The Canadian National Newspaper: Transgender Insight: It’s Not Your Grandma’s Gender Paradigm Anymore

As the editor of a weekly online magazine for transgendered people called TGForum.com, LINK I scan the news of the world to bring our readers stories about TG people interacting in society. Last month I was delighted to see an article in the Chatham Daily News, published out of Chatham, Ontario about a workshop for women’s shelters that was devoted to how shelters should deal with transsexual women who need aid. It was good to see that the shelters were open to learning about women who are differently gendered and that they realize that their mission is to help any woman who needs it regardless of her gender status.

Several years ago I was a guest speaker at a women’s shelter here in Philadelphia in the United States, where I spoke first to the staff and then did a presentation and answered questions from the shelter residents. The women in the shelter needed to feel safe; and to feel safe they needed to understand that any transsexual who came to the shelter seeking help was not any different than them -- she would be a person who needed help. After my presentation several of the women said they now felt better about one of the residents, who, until then, they had been perceiving as a “man in a dress.” They now knew that she was another woman, different, but still in need of the shelter’s services.

Often transsexual women fall into unemployment after they have announced their intention to change their outward gender presentation.

An employee who has been considered a good worker as a man, suddenly becomes “an unsatisfactory employee” when ‘he’ becomes ‘she‘. And often there is no way for the TS employee to appeal. This has been changing over the past few years andm TG activist groups around the USA continue to work toward federal legislation that will make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender orientation. But legal protections are only spotty at this time, and a safety net is needed for those who lose their jobs after coming out as transsexual and sliding down the economic ladder to the bottom rung. So, that’s why it’s good to see women’s shelters calling for workshops on differently gendered clients. Think how nice it would be if all employers would take the time to attend workshops on gender issues and help educate their employees about them instead of firing people who difference might cause a problem. Transgendered people are everywhere and it makes more sense to see them as useful parts of society than it does to marginalize them and make more work for the shelters.

Angela Gardner is the Managing Editor of TGForum.com, former Editor of LadyLike magazine and past Executive Director of The Renaissance Transgender Association, Incorporated. She can be reached via email at: LINK.

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