Examining employment-related stressors experienced by Two Spirit, trans, and nonbinary people in Canada in the Working For Change project


Noah Rodomar, Egale Canada; Brittany Jakubiec, Egale Canada

Two Spirit, trans, and nonbinary (2STNB) people in Canada face significant disparities when seeking and maintaining employment due to a range of barriers including both overt and covert discrimination, mental and physical health difficulties, and financial stressors related to the cost of transition. 2STNB workers are more likely to be subject to hiring discrimination, interpersonal harassment in the workplace, and unemployment because of the need to leave jobs that have proven hostile (Brennan et al., 2022; Kinitz et al., 2022). Furthermore, research demonstrates that 2SLGBTQI Canadians are overrepresented in precarious work, causing higher levels of stress due to financial insecurity (Kinitz et al., 2022). Using both a national survey (N = 555) and qualitative interviews (N = 79), the Working For Change project sought to better understand the employment experiences and barriers among 2STNB people in Canada. The overarching questions that guided our research were: What are the employment, underemployment, and unemployment experiences of 2STNB people? What forms of bias, discrimination, and violence are present in places of employment? Working For Change was conducted using a collaborative, community-based approach that sought the feedback of peer reviewers and recruitment assistance from other community organizations. Furthermore, our project was informed by intersectional theory, as Two Spirit identity is as much a racialized experience as a gendered one. Our findings show that most prominent barriers to gainful employment among 2STNB Canadians were related to disability and mental health challenges (see Rodomar et al., forthcoming). For participants, stress was generated from the workplace environment itself due to homophobic, transphobic, or racist coworkers, unsupportive supervisors, and discriminatory policies. Stress also originated from external difficulties, such as housing precarity or transphobic incidents outside of work, that then impacted participants' abilities to attend to their workplace responsibilities, which itself created stress within the workplace. We also found that 2STNB populations were subjected to high levels of stress both in and out of the workplace: even in workplaces that claimed to be trans-friendly, there were often policies that divided employees by gender (such as uniforms or bathrooms) or otherwise forced employees to out themselves (for example, requiring an employee's legal gender marker on applications or employee files). While 2STNB individuals are legally protected against discrimination in the workplace, this law is only effective if a worker's supervisor or human resources department is supportive and willing to act, which many noted to not be the case. Furthermore, if the perpetrator is the person to whom the employee would report any issues, workers are left with no recourse but to leave the workplace or pursue legal action, which is financially impossible for many. Even those who were able and chose to conceal their trans experience reported high levels of anxiety from the possibility of being outed against their will. Participants also frequently reported that they felt compelled to assume additional responsibilities outside of their job description--for example, serving on equity, diversity, and inclusion committees or providing education about gender to the rest of their workplace--overworking themselves, leading to more frequent cases of burnout. Across fields, working conditions for 2STNB employees caused additional stress in varying degrees due to a lack of understanding and accommodation for the needs of gender diverse people. Furthermore, 2STNB workers were also subjected to the same sources of workplace stress as cisgender workers, meaning that the volume of stressors was, for many, unmanageable, and eroded the possibility of financial security and the resulting health and wellness for 2STNB populations in Canada.

Non-presenting authors: Dan Irving, Carleton University; Félix Desmeules-Trudel, Egale Canada; Ellie Maclennan, Toronto Metropolitan University

This paper will be presented at the following session: