Friday Philosophy: Downward mobility

Earlier today, teacherken posted an essay entitled, American, land of opportunity – Not!.  It was mostly about the the limits of upward mobility caused by race and class.  In fact, the paper he cited discussed downward mobility caused by those factors.

Downward mobility is not strange to people in the trans community.  In the news yesterday was this report from the 2010 Creating Change conference, courtesy of Renee Baker for dallasvoice.com.

Numbers.  They were preliminary numbers, but numbers nonetheless.  And I’m a numbers person in the eyes of most part, so I thought I would share and comment on them.

They are not exactly new.  The numbers come from a preliminary report dated in November.  NGLTF released an even rougher sketch of the data earlier in last year.

But the question comes up from time to time.  Do transfolk really need to be covered by an inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act?  

The first thing I look for whenever I encounter a statistical analysis is methodology.  Sue me.  I’ve taught Statistics enough to know this is a must…and that I will rarely be satisfied.

A project team comprised of researchers, LGBT advocates and trans community leaders distributed on-line links to our survey through a network of more than 800 trans-serving and trans-led advocacy and service organizations, support groups, list-serves and online social networks.  Nearly 2,000 paper surveys were distributed to hard-to-reach transgender and gender non-conforming populations.  A total of 6,456 completed questionnaires were included in the final data set.

Now it is true that transpeople have made extensive use of the Interweb to build community in ways that few other minorities have done, but I believe that it is still the case that Internet surveys have some fatal flaws.  The people who chose to answer the survey are the very definition of a self-selected sample and, even though there were paper surveys distributed, I have difficulty thinking that anything close to 75% of transfolk are connected to the network that was surveyed.  Maybe 75% of employed transfolk, but that is rather the point.

In my own experience, when I attempted to move to Seattle from Arkansas in fall of 1995, my access to the Web became nearly nonexistent.

So I would suspect, though I have no evidence, that the unemployment figures arrived at will somewhat understate the case.  My point is that I will have to take the numbers provided with a grain of salt.  There are a couple I couldn’t originally figure out at all.  Then I thought about time.

But overall I have to commend the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) for attempting to do what generally speaking nobody has been interested in doing:  gather data on transpeople.

the 2007 American Community Survey reports that 75.1% of the nation identifies as white and 24.9 percent identify as people of color across a range of racial and ethnic categories.  Transgender and gender non-conforming people in the NCTE/Task Force sample identify as white at a percentage of 76%, while 24% of respondents identify as one or more of the following:  Black/African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Hispanic or Latino, Asian or Pacific Islander, Arab or Middle Eastern, Multiracial or Mixed Race.

Whether or not it is indeed true that the trans community reflects larger American society racially, it is the fact that the respondents did.  And maybe that might put to rest the assumptions frequently expressed that transgender is a white men’s “hobby”.

Some clues are left along the trail as to timing.  We are told, for instance, that the unemployment rate for transfolk is twice the 6.5% unemployment rate for the general public.  According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that locates the period of time in which the data was collected around November of 2008.  If the ratio of transgender unemployment to cisgender unemployment has not changed, the current unemployment rate for transpeople would be about 21.2% (seasonally adjusted to about 19.4%) as of January, 2010.  We should bear this in mind as we go through the other data.  One could…and I shall…point out that it is reasonable, even conservative, to expect that figures should be adjusted upward by a factor of 1.49.

The Colors of Money

For minority transfolk, it is worse.  Unemployment rates were 26% for African American, 18% for Latino, and 17% for multiracial transfolk.  If the 1.49 factor is indeed in play, that would translate to around 38%, 26%, and 25% respectively.  But even without adjusting, the numbers are appalling.  Seventeen percent is the approximate unemployment rate of black males in the District of Columbia, while 38% is the estimated unemployment of “young adult black males” nationally.

Forty-seven percent of respondents reported an adverse job action (did not get the job, did not get promoted, or were fired) because of being transgender.  While it might be argued that the 44% who did not get the job might not have gotten that job for other reasons (personally, I was denied a job selling educational materials in 1995 because my PhD made me “overqualified”), the 26% per cent who were fired were probably told to their face the reason for being fired.  There is no employment protection for being trans most places in this country…and people love to tell us exactly how they feel about us.  Nothing quite will make a man feel righteously manly like firing a tranny.  

The 23% denied a promotion again becomes a bit of guesswork, but I know that after I transitioned at a university in Arkansas, there was no way in Hell that I was going to be promoted to full professor.  And raises just didn’t seem to happen anymore.

How many of us were mistreated at work?  97%.  Now I know that many people, even here at Daily Kos, think that these sort of things didn’t really happen, that we were just being “overly sensitive”, but here is the data:

Mistreatment at work

• Harassed by someone at work:  50%
• Supervisors/coworkers shared personal information inappropriately:  48%
• Referred to by the wrong pronoun, repeatedly and on purpose:  45%
• Asked questions about transgender or surgical status:  41%
• Forced to present in the wrong gender to keep job:  32%
• Denied access to appropriate bathrooms:  22%
• Not able to work out a suitable bathroom situation:  21%
• Removed from direct contact with clients:  20%
• The victim of physical violence at work:  7%
• Victim of sexual assault at work:  6%
• At least one of these:  97%

Twenty-seven percent of respondents reported incomes of at most $20K.  Fifteen percent earned at most $10K.  Only 7% of the general population reported an income under $10K in 2007, according to Census figures.

Of course, if you aren’t making much, it is going to be difficult keeping a place to live.  Almost 1/5 of transgender people became homeless for some period of time.  Eleven percent were evicted.

While 62% of the population at large, at the time of the survey, had employer-based insurance coverage, only 40% of transpeople were accorded the same.

The conclusion drawn by NCTE is the following:

Employment protections are paramount. Transgender people face discrimination, harassment and anti-transgender violence in many areas of their lives.  These conditions create significant barriers to employment and lead to devastating economic insecurity.

Basic employment protections for transgender people provide a crucial foundation for dignified, economically secure lives.  Employment should be based on one’s skills and ability to perform a job. No one deserves to be unemployed or fired because of their gender identity or expression.

Although ENDA is not specifically mentioned, it is not lost on anyone that currently the bill is evaporating in the House, even though a majority of the House favor it:  The ENDA Spreadsheet.  It is not lost on us that the major reason it stalled was the possibility that one of us might want to use a restroom at work.

We are in the midst of an economic disaster.  We understand the panic around us.  But for transpeople, it has been an economic disaster for a long time.

Now people are talking about the need for a major jobs bill.  We can all agree, hopefully, that something like that is needed.  But what good would a jobs program be to those of us who are not going to be included?

Colored Lives Outside the Lines We seek lives of color in a world bent on casting us into the dark recesses of human existence Our voices are too often silenced by depriving us of the essence of equal lives Meaningful employment a place to live a community to engage and help mold into a better place I wish only to be able to retire before I die as a free and equal citizen Is that too much? –Robyn Elaine Serven –February 12, 2010