Do Workplace Gender Transitions Make Gender Trouble?

Abstract

This article examines what happens when an employee makes the transition from one recognized gender category to another and remains in the same job. Drawing on in-depth interviews with transmen and transwomen in Texas and California, we illustrate how a new social gender identity is interactionally achieved in these open workplace transitions. While transgender people often are represented as purposefully adopting hyperfeminine or masculine gender identities post-transition, we find that our respondents strive to craft alternative femininities and masculinities. However, regardless of their personal gender ideologies, their men and women co-workers often enlist their transitioning colleague into gender rituals designed to repatriate them into a rigid gender binary. This enlistment limits the political possibilities of making gender trouble in the workplace, as transgender people have little leeway for resistance if they wish to maintain job security and friendly workplace relationships.

This girl’s life: An autoethnography

“…In adopting Judith Butler, and particularly her early 1990 text 'Gender Trouble', Pullen and Rhodes (2012) conflate transgender with queer identities, fluidity and transgressive practices (see Muhr and Sullivan, 2013 for a brief overview of management literature that adopts queer theory and Borgerson and Rehn, 2004 for a critique of the concept of fluidity in relation to gender). vii They are not alone in doing so as the idea of transgressive practice appears repeatedly in management literature (Brewis et al 1997;Linstead and Pullen 2006;Muhr and Sullivan, 2013;Schilt and Connell, 2007;Thanem, 2011;Thanem and Knights, 2012). Pullen and Rhodes (2012) argue that the robot's 'male' performativity is an exaggerated macho account that is 'undone' when the robot does 'drag'.…”

“…Some management accounts are more nuanced and position trans as a fluid, queer identity. My concern is that some management theory presents the 'transgender phenomena' not as the 'evil twin' of queer theory but rather conflate it as queer narratives emblematic of fluidity and transgression (for instance Brewis et al, 1997;Linstead and Pullen, 2006;and Pullen et al, 2017) rather than variegated ways of how trans people cope and survive in the heterosexual matrix (Thanem, 2011;Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015;Schilt, 2006;Schilt and Connell, 2007). Pullen and Rhodes (2012), for instance, present an interesting and thought provoking reading of an episode from the TV cartoon series 'Futurama' in which they discuss how parody may operate so as to 'undo gender' and so allow for a resistance to gender normativity and the heterosexual matrix.…”

“…There is growing interest in management and organizational studies of the 'transgender spectrum' (Author 2016; Knights and Thanem, 2011;Linstead and Pullen, 2006;Muhr and Sullivan, 2013;Schilt and Connell, 2007;Thanem, 2011;Thanem and Knights, 2012;Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015). In this paper I wish to add my voice as a non-binary trans person to these narratives by considering both the terminology and labels used to identify trans people and a major trope that concerns trans lives -that trans people exemplify queerness, or difference, or liminality, or fluidity, or indeed any other 'radical, transgressive' understanding of gender and identity.…”

Listen carefully: transgender voices in the workplace

“…Schilt and Connell (2007) describe an interviewee who has transitioned from male to female in the workplace, but encounters animosity from a gay co-worker who repeatedly makes reference to her birth gender and suggests that she retains too many masculine traits. We are not suggesting that these types of incident are representative of the general tenor of relations between the LGB and the trans communities.…”

“…Those individuals who undergo gender affirmation and present publicly as the opposite gender may subsequently 'disappear' into the larger categories of men or women. As Schilt and Connell (2007) Adam's apples, and pitch of one's voice can render some individuals more easily "read" as transgender than others (Schrock, Boyd, & Leaf, 2009). Hormones, electrolysis, cosmetics, and surgery can help individuals "pass", but not everyone has financial access to these treatments, nor do they necessarily render individuals indistinguishable from the cisgender population.…”