New battleground for human rights: the bathroom

For
Joey, a day at the amusement park is fraught with tension. But then, every day
has had its share of difficulties since Joey, born female, started dressing
like the boy he feels he is.

“I
look like a boy, I consider myself a boy,” the 23-year-old SUNY Brockport
undergrad says. But because he has not started hormone treatments and is still
biologically female, Joey — who asked that his female name not be printed —
uses women’s restrooms if he can’t find a unisex bathroom.

Last
summer a woman pulled a knife on him in the changing room at a local amusement
park. He was changing out of his boardshirt and beater, worn in layers to
conceal his breasts. “Some lady with a 13-year-old daughter started screaming,
‘You don’t belong here,'” Joey says. She took out a knife and Joey left. Fast.

Public
bathrooms are undoubtedly the most dangerous places for transgendered people.
As a result, a fledgling movement to increase the number of gender-neutral
bathrooms is gaining momentum, as is awareness of transgender issues and
rights.

Students
at a handful of universities have made the news in the past year demanding
gender-neutral bathrooms and locker rooms. But the media has been strangely
silent about the real forefront of what might well be the next major social
revolution. Quietly — without rallies or lobbyists, without petitions or any
of the traditional tools of rights movements — an unlikely ally is
championing transgender rights: corporate America.

“Transgender”
is a catch-all phrase that includes post-operative transsexuals, people
transitioning between sexes, and gender queers. Gender queers don’t identify
themselves as either strictly male or female. Although no one knows how many
transgendered people there are — or if their numbers are even growing — in
recent years more young people are expressing their gender identity outside of
traditional male/female categories.

“More
and more young people don’t want to be put in a box,” says Pam Barres, director
of the Rochester Transgender Group. “Traditionally, you picked a gender and
went almost stereotypically in that direction. That’s not happening now with
young people.”

The
topic of bathroom safety comes up more often now according to Toby Greenfield,
youth services director at the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley. “It’s tough
for kids to constantly worry about that kind of stuff, constantly deciding
which bathroom to go in,” he says. “Either way they can be caught off guard and
made to feel uncomfortable.”

There’s
a wide spectrum of transgender appearance, Barres says. “There are people who
are transitioning from male to female or vice versa, or who may never have
completed surgery. Their plumbing might not be appropriate plumbing for the
sign on the [bathroom] door,” she says. “When people are first switching from
one gender to another, they don’t look male or female.” And gender queers don’t
fit easily into either category, Barres says.

Transgendered
students at a few schools, such as the University of Chicago and Wesleyan, have
persuaded their administrations to designate gender-neutral bathrooms. No such
steps have been taken at the University of Rochester or SUNY Brockport,
according to school representatives and campus gay rights activists. A
spokesperson at Brockport was unfamiliar with the issue and terminology. He
later reported that gender identity had never been raised with student advisors,
the residential life office, the department of public safety, or the
president’s office.

Twenty-five
miles away at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the situation is somewhat
better. Transgender rights are so important to President Al Simone that he
mentioned them in a community address last fall. RIT has added several dozen
new unisex bathrooms in the past year to accommodate the school’s handful of
transgendered students. And Simone is encouraging RIT’s governance groups to
add “gender identity and gender expression” to the school’s anti-discrimination
policy.

When
asked if some of the university’s more stodgy board members will go along with
the policy change, Simone admits it might be hard for some, but that’s no
reason not to forge ahead. “I don’t claim to understand why [transgendered]
people feel the way they do,” Simone says, “but just because I don’t understand
it doesn’t mean I can’t respect it.”

At first
glance these
might seem like cutting-edge changes in an era when Republicans rule the roost
and gay marriage can’t seem to get a break. But corporations have been much
more progressive than schools in protecting and accommodating transitioning
employees, according to Todd Plank, community relations and outreach
coordinator at Gay Alliance of Genesee Valley. In fact, several area companies
have been so successful in supporting their transgendered employees they’ve won
local and national attention for their efforts.

With
collective consciences raised by roughly a decade of diversity training and the
advent of employee networks — groups of workers who gather to discuss issues
important to blacks, women, Hispanics, and the GLBT community, etc.,
respectively — corporate America is putting its money where its diversity
statement is.

Plank
holds up Kodak, in particular, as a company with an excellent reputation in the
GLBT community. Kodak’s internal employee handbook offers guidelines for those
changing gender. It offers suggestions on how to work with the immediate
supervisor and local human resources person, according to David Kassnoff,
manager of communications and public relations at Kodak.

The
handbook also offers the locations of unisex bathrooms in Kodak Park. “We
acknowledge the fact that restrooms and locker rooms are sensitive issues for
transgender employees and the people they work with,” Kassnoff says. “When
there is a further need, [another] bathroom is designated as unisex.”

In
a company with such diverse workspaces, there’s no single process for
transitioning employees. Instead, Kassnoff says, the company consults community
experts, such as GAGV and Kodak’s GLBT employee network, Lambda, to tailor
solutions.

Plank
isn’t the only one giving Kodak high marks for its progressive approach. The
company has earned a 100 percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign, a
national advocacy group for the GLBT population, for three years running. HRC’s
three-year-old Corporate Employer Index ranks Fortune 500 companies on specific
accomplishments, such as adding “gender identity and/or gender expression” to
corporate non-discrimination policies and offering diversity training that
includes sexual orientation and/or gender identity and expression in the
workplace.

Until
recently, the only makeup Jeremy could wear comfortably in public was the black and
green smears of camouflage paint he wore as an Airborne Rangers in Afghanistan.
He had enlisted for the same reason many boys join the armed forces — he
thought it would make him a man. But the stakes were higher for Jeremy. Growing
up in Rochester, he had always felt more like a girl than a boy.

In
10th grade his mother, a strict Pentecostal who disapproved of his leanings,
took him to see Saving Private Ryan.
“These are real men,” she told her son. “That got stuck in my brain, that real
men equals soldiers and killing people,” Jeremy, now Jessica — a 22-year-old
pretty, slender woman — said in a recent phone interview. He enlisted after
high school.

“I
graduated from basic training and I still wanted to be a girl. I thought, ‘What
the heck is wrong with me? Maybe when I graduate Airborne school I’ll be
tougher.’ Same thing.” Then Ranger training. Then sniper training. “I still
wanted to be a girl.” His parents, he knew, would be devastated. Then a close
friend died in combat. Jeremy put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.

“The
bullet was struck by the firing pin,” Jessica said, sounding, for a moment,
like a soldier. “It was just a dead bullet. It’s uncommon.”

Suicide
attempts and suicidal thoughts are a big problem among transgendered people,
Rochester Transgender Group’s Barres says. Barres met Jessica at an RTG meeting
after the former soldier moved back to Rochester recently.

“People
feel they are born in the wrong gender, the wrong sex,” Barres says. “When the
gun misfired she realized it was time to go on with life.”

Later,
back in the States, Jeremy felt renewed and lucky. He threw himself into
learning about his options. He was working at a Best Buy in New Hampshire when
he started hormone replacement therapy to transition to a woman. For the most
part, Jessica says, Best Buy was supportive, going so far as paying for the
first five sessions with a therapist.

Best
Buy, like Kodak, received a 100 percent rating from HRC and participates in Out
and Equal, according to Julie Schlueter, diversity project manager at Best Buy.
Although the company does not track transgendered employees, Schlueter says,
Jeremy is not the first employee to make the switch. In addition to paying for
counseling, in some circumstances the company’s insurance may even pay for
medical expenses incurred during transition.

“There
are an awful lot of ways to state what you’re undergoing. I’m undergoing
hormone replacement therapy,” Schlueter says. “I do it because I had a hysterectomy.
Others do it for other reasons. We don’t sit around splitting hairs.”

Schlueter
was not alone among company spokespeople in taking these issues in stride.

“It
was no big deal, really,” Libby Gallis, marketing manager at Nixon Peabody law
firm, says about an employee’s transition within the past five years. “We did
whatever we had to do to support this person.”

The
employee, who did not want to be interviewed, met with the human resources
director for a year before they decided, together, to announce the transition.
“We hired a clinical social worker with an expertise in transgender issues to
come in and give classes to the employees,” Gallis says.

Did
any of the employees have a difficult time with the situation? “When people get
more information it obviously helps them deal with things,” Gallis says.
“Everyone was very supportive; the person had been with the firm a long time.”

In
response to concerns that some employees, including the transgendered worker,
might not be fully comfortable during transition, a bathroom was designated as
unisex. It was also renovated, Gallis says, “to make sure it was nicer.”

Jeremy wasn’t
so lucky. Despite
Best Buy’s perfect HRC score and sensitive management team, a major obstacle
stood between Jeremy on his journey to becoming a woman: the bathroom.

When
Jeremy first started dressing as Jessica, complete with a padded bra and
makeup, she didn’t “pass.” A picture taken in the early months of hormone
replacement therapy reveals her heart-shaped face, glistening lip gloss, and
incongruous knotty, muscular arms. (A link to an online photo album of her
transition appears in our list of resources.)

“[Best
Buy] said, ‘we support your diversity, we think it’s really cool that you’re
transitioning,'” Jessica says. “‘But you can’t use our bathrooms because you’ll
scare our customers off.'” She had to use the mall bathrooms, where security
guards and customers harassed her. “The looks people shot me,” she says.
“Someone threatened to call the cops and I just sprinted out of there.”

This
anecdote troubles Best Buy’s Schlueter, who is based in the company’s suburban
Minnesota headquarters. “Every top level policy we have has to play out on a
local level,” she says. “We haven’t created messaging at the local level. We
have work to do in seeing that this plays out better. We’re going to formulate
messaging that goes to local HR representatives to ensure that they’re very
clear about doing things differently next time.”

Despite
Schlueter’s best intentions, it’s hard to imagine a big-box retailer, whose
market edge is defined by low prices, will shell out for unisex bathrooms in
all its stores. What, realistically, can Best Buy do? Schlueter suggests that
maybe inclusion, not construction, is the answer.

“[Customers]
might be made to feel uncomfortable by wheelchairs. That doesn’t mean we’re
going to back away from it,” she says. “We need to create an environment where
every employee feels comfortable.”

Other
diversity issues can be trumpeted by corporations publicly and then quietly
swept under the rug. The needs of transitioning employees and their coworkers,
however, require attention and the commitment of a variety of resources. With
these issues affecting a seemingly small percentage of the population, why do
companies bother?

One
of the driving forces behind corporate America’s embrace of this new wave of
diversity is the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which has
had an influence on the 21st century corporation. Now entering its fourth year,
it surveys the top 200 Fortune 500 companies and other large, privately held
corporations. The power it wields is hard to understate. Nearly everyone I
spoke to brought up the HRC Index in explaining why they strive to improve
their treatment of GLBT employees. They also use it as a road map for further
improvements.

“We’re
at where [HRC] wants us to be,” Best Buy’s Schlueter says. “We continue to
follow their suggestions. They ask specific questions in their questionnaire
annually so we understand what best-practice expectations are.”

The
introduction to the Human Rights Campaign’s 2004 Corporate Equality Index
states that it “has helped spur an exponential rise in the number of firms that
protect employees on the basis of gender identity and/or expression.” There’s
been a 347 percent increase in companies that meet this criterion, according to
HRC. Many do it, HRC claims, because they want to earn the 100 percent rating.
It’s become a badge of honor.

Kara
Choquette, manager of corporate relations at Xerox, boasts of several recent
awards the company has won for diversity, including a 100 percent HRC ranking.
“Our diversity statement includes gender identity and gender expression,”
Choquette says. “We take a progressive stance and make a commitment to all
employees that Xerox will provide a supportive environment.”

This
kind of recognition is nice and all, but does it mean anything more than just
another plaque on the wall at corporate headquarters? Absolutely, according to
Xerox’s Choquette. It helps corporations attract and retain employees. “The war
on talent is tough,” she says. “We want to keep the best and brightest.”

Best
Buy’s Schlueter agrees. “Right at the very core of our values is to unleash the
power of people,” she says. “People are how we’re going to win in the
marketplace.” It doesn’t make sense to discriminate against any one group, she
says. “If you’re going to start peeling off which few here and which few there,
we’ll start losing major numbers of people who won’t be Best Buy supporters.”

Kodak’s
Kassnoff offered an example of how its diverse workforce gives the company a
competitive edge. About a decade ago, the black-box 35-mm cameras were doing
well in North American markets, but not in Asia. “It took insight from our
employees in Asia,” Kassnoff says, “to tell us, ‘the camera works fine but it’s
too big for our hands, and we don’t want to hold a bulky black camera, it’s not
stylish.'” Now, he points out, cameras are curvy and come in shiny silver
finishes, “like a big piece of jewelry.” They sell well, he says, in all
markets.

Still,
corporate America has a long way to go toward making transgendered employees
feel supported and safe. The Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Employer Index
lists many companies that are not welcoming to GLBT employees, among them Exxon
Mobil Corp and International Steel Group, which both scored 14 percent, and
ALLTEL, which scored a zero (its closest competitors, BellSouth and Verizon,
each scored 86 percent). And it remains to be seen whether the strides the transgender
community is making will continue at the corporate level, or if universities
will catch up.

We
may be entering a new era based not on feel-good philosophies like doing the
right thing, but driven, rather, by global competition and the “war on talent.”
Even if we aren’t, it’s a brand new day when corporations aspire to serve as
social role models. As Best Buy’s Julie Schlueter said: “We’re all learning and
trying to do the best we can to shape society on how they think of this.”