n February 2007, Steven Stanton, the city manager of Largo, Florida, divulged plans to become a woman and change his name to Susan. After the St. Petersburg Times broke the story, the City Commission voted to fire Stanton from the job he had held for 14 years, on the grounds that they had lost confidence in his ability to do it. One Largo resident alleged that Stanton had made the city a “laughingstock.”
       “When they say, ‘They can’t do this to you,’ many people don’t know that people who have a different gender identification and expression get terminated all the time,” Susan Stanton later told the Washington Blade newspaper.
       Americans are becoming more aware of transgender people through movie and television characters, and more and more real-life transgender people are going public. The National Center for Transgender Equality estimates that between 750,000 and 3 million Americans identify as transgender, though other experts make different estimates, and the definition of the term varies.
       But transgender people still have trouble finding and keeping jobs. Equal opportunity policies do not usually cover transgender employees, and most states do not have laws protecting transgender people from being fired. Even if employees are not fired outright, they may be made to feel unwelcome. Many transgender people are forced to keep their history secret, for fear that exposure could cost them their jobs. And if they can’t pass as members of their preferred gender, they might not be able to find a job at all.
       “We have employment at will, generally, in this country, meaning that an employer can hire or fire for any reason or no reason at all—they don’t like your face, they can say goodbye,” says Jillian Weiss, a professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey who studies transgender employment law.
       For people who simply can’t pass as the other gender, says Weiss, “your choices are essentially limited to the shadow economy or going on some kind of public relief.” Some transgender people, she explains, are drawn into prostitution because they cannot find legitimate jobs. “We don’t want people on public benefits,” says Weiss, “and we don’t want people in the shadow economy, and yet we’ve got this whole class of people who essentially are told, ‘Well, you’re an exception to that.’”
       Since the 1990s, various incarnations of an Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) have been introduced in Congress. The proposed law would protect gay and lesbian employees from harassment or firing as a result of their sexual orientation. In 2007, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and other representatives introduced a version of the bill that would also cover gender identity, protecting transgender people from discrimination as well.
       Because transgender people are less accepted than gays and lesbians, the gender identity stipulation proved controversial. Members of Congress who supported the bill feared that it would not pass, and Democrats from moderate and conservative districts feared that their constituents would be angry if they voted for the bill. Despite opposition from Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and trans advocacy groups, Congressman Frank removed the words “gender identity.” The bill was passed in the House of Representatives in November 2007 and was sent to the Senate, where it stalled.
       Some cities and states have non-discrimination laws of their own, but in most of the United States an employer can legally fire people for changing their gender or for dressing or behaving in a manner that does not match their biological sex. Some transgender people have successfully sued under Title VII, a federal law that forbids discrimination on the basis of sex, but this approach is not always successful.
       “It’s been kind of spotty,” says Carmelyn Malalis, a lawyer at Outten & Golden LLP, a New York-based employment law firm. “There are some courts that will say, ‘You are trying to bootstrap transsexuals onto Title VII and we’re not going to let you do that.’”
       Malalis has seen her share of transgender cases, although she says most do not go to litigation.
       “For the most part we see harassment. It’s not about ‘I hate you because you’re trans,’ but ‘I hate you because you don’t subscribe to my ideas of masculinity or femininity.’”
       James Halleman, 42, transitioned from female to male in 2001, when he was a steelworker at the Victaulic Company, in eastern Pennsylvania. His coworkers accepted his presence when he was a woman, but he faced constant harassment after he told the company about his transition. Despite support from his union, it was a struggle just to get a locker in the men’s locker room.
       “It was a hostile environment every time I went to work,” says Halleman, who has since left the company and is not out at his current job. “ENDA has to expand.”
       In recent years, many companies have tried to break through the confusion surrounding transgender employment by drafting anti-discrimination policies of their own—often because an employee’s gender transition presses the issue.
       Jillian Weiss, the New Jersey professor, offers her services as a consultant to such companies, and so far she has had about a dozen clients, most of whom have transgender employees.
       “Very few have come to me in advance,” Weiss says. “Mostly it’s like, ‘Oh my God, this is a crisis, what do we do?’”
       Weiss conducts training sessions for managers and coworkers and helps human resources departments write anti-discrimination policies, which are often more complicated than policies protecting other groups.
       “You can’t really just add something to your Equal Employment Opportunity policy,” she says, “because all that does is say, ‘We don’t discriminate,’ but you don’t know how not to discriminate. What do these employees need? How do we decide where people go to the bathroom? What do we do with insurance issues?”
       Weiss notes that the decision not to discriminate is not only in the employee’s interest, it also improves people’s perception of the company.
       “Diversity is extremely important,” she says, because companies that are perceived as generally discriminatory are less attractive to today’s young, educated job candidates. The demographics of the United States are changing, Weiss notes, and the majority of the country will soon be minorities. “If you’re perceived as a discriminator,” she says, “you’re going to lose out in the talent war.”

Have your transgender questions answered.