It Could Happen Here - The Condition of the Trans Working Class in America

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Mia discusses the economic and social condition of trans workers in the US and what it means for trans workers as a class Sources: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/article/unemployment-rate-returned-to-its-prepandemic-level-in-2022.htm https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/over-400000-transgender-people-have https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-287.html https://endhomelessness.org/resources/nationwide-survey-shows-widespread-discrimination-against-gender-expansive-people-including-in-emergency-shelters/ https://news.gallup.com/poll/656708/lgbtq-identification-rises.aspx https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/162985/economics/unemployment-during-the-great-depression/ https://endhomelessness.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/US-Trans-Survey-Brief-V4_Working-File.pdf https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/2022%20USTS%20Early%20Insights%20Report_FINAL.pdf https://mapresearch.org/brief/new-survey-reveals-dramatic-changes-for-lgbtq-adults-since-november-2024/ https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-280.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Iqadap and hear a podcast that is often about being trans in America and living under a regime that is actively hostile to our media. mere existence. I'm your host, Mia Wong. And today we're going to take a somewhat broad view and look at what it means to be trans in America from a class standpoint. Now, I think if you are trans, you are at least broadly speaking, not a capitalist in the sense of you do not own the means of production. You are not the bourgeoisie. There are so few of us at all who can be said to own the means of production. We are all almost entirely as a class like some kind of worker or another. But there is a lot of specificity to the specific trans experience of class and where we fit

into the broader American class structure that I want to talk about today. And I want to simultaneously get people an actual understanding in one place of just kind of the outskirts of how bad it is, but then also talk about how good it is, isn't maybe the right term, but want to give people a sense of what this class position means for our place and ability to fight back, because that is also a critically important part of not just being trans, but a critically important part of every leftist and liberation movements in the U.S. for the past, you know, decade has been, and long over that decade, you know, like two decades, has been us. And obviously, there have been a lot of trans people who are involved in a budget shift before then, but the extent to which trans people

have been involved and have been central to every social movement you've ever heard of, in the modern era is exceptional, and I want to talk about why that is. I want to start talking about why that is by looking at some of the data that we have on what it's like to be trans in the U.S. And this is one of the things that's very difficult when you're writing about trans people,

because, you know, we all have our experience of transness. and anybody who's tried to get trans-health care, I think, is aware that there is so much research that has just not been done about us. This is medical research on, like, the effects of specific, like, hormone regimens and, like, what kinds of medicines do and don't help and what the effects are. A lot of the information that you do get from doctors is based on really, really old studies that aren't applicable to what actually exists. And this is also true when you're trying to look at economic data, where

there just aren't that many studies of what it's like for trans people in the U.S. And the ones that do exist, and there are people who have done some, they're very reliant on data sets that are not specifically designed to be of trans people. And that's a problem, because a lot of what you end up with, and the reason why there are some things that I've read that are just not going to be in this episode, is that they are very reliant on things like, okay, we know this person has gender markers have changed or their names have changed.

And that's fine, kind of, if you want to sort of get a sense of what's going on, but like the percentage of trans people, the sort of demographics of trans people who have officially changed their gender markers is not reflective of trans people in general. So we're going to be using a lot of data in this. from what's called the U.S. Trans Survey.

It's U.S.TS. It's run by advocates for trans equality, and God fucking bless them. These people are doing the transgender's work. It's an invaluable resource. I don't know of a better sort of repository of information about trans people that has been collected. So these surveys are run fairly and frequently. There was one in 2015 and one in 2022. but in the 2022 one, they got 92,000 trans and non-binary respondents, which is unbelievable. That is a staggering sample size. But the information they got from it is in a lot of ways extremely bleak. I mean, you know, you can look at the positive stuff, which is that, yeah, people who transitioned

to say that, yeah, their lives are happier. Now they transitions. Like, they like transitioning. It's good. It's, I don't know, do the thing. It will make you happier. However, the economic numbers, Jesus Christ, oh boy, oh boy. Now, as I've said, right, the people who work on the U.S. Trans Survey, they do astonishing work,

but as with all trans people, they're doing astonishing work with not that many resources, and it takes them a long time to put their studies together. So again, the information that we're using is from 2022. So this means a couple of things. One, this is Dreen the Biden administration, right? a regime that is significantly less hostile to trans people than this current one, even though there was a bunch of bad shit going on then, some of it done by the Biden administration,

dear God, is Trump administration significantly, significantly more hostile to trans people. So the conditions that we're seeing now are going to be worse than the ones that we have data for. So all of the numbers I'm about to tell you about poverty rates, unemployment, and homelessness, it's gotten worse. The second thing is when the U.S. TransRivary Rights Report, I mean, they released recently, yeah, they released in June, health and well-being, a report of the 2020-U.S. Transgender Survey, it is 110 pages long. So they do very, very good and detailed work. However, what that means is that we still, for example, don't have like a granular economic report and we don't have just the full report that they write on this stuff. And we also don't have really the sort of granular reports that they had from the 2015 numbers on the experience of transatlantic.

people have different races. So those are sort of what I would say are the limits going into this that we have. However, what we do have from the early insights report is just horrifying. So one of the sort of defining conditions of being trans is dispossession. And you can look at dispossession in a whole bunch of different ways. You can look at, for example, the poverty rate. The poverty rate from the U.S. Trans Survey among trans people is 34%. The American poverty rate is 12%. So that's almost three times higher than the general population's poverty rate. And 34% is really bad, right?

Even looking at other demographics and other poverty rates, that's really, really, really bad. The trans unemployment rate is, I think, in some ways, even worse. the U.S. trans unemployment rate is 18%. The U.S. unemployment rate in general in 2022 was 3.6%. So let's try to get an understanding of what it means. Unemployment rate is a weird number. There are some people it doesn't count in terms of people who have stopped looking for work.

Right. But to put this into perspective, during the peak of the lockdowns in 2020, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 14%. And that was the highest that's been in ages. For trans people, it's 18%. So if you are trans in America, right, trying to find a job,

it is worse than it was for everyone during the lockdowns. 18% unemployment is like 1937, early 1938 Great Depression levels of unemployment. It's almost one in five people. And again, these are the numbers from 2022 between the Biden administration, when the situation was better for trans people, we don't have more recent numbers for the U.S. at sort of any kind of scale. And even back then, four years ago, when things were better for us, and the economy in general was running a little bit better,

it was, again, 1938 Great Depression levels for just a regular trans person, right? This has a really, really broad array of effects, right, in terms of, you know, just the experience of the world that you have if you are trans because you are fundamentally living in a different world than an economic world than cis people do. Like, again, the cis people's unemployment rate in 2022 was like 3.6% and yours is 18. You are living through the Great Depression and they are living through a normal economy. And that means that just fundamentally from a class position, you have a different experience of reality than they do. You're living in something that is not the same as theirs.

I also want to talk about homelessness numbers because, you know, queer homelessness has always been really, really bad for reasons that, kind of obvious reasons that we'll get into here, but it's also related to, for example, the unemployment rate and the poverty rate because, you know, having an apartment or just any place to stay is expensive. We got a report recently that was a joint effort between advocates for trans, equality in the National Alliance to End Homelessness, who did a report using the USTS data. And they talked about how 30% of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lifetime.

For Americans, it's about 4%. For Americans at large, right? You know, just like cis Americans in general, it's about 4%. So that is a homelessness rate of eight times the rate of the general population. And again, that is the 2022. numbers, which are now worse. And this is something that I think is borne out by if you are around any, like, I mean, not even working class trans people.

If you're just around trans people in general, you have met people who have been homeless, right? Like, you were just constantly around people who have been homeless. And this is one of, I think, the defining elements of what being a trans woman. worker is, is that the level of precarity is so great. And the odds that through some kind of employment discrimination or just some bullshit happening with your employer or just like, I don't know, the employer is doing layoffs, it is so, so easy to move back and forth between having an apartment and being on the street in a way that to some extent the general American

population has, but again, the rate for the general population, if they've been homeless in their lifetime, is 4%. And for trans people, it's 30%. And this rate, this 30% rate of people who've, trans people who've experienced homelessness. And also, by the way, a lot of the people who have experienced this have experienced them more than once. And, you know, there's a lot of just people who are trans who are homeless right the fuck now. This is why I say, like, put a trans girl on your couch at the end executive disorder because there aren't like widespread solutions to this right now. It's something that we have to figure out for ourselves and we just don't have the resources to do it. Now, this discrimination is intensified both in the housing market, right, by just general anti-trans discrimination,

by poverty. And this is also sort of a cyclical process, right? Like part of what's difficult about me writing this is that I, like, I haven't been homeless and I haven't been a sex worker, which means that I'm missing experiences that a lot of trans workers have. What I can say about it is like obviously being homeless makes it harder to get even just an apartment afterwards because it has a whole bunch of negative effects on a whole bunch of shit, including, for example, like, it like, you know, obviously is like fucks with your credit score. It fucks with just like, oh, do you have like previous landlord references that you can use?

There's a whole bunch of different sort of spiraling effects. of this. There's, obviously, there's health effects, there's safety effects. So what you're facing is, on the one hand, you're squeezed out through discrimination of the workplace, through the fact that also, and this is another fairly common thing, trans people make significantly less money than cis people do, just on the dollar. It's way, way worse. So you have lower income when you get a job, you have less access to jobs, and you also just have housing market discrimination. And also, People have weaker access to family support networks that function in a way to subsidize social reproduction for cis people.

A lot of trans people's families and parents don't accept them and they just get kicked out. Or if they are able to access resources from them, it's under conditions of extreme violence. And that has a massive effect on homelessness, right? Like a whole bunch of homelessness is caused by queer youth getting kicked out of their houses. and because you also don't have places you can go back to, right? You don't have the kind of like familial safety net that a lot of cis people have access to and you're less likely to have access to it. This intensifies the rate of homelessness and it intensifies the consequences of it

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No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. We are back. Now, there's another factor, something that's becoming increasingly a factor of trans life, that has existed obviously for a long time, but has been enormously exacerbated by the current regime. And that is the trans refugee population.

There is in the U.S. a massive trans refugee population. These are, you know, what you would call, I guess, internally displaced people. The Movement Advancement Project, or MAP did a study in 2024-20205, looking at trans people who moved from one state to another because of anti-trans legislation, right? And they found, and this is just between November and June of 2025, they found that 9% of all trans people had moved in, Just that eight-month span, right?

That's 9% of trans people had just, just in the span between November 2024 and June 2025, right? Just in that span, 9% of the trans population moved. That's over 1% of the total trans population moving per month to a different state, specifically because of anti-trans legislation, right? That's really bad. if you look at sort of the general population of trans people in the U.S., that's 400,000 people in just that eight-month span. That's the entire population of Cleveland, Ohio, and then 35,000 more people. Right. I mean, obviously, it's not like the complete metropolitan. It's like the actual just like city of Cleveland, right?

But like, again, that's in the span of eight months, we moved the entire city of Cleveland. And it's definitely gotten, like, almost certainly has, like, there have been more people who have moved, you know, since June 2025 because the anti-trans discrimination, anti-trans crackdowns from the state have only gotten worse. This is a refugee crisis, right? And the things that they're fleeing from are also things that are just, you know, conditions of what being trans is in the U.S., right? Which they're fleeing restrictions on health care access from the national level, from the state level, also as we talked about from religious hospitals who can also just like

even if you're in a so-called blue state can just be like fuck you eat shit we're not going to give you healthcare they're fleeing bathroom bills they're fleeing don't say gay bans they're fleeing also just an increase in social violence right? Because the thing that this all

legitimizes right that anti-trans rhetoric legitimizes that anti-trans state action legitimizes is just getting assaulted for being trans. A thing that has always happened but is now happening more than it did before. And yeah, that not being, you know, assaulted, and this happens at work, this happens like coming back from work,

this happens in other places too, is also, you know, a part of the condition of your labor. When you combine the fact that trans people were already, and I want to point this out, right, the homelessness rates, you know, the 18% rate of unemployment, the 30% rate of experiencing homelessness in their lifetime, right. That was before the refugee crisis, like really, really intensified into what we're seeing now, right? It was not as bad in 2022 as it is right now when, again, like we were seeing for a period of eight months, we were seeing over percent of the population per month, the trans population per month moving.

All of all of the unemployment numbers and the poverty numbers and the homelessest numbers, those were all those were all. the sort of real intensification after the election of the mass migration and refugee sort of status of trans people. And this has had an effect on trans people's class position, right? What this has created in the places that trans people are fleeing to, and this is places like Portland, this is places like New York, like L.A. There's a lot of sort of like regional centers, too, right? Obviously, Chicago is like the other sort of big one, but, you know, they're like places like Missoula, right, for people who don't know what Missoula, Missoula is a city with a, you know, like a pretty large

university population in Montana that has a fairly large trans population because it collects trans people from a whole bunch of the region around it, and there's also a bunch of people who go to there for college and realize that they're trans. But what this has done, right, is it's forced a bunch of people to leave their homes, which is expensive, right? And then you have to find jobs in the... these new places. And it's already really difficult to find jobs in the places that you were. And so, you know, what you're facing just in general, right, is you're facing this tradeoff

between can you survive in the place that you are with the life that you have, or do you need to pick up and go to another place where it's less illegal for you to be yourself? And what this has created is this sort of mass underclass of trans workers that is especially large in places with large refugee populations. These workers are of any subgroup that, like, trans people are in. The trans people in that group are the most marginalized and the most just absolutely fought of everyone in that group, right? You know, you can look at like the violence rates for black trans women particularly is appalling. Right. There's a lot of disabled trans people

and among disabled people who already have it really, really bad in the U.S. Right? Like you look at disabled trans people and it's even fucking harder. That's especially an issue with something that's been affecting a whole bunch of people which is the Medicaid work requirements which have been just

unbelievably harmful to a whole bunch of disabled trans people who suddenly are being forced to work who just can't. Right. And what this has created is this incredibly, incredibly precarious class of workers all over the spectrum of the working class, right?

There are a lot of trans people, an unbelievable number of trans people working service jobs and like the lower end and shittier the service job, the more likely you are to find trans people there. There's always been a lot of trans sex work because a lot of times that's the thing you can do, right? And this is sex work across the entire spectrum of what sex work is,

of sort of like greater and lesser degrees of risk. This also is the thing that contributes to the criminalization of trans people because there's a bunch of criminalization of sex workers in ways that gets trans people targeted by the police and subject even more police violence than they are already, which they are also subject to extraordinary amounts of police violence. I don't know, every trans person has seen some shit. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart.

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Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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as part of my Culturea Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics,

race in America. There's going to be a politics of remembering the civil war. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Lee Boulevard. Get to the grocery store. I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job. I'm Akila Hughes. In Rebel Spirit, season two goes deep on both of those things, the fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space. We are more than our bodies. We can We contain essence. We contain spirit. How do you represent that?

They are just fueling a fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But I'm not just saying this to be like the trans-class position is bad, but what this has done is create this class of trans workers that moves between parts of the class that don't have contact with each other very much,

there's a whole bunch of movement between being housed and being unhoused in a way that is at a significantly broader scale than it is for the rest of the population. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of trans who are able to unify around being trans and have contact with each other and who organize with each other

and who fight alongside each other, right, from different parts of the working class that don't often particularly get along and in particular in terms of like, you know, service workers and unhoused people, there is a really systemic effort by the states and by the rights and even they need to buy the done by the Democratic Party too

to pit these groups against each other. But also with trans people, it's like, well, I don't know, like there's also an extent to which, yeah, like if you're a trans person, you are, you know, X number of days away from being that person on the street. And so this has created a fairly unique class position, right, of unbelievable precarity. You know, state-en-forced precarity.

It's obviously not the only, right, class position in the U.S. of, like, legally mandated precarity. You can look at undocumented workers who have even more genocidal shit happening against them right now in terms of just like, yeah, no, yeah, there's just ice rounding people up.

But what has been produced here is this incredibly precarious class with, like, down the remobil workers. And it's also worth noting that like to some extent, this is a deliberate strategy of the right. Like this is what the right wants. You know, if you look at like the rise of neoliberalism, you look at Reagan, you look at Thatcher, right?

One of the big things that they are about in this era is control over gender and control over social reproduction. This is one of the things, you know, if you look at how these people come to power, they come to power on the back of very, very, you know, very important. very right-wing social movements, right? That are, you know, in the U.S., it's like the, you know, the sort of like the rise of the evangelicals who,

one of their big things, right, one of the things that they're interested in is suppressing queer people specifically, right? But you can look at this in other contexts, too, where, you know, you can look at China in the 1980s as the beginning of sort of the reform period is starting when you start to see the return of

capitalism to China. In 1980, you get the one child, policy. I'm going on a little bit of a tangent here, but something I don't think is really acknowledged in the way that people think and talk about China, which is that the one child policy was not a thing from the Maoist period. This was the reformers, right? Deng Xiaoping is in power when this goes into effect, right? And when it's like written into the Constitution, like, this is Deng Xiaoping. This is, this is, you know, the sort of pro-capitalist reform movement that is imposing the one-child policy on people. In the U.S., you also have, like, restrictions on a

are sort of part and parcel of the rights attempt to expand capitalism, because control over the family, control over, you know, social reproduction, the production of new workers and the ability for people to continue to be workers for the capitalist system, that's something that is important to them, right? And the maintenance of right-wing gender roles is something that is important for them to be able to reproduce their ideology and also reproduce capital in general. And so they came after us. But on the other hand, right, you know, as much as we have been targeted by the right, trans people have also, as I sort of talked about a bit at the beginning of this episode, been overrepresented in just every leftist social movement for the past

like two decades, right? Everything from like union organizing to mutual aid to like who shows up in the street to protest to like blocks from like occupied. to the uprising, right? There are trans people in all of these social movements in extremely key roles. And the only real way for this not to happen is when trans people are specifically driven out of these movements. And that happens a lot, right?

Like, that's also, like, one of the things that you experience being a trans, like, worker, is that, you know, people who are transphobic in the left will run you out of the shit that you're doing. Usually, I say usually, because sometimes they are, you are explicitly push off for being trans. Usually there's like some other excuse that's found to do this.

But, you know, even with how much, you know, like persecution of trans people there have been in the social movements, like trans people still show up for it, right? You know, they take just sort of a random example, right? Friend of the show, Vicky Austroiswile, was the facilitator of the first Occupy meeting in New York, right? We're just, we're just always there. We have always been there. We've been there everywhere and we will continue to be there in all of these movements. in the anti-ice movements in, I say movements,

because like this is true in like the 2018 anti-ice movement. It's true in the current anti-ice movement. It was true in the student encampments in 2024. And there's a reason for this. And the reason for this, to a large extent, is that very precarity, right? If you are going to be trans, especially now, you have no choice but to fight.

If you want to exist, if you want to have access to your healthcare, if you want to be upgraded to the status of mere proletarians, if you want your life to just merely, merely be the life of a cis worker, which is significantly less fucked than your life is, you have to fight. And this is something that is also spread to some extent by sort of transculture, I would say broadly, but also just like the kind of social groups that form.

And also it's spread, and this is particularly something you see. in unions a lot, right? We've talked a lot in the show about trans people being overrepresented in unions. It's like, well, we're overrepresented in unions because we're workers, right? And this is in some sense the potential of what the right has wrought, right? Which is that they have created this extremely large population of trans service workers and trans refugees who have nothing to lose but their chains and a world to win. Slightly elsewhere in the manifesto, So Marx writes, what the bourgeoisie produce above all are its own grave diggers. And if you look out at the world in 2026, you can see the graves being dug.

The question is who is going to be buried there? The capitalist class would very much like it to be us. I, for one thing, don't want to fucking be buried in a mass grave. and if we're going to put something in that grave, better it be the class system itself. And that's a world worth fighting for, a world where there are no grave diggers, where there are no mass graves,

where the state and the landlord don't throw you on the street in the night, where you can live in your community and not be run out. When you have your health care and you are able to be the person that you want to be. And that world is winnable. All that is left is to fight for it. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Joy is essential and it's also elusive. But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotbi.

If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Listen to Joy 101 on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS. My first guest is Terence Hilton, Shakira, Luke and Yerrin. Have surprises. Many surprises.

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