Manifestations of gendered labour as experienced by Two Spirit, trans, and nonbinary workers 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 hiring discrimination, transphobic or racist harassment in the workplace, and the need to leave jobs that have proven hostile (Brennan et al., 2022; Kinitz et al., 2022). Furthermore, the existence of 2STNB people complicates cultural understandings of gender, which then can lead to new avenues for analysis when considering the ways that work and the division of labour are gendered. 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 as follows: What are the employment, underemployment, and unemployment experiences of 2STNB people? How do 2STNB people experience the workplace? 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. 2STNB interview participants often reported that they felt compelled to assume extra responsibilities, sometimes to the point of overworking, due in part or whole to their gender. For example, 2STNB participants often served on equity, diversity, and inclusion committees to ensure that their needs were considered, or worked harder than their straight, cisgender, white colleagues to prove themselves valuable to the workplace or to earn equal respect (see Rodomar et al., forthcoming). Participants also frequently noted that they performed significant amounts of emotional labour in addition to their formal responsibilities, such as educating others in their workplace about trans and nonbinary identity, issues, or experiences. This form of emotional labour was even more prevalent for Two Spirit or Indigiqueer participants, answering questions about race or Indigeneity along with those about queerness or gender. Due to higher rates of gender-based harassment and discrimination, 2STNB workers also found the process of fielding and reporting these incidents to cut into the time needed to complete their work, on top of being an emotionally draining task. Finally, 2STNB workers were also subjected to the gendered division of labour as it occurs for cisgender people. Participants recalled being assigned tasks based on their perceived gender or being denied advancement opportunities for which they were qualified due to their gender presentation, with transfeminine workers being especially affected. Overall, 2STNB people were affected by the standard gendered division of labour in the workplace and are further subjected to forms of gendered labour that arose specifically from the experience of being gender diverse. Most participants, when asked about changes they would make, recommended more comprehensive education on gender diversity in the workplace, both to combat the initial ignorance that contributed to the gendered division of labour, and as a practical measure to prevent this responsibility from falling to the gender diverse employee themselves, which puts extra strain on the worker and impedes them from attending to their usual duties. The challenges that gendered labour presents are just one of many factors that contributed to a much larger discrepancy between labour and income experienced by 2STNB Canadians.

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: