this exact purpose, she ran an event called Trans
100, which Masen was one of the people who was
highlighted, and identifying people who are by action, by
visibility, by impact, heroes, significant people in the
trans movement.
But yeah, we need something that's like the HRC equals
sign that isn't just TLC.
MASEN DAVIS: I totally agree with that.
The Trans 100 I think was great.
They did an event in Chicago, did social media and print
media around 100 people who've been active and made a
difference in the trans movement.
That was a real watershed, in part because most of the media
around transgender people has been-- like the Day of
Remembrance is our best known day, which commemorates all
the people we've lost to anti-transgender violence.
We've had a lot of things where we commemorate people
who have died, but usually through violence or *** and
AIDS, which disproportionately impacts our community.
There have been very few campaigns to really get out
the good stories.
We have folks who have contributed so much in so many
different fields.
Many people don't know it.
And there are a lot of reasons for that, but I do think we're
ready to be much more visible, much more powerful as a people
and as a movement.
We have yet to find that equals sign moment.
There is a transgender symbol, but it's a little clunky, in
my opinion.
We're not quite there yet.
But I think we're getting there.
And if any of you are great strategists and graphic
designers, let's work together to create that.
But it is time.
And in many ways, we're very much like where the gay and
lesbian movement was 20 or 30 years ago, where the media
representations were as victims or killers or the joke
of the sitcom.
And we're ready to move.
We're ready to go and have our moment.
We have a lot of needs.
We've got a lot of momentum.
And I do think that this is a moment for us to really make
this a reality.
EMILY METCALF: What I want to make sure to do before we end
the talk is to announce that for those of you who aren't
aware, Go Transgender has a lot of information about
resources on transitioning and transgender issues at Google,
including a list of gender-neutral bathrooms in
various buildings.
So that's a really great resource.
MASEN DAVIS: And can I also just say, thank you all.
Google has been a leader in policies supporting
transgender people here, on the job.
And you've had great health care.
I hope it continues to be great health care.
I see nods.
That's awesome.
I'm so grateful for you all and your leadership in this,
and also your support of Transgender Law Center and of
this movement.
It's made a big difference to us, and we look forward to
continuing to partner together.
Thanks.
EMILY METCALF: Thanks so much.
And please, everybody give a round of applause for--
[APPLAUSE]