I have read similar complaints about some other types of situations. I think it is informative because with trans people there is the Before/After factor. So have you noticed a drop in customer service that you can attribute to being perceived as transgender?
It varied, but yes - I had much worse customer service experiences (and just interactions with the public in general) caused by discomfort with my transition.
On the positive side of things (I guess, if you consider it positive), cis allies who wanted to communicate they supported me tended to bomb me with compliments and kindness. I would be standing in line and a random woman would come up to me and start touching my dress and ooing and awing about it and asking where I got it. Random workers in the health food store who had ignored me for years would start randomly complimenting my clothes. That kind of thing.
An area where customer service really became worse was when I would make phone calls, e.g. to financial institutions, utility companies, medical providers, etc.
It was especially bad when routed to a call center in the “third world” (e.g. India), and when I had to either update my name & gender, or otherwise out myself as trans over the phone.
One example: it took me several months to recover a financial account; not only were there problems with their information systems, but culturally it was a shock for people on the phone to be dealing with a transsexual and I think they either sabotaged, resisted, or otherwise were negligent with the process of updating my information.
Voice training really helped with this, and making an effort to update my name & gender wherever I could in conjunction with voice training meant I had fewer and fewer situations where I had to out myself.
One of my worst experiences was trying to get my marriage license updated. The clerk wouldn’t issue a new license and only issued an invalid one where the old name was left visible with a thin line through it and they scribbled the new name in next to it by hand, and they used white-out on my gender marker instead of changing it (or even just removing it properly). I’m fairly certain that’s illegal and my only legal copy of my marriage license is now semi-illegitimate, as well as outing me clearly to anyone who sees it. At this point I’m just waiting for Trump to lose power and for the cultural and political winds to shift. Currently civil rights lawyers are completely swamped and the courts are increasingly hostile anyway, so I don’t see what I can do other than wait.
I see. You make very good points.
It certainly sounds safer to keep a low profile and wait right now.
I could see a practical argument in favor of waiting to socially transition until you’re starting to pass with strangers, but for HRT and medical transition I wouldn’t wait - the risks far outweigh the benefits for waiting.
EDIT: I would never want someone to hold off on their transition because of these stories - I strongly feel people who have gender dysphoria need to take seriously their need to transition; even as I went through these difficulties, the reality of repressing and not transitioning was much, much worse.
Every day of my life pre-transition I wanted to be not alive and most days I actively wanted to exit, but once I transitioned it didn’t take long for me to feel life-affirming and the feelings of not wanting to be alive became far less frequent (for the first time in my life, mind you). This was despite increased social stigma from looking trans, I called it my “irrational happiness”.
So, the awkwardness of a few phone calls does not justify risking your life and staying closeted or repressed. The empirical evidence backs this up, too - it’s not just anecdotal.
This was despite increased social stigma from looking trans, I called it my “irrational happiness”.
Pretty much the same. I didn’t mean postpone transitioning, furthest from my mind. I might add an edit actually if there is grounds for misunderstanding.
I meant going after legal recognition in documents, drivers licenses, birth certificates. IN THIS ECONOMY? Didn’t we just read what happened in Kansas last week?
So to put it more clearly: Interactions with US institutions related to trans stuff is actively dangerous right now.
I think some lawyers might agree with you, and furthermore you just can’t update certain documents with the federal government right now (like social security and passports, both of which won’t respect your gender identity and will only use assigned sex).
However, I tend to think this is a mistaken view overall - probably you will be targeted for being trans whether you update documents or not, and the on-the-ground risks of outing yourself is worse by not updating your name legally.
Think of interactions with the police: would you rather have an updated name and marker on a driver’s license in that interaction and the possibility of passing, or would you rather that interaction guarantees you are treated as a trans person as soon as they see your license whether you pass or not?
I lived in a state that would not let me update my gender marker, so I had interactions with the police where I passed, but once they looked me up in their database (based on my passport with a correct gender marker), they were able to know I was trans, but that wasn’t relevant in the moment because they only learned after my interactions with them that I was trans. They treated my as any other cis woman because I had updated my documents and happened to have a document with the correct gender marker.
I also left that state and moved to another state that does allow me to update my gender marker on my license, and now I have a passport and driver’s license both of which are in my correct gender and name. This is a great situation to be in, and I tend to think any person who is transitioning and is a woman or man should strive for that as well, for safety reasons.
Think of all the cases where someone needs your ID - signing up for gym membership, at physical therapy, at the eye doctor, at a bar, when buying alcohol, etc., if you start to pass all of those interactions become vectors where you will out yourself if you don’t update your name and gender marker, and often people don’t even notice a wrong gender marker (though it’s still a risk, I know someone who ended up being mistreated by a gym because her license had “M” on it).
So in general I think the pragmatic safety value of updating documents far exceeds the risk of being targeted by the government, and if the situation has devolved to the point where that risk flip flops and the gov’t will really be hunting down trans people, the goal at that point should be escaping the country at all costs, because the US gov’t (and their private partners) have significant capacities for data collection and spying and it won’t matter if you never updated your documents.
For context, in the US, car companies already listen to your conversations and use the data they collect to categorize someone’s sexual orientation and gender identity. The store, Target, builds intensive profiles about anyone who goes to a store. Being visibly trans is enough to get you logged that way in a million ways by a million companies. Companies like Google, Oracle, and Facebook track what people do online and build profiles (even if you don’t use their services or visit their websites).
The cooperation between private companies in their data collection and the US gov’t is already strong, but the US gov’t also has a history of forcing companies to disclose information to them and using legal measures to prevent the companies from notifying victims or the general public.
And ICE has already asked & received data from Google on pro-Palestine activists, and when ICE asked, Google broke their own policies to release that information to ICE without a chance for the activists to take legal action to prevent that data being handed over.
So, yeah - changing your documents might be one way the US gov’t tracks trans folks, but it won’t be the only way, and you have to weigh the cost / benefits either way.
I tend to think it’s better for me to have as-accurate-as-possible official documents to prevent hassles. Recently I’ve even had trouble with convincing people I really am the same person I was before I transitioned, so even if it’s not related to trans stigma, having updated documents is also important for avoiding suspicion of committing fraud or having illegitimate documentation (even if it’s actually legitimate).
the on-the-ground risks of outing yourself is worse by not updating your name legally.
Of course. That is why we get the legal right in the first place.
and if the situation has devolved to the point where that risk flip flops and the gov’t will really be hunting down trans people, the goal at that point should be escaping the country at all costs, because the US gov’t (and their private partners) have significant capacities for data collection and spying and
That is fair reasoning, but unfortunately, this is what many fear it has come at.
it won’t matter if you never updated your documents.
Coming from several privacy conversation this could be a form of defeatism. The Kansas case shows they use legal transition data in flagging trans people. Of course an actual holocaust is a whole other ballpark, but even then they will be desperate for info on who is who. You don’t think there’s anything worth saving privacy-wise for trans people?
So, yeah - changing your documents might be one way the US gov’t tracks trans folks, but it won’t be the only way, and you have to weigh the cost / benefits either way.
OK this more or less answers my question above. The thing is, none is really sure how the Kansas DMV pulled it off. Bottomline is they’re running OSINT and keep tabs on trans people. I also recall the attempts of Texas to get medical info on transitions from Seattle.
You make valid points for the necessity of pursuing legal recognition, but these cases are troubling as long as this situation goes on.
That is fair reasoning, but unfortunately, this is what many fear it has come at.
based on what? as far as I can tell it’s only anticipation of possible future risk that leads to this thinking, not any actual direct risk right now. There is still largely no criminalization, no camps, etc. The main way trans people are oppressed right are mostly through other categories like poverty and race - those people experience more deaths, violence, disease, and imprisonment (but not for being trans itself, that’s just a compounding factor in their poverty and the way they are targeted or forced into illegal activities like sex work for survival).
The Kansas case shows they use legal transition data in flagging trans people. Of course an actual holocaust is a whole other ballpark, but even then they will be desperate for info on who is who. You don’t think there’s anything worth saving privacy-wise for trans people?
I don’t mean to imply a defeatist attitude, I think it’s a misreading of my point - my point is only that not updating your documents to reflect your actual name and sex is a miscalculation of risks, prioritizing unrealized fears of possible future risks over on-the-ground and actual / direct risk trans people face. I’m not saying there is no benefit to not updating documents or that it never makes sense to not update documents (that would be defeatism), I’m saying despite the possible risks, it often still does make sense to update documents for a lot of trans people.
The reality is that the US even in its right-ward turn is still one of the safest places to be trans, and one of the best places to transition - with greater access to care and better legal rights than most countries.
We don’t know whether the current administration will succeed in their goals, and the situation varies from state to state.
People should probably prioritize getting to safe states, and forming escape plans to leave the country if need be. But updating documents is still a practical step that should be taken by many of us, and the risks of not updating documents seems to far exceed the possible or anticipated future risks of persecution by the government (which again, I don’t think will be a campaign of oppression that does not just hinge on whether documents were updated).
as an aside (footnote)
In some cases it’s straightforward that the risk of updating documents outweighs the benefits.
I think it absolutely makes sense for non-binary folks (or gender non-conforming folks who may be many years into medical transition and don’t have the money or genetic-luck to pass) to have the option of falling back to their assigned sex if they still can pass as their assigned sex and to leave their documents in a way that allows them that safety fallback even if it is not perfectly affirming or representative.
That is, a gender marker like X on a passport is an obvious increase in on-the-ground risk, so it’s a clear example where updating the document would be an increase in potential future risks that isn’t justified by the alleviation of immediate, concrete risks.
But for trans people who are men or women, and who are early in transition and don’t yet pass but are likely to, or are starting to pass as their gender - those people have a lot to gain by having documents that align with their gender.
I changed most of my documents before I was passing, and thought I would never pass - I generally think trans people underestimate their future or present capacity to pass as their gender, so I would even lean towards general advice being that you should update documents regardless.
As always, don’t think of my responding as disagreeing.
I think it is important that you integrate passing in your analysis, and indeed it is a factor to consider either way.
But I beg to differ on the state-sponsored genocide thing. There have been several analyses on that, but I don’t want to be grim. I will leave it at that. There is a prior and a posterior probability at all times that things will get worse in that direction, and we have to update this with every new development. I don’t believe it is an immediate danger, as it is a long term non-zero possibility.
Otherwise, I agree on the necessity of social and legal transition as the medical one. And the on-the-ground risk analysis. I think you provided some original thinking here. I hope people find this helpful.
no, actually just better customer service
What do you mean by a “drop in customer service”?
I assume experiencing worse customer service due to employees feeling uncomfortable around trans people
Being treated worse by cashiers, waiters, and the like.
No, experienced an increase in misgendering though. People still call me ma’am instead of Mx. although lately I’ve been getting sir and mister a lot because of my hair.
Not at all. All my name changes went over very smoothly and respectfully, be it in person or over the phone. And service experiences that don’t have anything to do with my being trans are actually nicer now. (Disclaimer: I pass and I live in one of the safest cities for queer people in the world.)
I honestly feel that in general people are far nicer to me post-transition (MtF) than pre, especially so with cis women. With customer service reps, I’ve also learned that even a little voice training helps immensely. Even if they’re bigoted, it’s a mental hurdle for them to overcome when they hear a feminine voice, build the mental model of you being female, and then see your “before” information with the incorrect gender. It’s gotten to a point where I’ve had employees saying “Okay Ms. Hovercat, let’s get your information pulled up. Oh, for some reason they had you in here as ‘Mr. Hovercat’, I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, let’s correct that for you”.
I know it’s become a meme at this point about how much transwomen loathe voice training, but I notice a very, very distinct difference in the way I’m treated by people out and about vs my friends who haven’t voice trained yet, and it’s seriously been by far the best thing I’ve done mentally for eliminating a lot of dysphoria.
I am many years in and I have had on and offs with voice training. The benefits of voice training are immense. On the other hand, voice can be the only clue after several months on HRT, but it has a big effect.
I know that people are more nice to (perceived) women, I seem to have a blind spot about that. I mostly focus on all the little things can go wrong if your voice lets on you are trans, in waiting times, wrong orders, inappropriate amounts of chili, lower quality food, as well as gossiping, outing you, staring from waiters/staff etc.
Apart from staring I used to write off most of this stuff. I only registered that many times I realized consistent misgendering was correlated with selling me faulty products or food gone bad or heavily worn out banknotes. My theory was that there is a “second class customer” class, and being trans puts you into it.
But then I read a thread on Reddit about mixed-race couples and I realized that some of the items in the first list are oddly familiar, and started thinking if people do them to trans people out of aggressiveness.
