In April 2012, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ( EEOC ) determined in the case Macy v. Holder that transgender and gender non-conforming people are a protected class under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects people based on sex.
This EEOC ruling was affirmed by numerous court decisions, the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice. These federal entities findings make it illegal to discriminate against transgender and gender non-conforming people across the country despite some state and local municipalities lack of employment protections for these individuals.
According to the EEOC site "the commission has obtained approximately $6.4 million in monetary relief for individuals, as well as numerous employer policy changes, in voluntary resolutions of LGBT discrimination charges under Title VII since data collection began in 2013."
President Obama's Executive Order 1148, enacted in July 2014, took this ruling a step further. It explicitly forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in both federal agencies and private firms who receive federal contracts.
Despite these national employment protections, a number of transgender and gender non-conforming people have either not gotten hired, been denied a promotion, were harassed and/or were fired from their jobs, especially transgender and gender non-conforming people of color. This aligns with national trends that show people of color across the board are often discriminated against in hiring and when promotions are considered in favor of white people.
One of the reasons this persists is because employers often ignore the EEOC federal statue in favor of state and local laws which omit LGBTQ people from discrimination protections. Just under half of the states protect against employment discrimination in the public and private sector based on sexual orientation and gender identity. This discrepancy would be eliminated if the Equality Act—that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in all areas including employment—was passed by Congress and signed into law by the president.
Since the EEOC ruling is relatively new, data is still being collected on how many transgender and gender non-conforming people of color have continued to experience negative workplace environments, haven't been hired or were fired.
Among the many transgender and gender non-conforming people of color who've been discriminated against since the EEOC ruling is Austin Fonville of Beaufort County, North Carolina. Fonville—who identifies as a Cuban African-American transgender male, attends community college in nearby Pamlico County, North Carolina and was the school's Student Government Association president last year—told Windy City Times it's only gotten worse since HB2 was signed into law.
"HB2 made my life worse," said Fonville. "It's opened me up to cruelty from my school's board members and pointed a spotlight on me even more than there already was. People have been reluctant to hire me because I may cause them to lose business. Within this small community, there aren't many secrets. It's hard to prove why you don't get a job, but when someone tells you directly, 'Look, I like you but I can't hire you because they won't let me' that says it all.
"I'm in school to be a group counselor, but they make it difficult here for me to offer help to the LGBTQ community. I don't have a criminal record, so there's no reason why I can't get a job. When I apply for jobs, if someone knows me from before, they feel it necessary to inform people of my previous name/pronoun. This can potentially put me in danger. I'm in the process of applying to colleges further north so I can leave this state, because not only have I been targeted, my wife and daughter have as well."
In Sept. 2013, the Movement Advancement Project, the National Center for Transgender Equality ( NCTE ), the Human Rights Campaign and the Center for American Progress put out a report—A Broken Bargain for Transgender Workers. The report included information from the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which "found that the unemployment rate for transgender workers was twice the rate for the population as a whole ( 14 percent compared to seven percent ), with the rate for transgender people of color reaching as high as four times the national unemployment rate."
The survey also found that "24 percent of transgender people in the U.S. identified as people of color, compared to 22 percent of the general population."
Going further, the survey notes transgender people indicating they were denied employment due to their gender identity with the numbers being higher for transgender people of color—47 percent of Latinx, 48 percent of Black and 56 percent of multiracial respondents.
Another finding stated 78 percent of transgender and gender non-conforming employees were harassed in the workplace with transgender people of color having even higher rates of harassment.
According to the survey results, transgender people of color ( other than those identifying as Asian ) were also more likely to report having lost a job than their white transgender counterparts.
This data was complied prior to the EEOC ruling and the recent findings by the Williams Institute at UCLA that showed there are twice as many transgender adults in the U.S. than previously reported—an estimated 1.4 million or 0.6 percent of the total population.
Later this year, the NCTE will release the results of the U.S. Trans Survey, which was conducted in late 2015 and had more than 27,000 respondents. The new survey report will contain data about the workplace experiences of an unprecedented number of transgender people around the nation.
See EEOC.gov, TransEquality.org and LambdaLegal.org .
