It is hard for transgender people to get work, but we are all human, and we all have to live and survive. It's not fair that we have to pretend to be somebody that we are not to do the thing that we love. It's like how anybody ever take me seriously? How am I going to be able to put my resume out there and find a job?Some employers don't have an understanding of why not hiring a transgender person is as act of violence. People don't have an understanding when you go into a workplace and there is a transgender person that's there, it becomes a common air over a person, that the person has to fight to defend themselves everyday.
True stories from transgender women:
I was working in a job that was very transphobic. I've been in almost every style of restaurant around the country, and I've encountered it in all of them. I usually describe it as a boys' club. It's a very masculine, heterosexual-drive job. I was living as a male at work, and female outside of work. It raises a high level of anxiety to have to switch back and forth between these two roles. I knew that if I didn't transition, I was gonna die anyway. That's how depressed I was. At the Christmas party that year, I was struck in the face by some of the people that work there, and knocked unconscious. When I came to, I was covered in blood. I was almost ready to give up on life. Out of somewhere deep down, I managed to get the courage to get going again. I basically came to Maine, and I started over with a new life. I came here with nothing except for my car, my clothes and my dog. I actually was few days outside of Maine when I got a message on Facebook from somebody that want me to come work in their restaurant here. I was terrified to work in a restaurant again around that type of atmosphere, and people like that. So, it did take a level of reassuring and building my confidence back up to get me back into a kitchen.
I wanted to be the leading swan in the swan lake. I just fell in love with her. She just very graceful, elegant. I definitely wanted to portray the female role, but ballet in itself is traditional and it's classical, so you have a male and female. They definitely want a gender identity in the ballet world. Expectation did cost me certain roles. One Saturday morning, I came into class and do an introduction for the dance teacher. And he came up to the barre to give me a correction, and then he pulled me off to the side and he told me that I need to tone it down with the makeup, I went against most of, I guess, the protocol for being a male ballet dancer. They got another guy to do the role. It was a good role, and I was upset but I wasn't about to conform.