Women at Work - There’s More to Gender Than “Man” and “Woman”

Episode Date: May 27, 2019

Thinking of gender as man/woman and masculine/feminine leaves out a lot of people. We talk about the problems the gender binary causes at work and get advice on how to support transgender and nonbinary colleagues. Guest: Lily Zheng. Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at Work. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Gallo. I'm Nicole Torres. And I'm Amy Bernstein. On our podcast, we talk a lot about gender bias and how it affects women's experiences at work. But what about people who don't present as the gender they were assigned at birth, or who dress and act more feminine some days and other days more masculine? Research shows that people who don't conform to the gender binary struggle. They are often treated poorly by their managers or HR, and are even shut out of the workforce

altogether. And yet, more and more people are expressing their authentic gender identity at work. And by challenging the traditional norms, they are also challenging gender bias. We draw on these boxes for stereotypes. And so if I know that I treat men one way and I treat women another way, how do I treat you who's non-binary? How do I treat this person who's a gender that I've never even heard of? And in a perfectly equal society, I don't think this would be a problem. That's our guest expert, Lily Zhang. I interviewed her while I was at a conference for women a couple months ago.

She's studied the workplace experiences of people who identify as trans, non-binary, gender fluid, or gender diverse in some other way. Lily teamed up with the sociologist, Alison Ash Fogarty, to analyze interviews Alison had done with people in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of people's experiences were negative. A freelance architect said clients wouldn't hire her after she transitioned.

A veterinarian said a manager outed them as trans to their colleagues. A writer said they left their newspaper job and journalism after colleagues wouldn't use their preferred pronouns. Lily and Allison wrote a book that draws on stories from 25 interviews. It's called Gender Ambiguity in the Workplace, Transgender and Gender Diverse Discrimination. You know, for researchers, it's a gold mine, right? I'm not surprised that researchers like studying trans people. And as a trans person who was a researcher, there was so much content there. We could explore that for days. But oftentimes the material benefits of this research never makes it to the trans people who we talk to, which is why this book was so

important for me. Because if it had not become a book, we would have done all this research and found all these things and it would have sat on some dusty corner of the internet forever. Lily now brings those research findings to organizations. She leads workshops about gender identity and expression. She also helps leaders develop policies that are inclusive and welcoming for all employees, regardless of how they identify. I do all of this so that trans people

can have a shot at life in some respect, right? So that trans people can earn the money and have the basic dignity to exist in this world. Where does all this discrimination, all this hatred for trans folks come from? I'd just say the gender binary. And what I mean by that is that in our society, we have these very, these very rigid ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman. And we've built boxes around each of these ideas. And so how to look or not to look, how to act or not to act, how to feel or not to feel. Men are punished for crying, for

example. Women are punished for being agentic and taking charge. And what trans people do is they show how all of these boxes are arbitrary and they show how the boundaries of these boxes can in fact be broken. And that's really scary because what many cisgender people do and cisgender people being people that identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. What many cisgender people do is they've adapted to these ideas, these really restrictive ideas about manhood and womanhood by conforming to them. And while that's a fine survival strategy, oftentimes it's unconscious. People don't realize all the ways in which they crunch themselves up to fit society's definition of gender.

And so when cisgender people see trans people that challenge these boxes, there's often a very visceral feeling of discomfort or even threat. It's this underlying idea of, well, if this person could have responded to the same things by doing these things and by breaking the boxes, by pushing the envelopes, by being themselves, why can't I do that too? And that raises in an instant all of these uncomfortable feelings about gender and identity and authenticity and compromise. And it's uncomfortable. It's very uncomfortable. And one of the ways, unfortunately, that cisgender people can resolve this dissonance is by pushing trans people back so that cisgender people feel more comfortable. And that's the basis for a lot of the prejudice and discrimination. It's not blind hate.

It's more a discomfort arising from how is it that you can experience gender in such a different way from how I've had to force myself to fit into these boxes. I want to make sure I'm understanding because what it sounds like is you're saying in a way it's jealousy. That trans people are doing something that most of us cisgender people wish we could. Is that right? Yeah, I think that's what I would say. I don't think it's explicit. And I think in some way, all of us really do want to experience gender authentically. All of us do want to push the boundaries of what it is we can and can't do. And this isn't to say that cisgender people are all, you know, uncomfortable with their gender. In fact, many are. But I think trans people raise the possibility of options existing for

people that never thought that there could be options before. And that can be a deeply liberating experience to see someone and go, wow, I could do that too. And that can be a deeply liberating experience to see someone and go, wow, I could do that too. And that can be a deeply uncomfortable experience as well. And so we see this kind of binary of experiences, right? Like when I first saw a trans person in my life, like my first thought was, oh no, right? Like, I don't want to know that that's possible because then I could be that. And I had the same visceral discomfort that I think many people do. And it's just a matter of familiarity. I think once you meet more trans people, you know more trans people, you start realizing that it's just a variation on the same sorts of experience that

all of us have. What happens at work when a trans person or even a cisgender person doesn't conform to gender norms. So what happens in the workplace when trans people exist in a way that doesn't conform is that usually the workplace takes steps to correct it. And so what I mean by the workplace is I mean the apparatus, the machine, everything. Every individual employee plays a part. Every HR professional plays a part. Basically, people work together, unfortunately, to reinforce these gender roles and to correct what they see as someone who's misstepping. And so we saw all of these kinds of experiences in the research that we did. We saw experiences of trans people that were perceived to be women but not doing it right. And so other women would step in and be like,

no, no, no, this is how to do it right, honey. You don't understand what you're doing. This is how to apply your makeup. You need to do it like this. And we saw all of these types of discrimination experiences because oftentimes trans people weren't asked. They weren't asked whether they wanted to be coached or apprenticed in this way. There's a term called gender apprenticing that we describe in our book. And this sort of non-consensual coercing of people into these gendered boxes is just one variation of how I think cisgender people do it to themselves all the time, right? You always see men like telling other men to man up and to do certain things and to be certain ways. You see a lot of women also, right, like quote unquote, mentoring other women on how to be the right kind of women in the workplace. And trans people are

just another egregious example of how everyone in the workplace unconsciously works to reinforce these boxes. You mentioned makeup. And as a young person in an organization, one of my mentors told me I needed to start wearing makeup. I hadn't been wearing makeup. And so I did. I have spent a lot of time and money learning how to use makeup, wear makeup. And I recently was recording a video with a woman who did not wear any makeup. And I recently was in recording a video with someone who, a woman who did not wear any makeup. And I had this very visceral reaction where I was angry at her. I started questioning.

I was like, how many thousands of dollars have I spent on makeup? And I didn't have to do it. And I wonder if that is a bit of a parallel for what people feel, what you were describing cisgender people feel when they see trans folks in work. I think that's a perfect example and exactly what I'm talking about. The way in which trans people are policed in the workplace is pretty much the exact same way that cisgender people are policed in the workplace as well. And what I've tried to do with this research is to show, yes, that discrimination against trans people is real, but also that all of this is just a part of how the gender binary enforces itself and how all of us enforce the gender binary on each other. It's not that trans people are this exotic group that experiences these, you know,

very unique forms of discrimination that no one's ever heard of in the world. No, it's more like we have an experience that, for a bunch of reasons, the media has sensationalized. But it all boils down to the fact that all of us are being made to participate in something that we don't really like. And because we've internalized all of this, all of us become the police for each other. I've seen trans people police each other in the exact same way that you just described. And it's done out of this understanding that this is the only way to survive in the world. You have to do this to survive. And so when you see someone that's actually surviving just fine without doing any of these things, you have the exact experience

you talked about. You start questioning, why the hell did I do all that? What have I been doing with my life? I thought I was comfortable with this, but in fact, I was uncomfortable the whole time and just sucked it up because I thought this was how you had to be. But maybe we can all express our gender in more authentic ways, whether or not we call ourselves cis or trans, and experience authenticity no matter what that looks like for our gender identities, for our gender expressions. What are a couple of the ways the workplace experience of trans men and trans women differ? So this is a really interesting one, and I'd like to dive a bit into the research. What we found is that surprisingly, trans men and trans women don't experience treatment on the basis of their identities. They experience treatment on the basis of how others perceive them. And so the trans men that were seen as,

you know, macho masculine men were treated really well. They were afforded almost every single male privilege that they could have gotten, that other cisgender men had. They were inducted into the boys club, if you will. Trans men that were viewed as masculine women were treated completely differently. They were treated as if they were women, but masculine women are treated a little better than feminine women in the workplace, so they were treated somewhat well as well. But then there were some trans men that were treated as feminine men, and feminine men weren't actually treated that well in the workplace. Other men put them down. Other men policed their genders. For trans women, some people saw trans women as deviant men, and they received the worst treatment out of anyone who we talked to because they

weren't being interacted with as women at all. They were being interacted as, you know, cross-dressers because people thought that they were quote-unquote deviant men. And it even hurts to say that, right, because no trans woman wants to be seen that way. But because they were seen that way in the workplace, they experienced so much discrimination and sometimes even violence. Other trans women who, you know, passed as cisgender women were treated like feminine cisgender women. And as we all know, in some workplaces, that's great. In some workplaces, that's not so great. But all of these are just variations on a theme. It just depends on how people perceive trans people to be. And it's so upsetting to me that all this discrimination happens and to some extent is out of our control as

trans people. And this explains so much about why trans people need to constantly manage our appearance in the workplace and manage how other people see us, because the people discriminating against us don't care about what we say we are. They only look at us and decide to make assumptions based on that. So how did the trans women you interviewed talk about their perception of the privilege they had at work before and after they transitioned? Many of the trans women we spoke to described having much better workplace experiences before they transitioned. Many of them described being perceived as cisgender heterosexual men, and many of them identified as cisgender heterosexual men before they realized that they were clearly promoted faster than the other women in their workplace, or where they were given the benefit of the doubt, or no one else would have gotten the benefit of the doubt, and all the classic sort of male privilege things. But what

happened when they realized that they were trans is that things started shifting. Many of them started experimenting with gender in the workplace, and then they were punished in the ways that we've been talking about. We spoke to Alex, I believe, an executive who was treated very, very well. And she dealt with her gender exploration by first painting her nails and growing her hair out. And her boss called her in one day and just said, what's going on? You need to stop doing this. And everyone was staring at her nails in meetings. And suddenly she was really uncomfortable she decided that she couldn't in fact transition in this

workplace because it just wasn't a hospitable environment for her and so she left so we have these very stark binary experiences of you experience privilege in some ways because you're perceived as masculine in some ways you might even identify as masculine but as soon as you start challenging that, you realize that that male privilege is brittle, that it's very fragile, and that you lose it almost immediately as soon as you start foraying into femininity in the workplace. That's kind of what male privilege is in general. It's not meant to be something that is stable. It's because men tear themselves down all the time just to grab male privilege, the smallest liver of it. So you heard from people in your research who don't identify either as a man or a woman

that they felt pressure at work to pick a gender. Why weren't co-workers okay with thinking of them as gender fluid or non-binary? So we spoke to many non-binary people, and the overwhelming experience is that, well, cisgender people don't have room in their concept of gender for people to exist outside the boxes. In fact, people don't even like to think about gender in terms of boxes. And so when non-binary people appear, people that identify as neither men nor women, it draws attention to the fact that there is space outside these boxes. And as we've been talking about, that's deeply uncomfortable because people don't like to

think that there's something else out there. And this affects the workplace because we draw on these boxes for stereotypes. We draw on these boxes to decide how to treat people. And so if I know that I treat men one way and I treat women another way, how do I treat you who's non-binary? How do I treat this person who's a gender that I've never even heard of? And in a perfectly equal society, I don't think this would be a problem. But the reality is our society is very far from equal. And so people struggle to be like, I don't understand how to relate to you. And that's

deeply uncomfortable. In fact, that's threatening. So please pick a box so I can figure out how to even start interacting with you. And you see that when people refuse to pick a box, sometimes people roll with it and they treat them like trash. And other times people will not take no for an answer. There was this one person who we spoke to who was speaking with an interviewer on the phone and the interviewer was like, you need to pick one. And this person was like, I don't really care. Why don't you just pick anyone? And this person was like, no, you need to pick one right now.

And it forced this choice onto this person who in the moment said, oh, I'll pick a woman because maybe I'll get hired more, right? But it was this snap decision that was deeply uncomfortable. And it's because people aren't good at dealing with ambiguity. People aren't good at dealing with something that's neither man nor woman. And for gender fluid folks, it's even worse because it calls attention to the fact that we treat men and women differently. We talked to Rowan, a tech worker who presented more masculine some days and more feminine some other days, and everyone was freaked out.

Everyone was like, oh, no, you need to figure out what's going on, because they were uncomfortable. They figured out that when Rowan was presenting feminine, everyone treated them worse. And then when they presented masculine, everyone treated them better. And people were aware that this was happening, and that made them deeply uncomfortable. Of course, Rowan was more uncomfortable,

but it drew attention to the fact that gender inequity existed in the workplace, and no one wanted to talk about that. And so all of these things are kind of wrapped up in the way in which non-binary and gender-fluid folks exist in the workplace, and we're just not ready to have that conversation. Or at least the folks who we talked to described workplaces that weren't ready to have that conversation. I was really struck in your book by the experiences of the butch women, in particular because of what you were just talking about around how it highlighted the gender bias that exists in most workplaces. Can you tell me a little bit about what you found interesting in those experiences? Sure. So basically what we found in the research

was that butch women or masculine women experienced pretty good workplace outcomes. Butch women received less discrimination, received more invitations into men's spaces. And the way in which they achieved this is because their masculine outside appearance in some way legitimized their more, let's just call it, agentic masculine, quote unquote, behavior. And so where in the past, if you have a feminine woman who's taking charge in the workplace, you'd call her a bitch. But for these butch women that presented in more masculine ways, it was almost as if that outward appearance made it easier for them to be more confident and to take charge.

And so they had really good workplace experiences up to a point, which is very interesting. We found that there was this thing which we coined the butch ceiling, which was this idea that the more butch you get, the better you get treated in the workplace until you're so butch that you might get mistaken for a man. Because then the men in charge don't see you as someone that's like a proto man or someone that's close to a man. They see you as someone that could actually replace them or someone that's vying for their manhood for some reason. And of course, butch women don't actually care about this at all. It's just a projection that men have in the workplace. But when they experience this, they suddenly turn tail and they respond with violence, with discrimination. We saw this

experience with Jordan, who presented very masculine in the workplace in such a way that made their co-workers super uncomfortable, and they responded with death threats of all things. And so we found this super fascinating because even presenting in more masculine ways for women isn't a surefire strategy. In fact, it's backfiring because what butch women were made to do in the workplace is to testify against other feminine women. They were brought into men's spaces and men would joke around with these butch women and delegitimize and sexualize other more feminine women in the workplace. And butch women were put in this position where they had to sell out, if you will, other women to keep their status with these men in the workplace. It's dirty. It's really turning

women against each other. And so while butch women had really good outcomes for themselves as individuals, we really explored the fact that ultimately buying into patriarchy benefits nobody. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Hey listeners, if you want to hear from more leaders to help you answer questions like,

should I talk about my anxiety at work? Or how do I claim my leadership power? Then you should listen to TED Business, hosted by Columbia Business School professor Madhupe Akinnola. The show features TED Talks about everything from setting smart goals to the latest on DEI in business, followed up with a mini lesson from Mudupe on how to apply these lessons in your own life. Listen to TED Business wherever you get your podcasts. We've talked a lot about the impact of the discrimination on the trans person.

We haven't quite talked about the financial impact though. Can you explain what you saw in your research and what you see in others research about the financial impact of the discrimination? It's crippling, honestly. What we saw is not that trans people took a hit to their paycheck upon being out in the workplace. Many did. I believe it was Robin that worked in a union where once she transitioned, she saw a huge cut to her salary, and she provided numbers as well. So we got a great case study of how much money you lose when you transition. But the more insidious outcome of all this is we saw so many of the folks we talked to turn to entrepreneurship. And while that sounds great, right? I love trans entrepreneurs. We're

great. Like there were so many folks that had creative ideas for how to start their own businesses. When you dive into the stories, it turns out none of this was by choice. They literally could not get employment anywhere. It wasn't underemployment, it was unemployment. Nobody wanted to hire them. In some case, a headhunter said to one of the people who we talked to, no one will hire you because you are trans. No recruiter wants to put forth a candidate with deficiencies, end quote. And so when you're faced with that sort of environment, trans people get systematically excluded from working life. Trans people don't have any role in the labor market under these kinds of conditions of discrimination. And so we saw this over and over and over again,

trans people being slowly and systematically pushed out of working life to begin with. I was struck by a line early in your book where you say that the vast majority of people don't adhere to prototypical gender norms. I'm sure many of our listeners don't identify with those norms. So what do you think the experience of trans, non-binary, gender fluid people can teach us about the risks and benefits of challenging gender norms in the workplace. I think one of the biggest lessons is that you can't challenge gender norms by yourself. The costs are enormous. And for example, when trans people transition publicly in the workplace, they often do so by themselves. You don't usually see a group of three or four trans people all group transitioning, though that'd be pretty cool.

And the costs are really high. Oftentimes they are made into martyrs. And unfortunately, cis people and other trans people who might be closeted learn the wrong lesson. One of the folks who we spoke to saw another trans woman in her workplace transition. And as a result, that trans woman's career prospects tanked. Her promotion was never granted to her. Her career track just ended right there, and she couldn't go anywhere. She didn't get fired, right?

But that wasn't a very heartening prospect for this individual. And so what I would say is I want cis people to take away from this. You can challenge gender, but you all need to challenge gender. Stop waiting for trans people to do it because we're martyring ourselves. And it would actually be much easier for trans people to do it if cis people did it too. If more cis people in the workplace said, oh, I'm going to present myself super butch. And your employer would ask, oh, are you trans? You're like, no, I just want to be butch, right? The more we see this kind of gender non-conformity from cis people, the more accepted it's going to be for trans and gender diverse people to do the same thing. The more it's going to be apparent that

trans and gender diverse people are just a variation on the same sorts of experiences that cis people have. There's no reason why cis people can't challenge gender. In fact, cis people are better positioned to challenge gender than trans people are because cis people are punished less for it. It's incredibly remarkable in the way that trans people highlight how severe gender bias is, I think that's also an incredible view into privilege. Yeah, totally. I think, again, trans people shine a spotlight on everything, and we pay for it very dearly, I would say. Trans women experience some of the most violence in this country, especially black and brown trans women. Almost all of the trans murders that have happened in the last, I don't know how many years, have been black or brown trans women. We have an

epidemic in our communities. Black trans women in particular are killed at much higher rates than any other population in the U.S. And so we need to be creating a world that is better for trans women. We can't let the trans women martyr themselves over and over and over again to teach us a lesson. And so what I do with my work is to take this research into spaces and to be the visible trans woman so that other trans women in the workplace don't have to do it. Because every trans woman that speaks up in the workplace makes herself into a martyr all the time. And every trans man and every non-binary person, they put their experiences and their stories on the line and give up their privacy to make workplaces better. And it's deeply selfless work. And it's,

it's, I value it so much, but I've made this my life's work because I don't want people to keep burning themselves out for the greater good anymore. And I hope folks read this book so that they can learn these stories so that we don't have to keep throwing ourselves on the line to put it bluntly to help cis people get it. Let's talk about the balance a little bit because you're saying there's a balance for trans people between being authentic and being safe, and there's also a balance between doing what's right for the individual and doing what's right for the trans community. How do you advise trans people to think about those two balances? Yeah, it's a great question. I think something that we benefit from today is the fact that there's so many people doing this work. There's so many trans people doing this work. And I mentioned that because it's important that we realize not every trans person has to do this work. And in the past, I think when folks were feeling more isolated,

it felt like the world was on your shoulders. You were the only trans person you know. Of course, you need to advocate. Of course, you need a trailblaze so that every trans person that comes after you can have an easier time. But what that did is it, like I said, it made martyrs of everyone. Everyone burned themselves out for the movement. And because of their sacrifices and because of their work today, we don't need to do that. We have organizations across the country working on trans issues. We have many trans people in the spotlight, Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, other very famous trans people working on these issues. And for the trans people considering coming out, I think times are different. And I would advise any trans person that's thinking of coming out

to say how much of this is for you and how much of this is because you feel like you have an obligation. And center yourself first. Your safety is more important. And if anything, the people who came before you gave up their safety so that you could have yours. And being connected to our history as trans people allows us, I think, to take care of ourselves better and to not keep repeating this endless, we need to hurt ourselves and martyr ourselves for the movement, because there are organizations that do this every day. I really want to fight for a world where trans people don't have to fight for anything eventually. And I think other trans people doing the same work that I'm doing would

say similar things. So I think for young trans folks, for trans folks coming out, for older trans folks who are just considering it, I would say chill and help out if you can, but there are so many people doing this work today. And to some extent, maybe just leave it to us. Like we are, we've made this our life's work. And if trans people can sleep easy thinking that they don't have to do this stuff, like, that keeps me going. In the second part of my conversation with Lily, we talk about what managers and peers can do to help out their transgender and gender diverse colleagues. My experience in the workplace when I wasn't working for myself as a consultant was wholly contingent on having a good supervisor, a good boss, a good manager that got it and could support me. And that made the biggest difference. In many ways, it doesn't even matter where I was working because that manager was everything. What specifically did your manager do that made you feel included and supported? So I didn't care that my manager gendered me correctly every single time.

I cared that my manager would make a mistake and then correct it. That made the biggest difference for me. And I did have managers that do that. I had managers that misgendered me in front of everyone and it hurt and it was awful and it broke my heart because I really liked them. So I talked to that manager and I said, this was awful. And they said, you're right. That was awful. I hurt you. That was terrible. I should never have done that. But I did do that. I'm sorry. How can I get better? And I said, just don't misgender me. And they said, all right. And they didn't. Right. So the key characteristic here is not to have a manager that's perfect, because I think managers, I work with managers a lot. They're very scared of being held to these standards of never messing up because managers are people, people mess up.

The most important trait here is that managers can embrace failure and actually learn from it and to actually change their behavior from it. And that managers can listen to trans people when trans people express their needs and follow through on what it is that trans employees ask for. That's what I think the most important characteristics of good managers that I've had are. I think managers are very invested in doing right by their people, at least good managers. And that's not always easy to do. Do you have any specific advice for managers who might be managing someone who's gender diverse or trans about how they can do right by them. I think the most important thing for managers at the end of the day is ask.

It's very simple. Ask your gender diverse employees how you can help. Suggest some ways in which you can help. So say, hey, I know you might be interested in reaching out to HR. I have a contact there if you want to reach out to them. And let me know if that's something that interests you. That's it. And so if the employee reaches out, then you help them. If they don't, you don't help them. And you might say during your first one-on-one,

hey, I want to help you have the best workplace experience you can. Is there anything that's on your mind, any way that I can help you out? And that's it. If they say, no, there's nothing, then you say, great, then there's nothing. I really hesitate to say, these are the five things that you should always do, because there are no five things you should always do for your gender diverse employees. Because the whole point of gender diverse is that their genders are very diverse. And why am I going to give you one way to interact with all of them? Just ask. And also, we just talked about failure, about getting it wrong. Be humble when you get it wrong. And it's not if you get it wrong, it's when you get it wrong. And this applies to anything in the diversity and inclusion space, not just gender.

It applies to race and class and sexuality and etc. You're going to stumble. Everyone stumbles. Instead of trying to be perfect and to have a list of words you shouldn't say, right, though there is a list of words you shouldn't say, you should learn from your mistakes and address harm that's been done. And you will do harm, right? You will hurt your direct reports. They will probably do things to hurt each other too. And so we need to recognize that the best way to manage is one that acknowledges harm and moves forward to embrace your employees' needs. So what are the things you shouldn't do? Don't use the T-slur. Don't say shemale. Don't misgender your employees, even as a joke.

Just don't make any transphobic jokes. Don't gender police even playfully. Gender policing being commenting on how people look or dress, etc. Don't ask personal questions. Many times managers feel like, oh, this trans person's transitioning. When are you going to get this surgery? And like, you wouldn't ask anyone when they're going to get genital surgery. Like that's just not a workplace question you ask, you know? And so don't do that. There's plenty of other things I can think about, but that's off the top of my head. Great. So let me ask you, have you ever had a manager who did something, you mentioned that you had a manager who misgendered you in front of other people. Was there anything else egregious or really harmful that a manager did that you would advise other managers to avoid?

So something that happened to me was that somebody misgendered me. Whatever. It's normal. I corrected them. Also normal. And they spent the next 10 minutes apologizing. And that was not good. And so they just constantly said, sorry, sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I'm so sorry I didn't mean it I really didn't mean it I hope you don't think I meant it I'm so sorry and like it just

went on and what ended up happening was I had to be their therapist I had to say no it's okay it's all right everything's going to be fine I don't hate you everything's gonna be okay and they're like are you sure are you sure I'm so I didn't. I'm not a bad person. I didn't mean it. And it just went on. And I was like, when will this stop? Please stop. Please stop apologizing now. So the first misgendering wasn't really that bad. You have now made it bad by whatever this performance is right now. I get it. You're not a bad person. But, you know, oftentimes people feel like they need to defend themselves against doing harm. But I think you should just suck it up. You're going to hurt people. Like, that's fine. Like, not to say that it's OK to hurt people all the time, but it happens. So own it. Say you're sorry. Do better in the future.

That's all trans people want. We don't need like a groveling apology. In fact, it makes it worse. And so that experience was awful. And I had to tell this person next time, look, if you keep responding like this, when I correct you, I won't correct you. Me correcting misgendering is a courtesy to you. I'm letting you know that I trust you enough to get better. If you keep doing this, I'm just not going to trust you enough to get better and just ignore you when you misgender me and not be friends with you. Right? I'm a big girl. I can make my own decisions and I'm not going to trust you enough to get better and just ignore you when you misgender me and not be friends with you. Right. I'm a big girl. I can make my own decisions and I'm not going to choose to subject myself to whatever it is you just did. And this person had like this moment. They were like, oh, I'm sorry. And I looked at them and I was like, just one. I'm sorry. And they were like, understood. Won't do it again.

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What do you do if you find out HR is against you or at least not even supportive? So this is where we start getting into the suboptimal strategies of the book when you're in a situation where it's kind of a lose-lose, and it's about damage control rather than finding the best solution. I don't like that I have to talk about these things, but the reality is for many trans people, survival matters more than anything else. And so yeah, when HR is your enemy, you are going to have a really tough time. The only thing I can recommend is if it's not reasonable to get out of that workplace, you need to find a manager that's willing to be your shield. If you don't have that manager, you need to transfer to a position that can have a manager or supervisor that can be that person for you. Because HR is not going to have your back. If your manager discriminates against you, HR can't do anything.

Even if you have a great HR sometimes, your manager can go through them. Some stories that we covered in the book, they talked about their manager being discriminatory towards them. And when they reported it to HR, HR tried to reprimand the manager, but the manager could fire one of the HR people. I don't understand what that company was like, but that manager just replaced the HR employee that decided to reprimand him. And so ultimately, the manager is at the root of everything. If HR is terrible, you need a shield. You need to find a manager that's on board. And barring that, if possible, please leave.

If you cannot leave, this is where you start to do some of the less good strategies, right? You might choose to hide your identity in the workplace. You might choose not to interact with people. You might choose to minimize client or customer interactions to minimize the potential for reports. I don't like that I have to recommend any of this, but these are the real survival strategies that people have to use. And when we start talking about workplaces that are very, very far behind, these strategies become life or death. And how sustainable are those strategies, hiding your identity or trying to avoid interaction

with certain groups of people? They're not. They're terrible. I would never recommend them to anyone who had any better choice. I think the reality is, though, that many trans people in many workplaces do this every day, all the time. Many trans people don't have the luxury of working in a workplace that has any sort of HR policy around non-discrimination. Many trans people don't even live in states with non-discrimination policies to begin with. And so these strategies become commonplace.

You see many trans people living a double life and kind of going to work as one gender, and then in their social life being another gender, and that works for some people. None of this is optimal, right? None of this is the way in which we want trans people to be living. But it works for some folks. They survive in spite of everything. And so I would just say, do what you need to do to survive in spite of everything. Hopefully the folks that are working on this stuff in terms of national policy and state level policy can get their act together and make changes happen. But I'm not going to ask trans employees to put themselves on the line, right, in the hopes that someone in Washington is going to do something, right? Just do what you need

to do to get through the day. Do what you need to do to get your paycheck, pay your rent, like, survive. Like, that's the most important thing. So I have one last question. If one of your colleagues comes out as transgender, how can you make them feel comfortable? So make them is a very interesting choice of words because you can't ever make anyone feel comfortable. But like I said earlier, you can always ask. You can say, what are you experiencing doing these 10 things. Would any of these things benefit you at all? So you can say, would you be interested if our workplace like invested in like little gender placards for our desks? And they might say no, but they might say yes. But the most important thing is to not foist them on the trans person. You don't say, all right, you're trans, right? So here are the five things that I'm going to do to like make you feel good in this workplace. And like maybe they might be a trans person that actually doesn't want any visibility at all

and doesn't want anyone to ever talk about them being trans. So the best thing you can do is nothing, right? But you won't know this until you ask them. So yeah, treat your trans colleagues like colleagues and ask them about things. This is my default canned answer to any D&I thing, right? It just comes down to don't do the small list of like aggressively not okay things. And then for everything else, right? Ask, talk about it,

talk about what they're going through, and to the extent that you can, offer help. Also, realize that sometimes you're not the person that's going to make the biggest difference, right? Maybe the trans person in that workplace really needs a good transition policy from HR, and if you're not HR, then like you can't do anything about that. Or maybe if you're friends with HR, you can advocate for them. But again, it's just a matter of asking what you can do and being okay with whatever answer you get. Before we close, I just have to tell you a story that I was picking up my daughter from school and I asked another mom how she was doing.

And she said, oh, I'm not doing well. It's been really chaotic. It's been really hard. And I said, mom how she was doing, and she said, oh, I'm not doing well. It's been really chaotic. It's been really hard. And I said, what's going on? And she said, well, I think we're shifting to the matriarchy, and it's just going to be complete chaos for a while. And I was like, this is such a refreshing pickup conversation, and I just loved that feeling that it's okay to be uncomfortable. It's okay that this doesn't feel settled and okay. And this shift is going to be hard for all of us.

Yeah, it's going to be really, really difficult. And I haven't even talked about the non-binary revolution, but that's going to be huge, right? Like none of our workplaces are prepared for this. Like we're very barely getting a handle on trans people transitioning in very binary scripted ways, right? What are we going to do when Gen Z is like 50% non-binary and genderqueer? None of us are ready for this.

Like there's a whole book on this topic, honestly. But yeah, I think things are going to be pretty tumultuous, as they always have been. But we'll get through it somehow, like we always have. We'll get through it together. Yeah, we will. Lily, thank you so much. This has been such a helpful conversation for me,

and I hope it will be for our listeners too. Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me. This was lots of fun. Lily and I were both at this conference for women in San Jose, California. It was about 7,000 women there. And it was an interesting place to interview someone about gender diversity because it was a interesting place to interview someone about gender diversity

because it was a woman-specific conference. And after the interview, Lily and I went back to the conference area. We went and saw Serena Williams speak. I got to see Lily on her panel later that day about diversity and inclusion. And I have to say my entire view of the experience was changed so I sort of felt like she had put new glasses on me or had taken off glasses I'd been wearing and I just walked around looking at people very differently sort of who's conforming to gender boxes who's you know who's breaking those who's challenging them we actually were sitting

lily and i were sitting at watching serena williams speak and they posted this slide about women who live with men and you know lily turned whispered to me but what if you're a woman who lives with a woman and i said and what and what about the binary? And she said, the binary is everywhere. We're not going to avoid that. So it was just, it was, it was both enlightening and also it made me a little shaky. Like I felt like my view of the world had been quite different walking out of that. Had you subscribed to the, to the tyranny of the binary before that? Gosh, completely without even realizing it. I mean, I think that was the shaky part. It was less that everything was so new and it was more sit in airports and I'll just look at people and say, I wonder how much their gender expression is a choice. Right.

And I also notice how my brain quickly categorizes man, woman. And if it can't categorize, it sticks like a record getting stuck. And it's like, what's happening there? What's happening there? When you talk about the binary, though, is it it's not just man, woman. It's also is it masculine feminine i think in my head it had been men man woman but i'm starting to think about it a little differently now as a result of the interview i don't what what has the binary been in your view i think it had been i the same, but I had always seen this hard line between what is masculine and what is feminine.

And I have seen and kind of experienced a fluidity between those two things, but I still see them as kind of these binary, these opposite expressions. And so listening to your interview with Lily also made me think about those boxes. You know, there's a masculine box and a feminine box and you can ascribe to one or the other. But I think it can be much more fluid. Yeah. Like I was thinking about how I, all my friends know this, I have this obsession with trousers and I like wearing suits and I try to wear suits like whenever I can. You know, it's a more masculine expression, I guess. And it's a conscious choice to be seen a certain way. Maybe it's transgressive or like I think fun and playful, but maybe also more powerful because it is less feminine. Well, also women can do that without social censure. Men can't, and Lily made that point. Right.

This did make me think, though, if this happens in some places and regions more than others, like I had my coming of age or whatever in New York where I felt like lots of people were pushing boundaries all the time in terms of what they wore and how they expressed themselves. So for me, that became normalized fairly early on. And I don't have, you know, experiences of entering the workplace and and, you know, heels were the order of were done around here, which is almost the definition of organizational culture. It's the assumptions about how we express ourselves in this place.

It's the rules of the road. And so that, for me, was sort of one of the central questions in your interview with Lily, because what Lily was saying to you, Amy, made me think that, you know what, we cannot walk into any relationship in the workplace with assumptions. We really have to identify as either. And we're going to have to figure out there are going to be more people who are not going to identify as either, and we're going to have to figure out how to deal with that in corporate America. That's our show. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Nicole Torres.

And I'm Amy Gallo. Our producer is Amanda Kersey. Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz. Maureen Hoke is our supervising editor. We get technical help from Rob Eckhart. Erica Truxler makes our discussion guides. J.M. Olajars is our Copy Editor. And thanks to Sarah Shuey for recording my interview with Lily.