My tips for trans inclusion at work

1. Listen to your trans colleagues

At Citizens Advice I had the honour of chairing the trans & non-binary equity group - a group set up to give trans staff and volunteers a real voice in the organisation. Even in an organisation so dedicated to equity, diversity and inclusion, there were so many things that benefited from our input or required us to have connections with senior leadership so we could speak up when we were being inadvertently harmed.

Creating the space for your trans colleagues to speak up and advocate for themselves will go a huge way to making your workplace more inclusive.

Remember that listening doesn’t mean expecting us to do all the work to make something more inclusive: the allyship guide is a good resource for learning how to listen to and centre marginalised voices whilst not expecting them to do all the work.

And it’s important to remember that you don’t have to understand someone to support them. Don’t try to put yourself in a trans colleague’s shoes, but instead believe them when they speak. Being trans is notoriously difficult to explain (it sits at a complicated intersection of biological and social factors related to the extremely gendered society we live in) but just because something is difficult to explain doesn’t make it any less real. The internet will work whether you understand what total internal reflection is or not. And trans people will exist whether you understand our biology or not.

2. Challenge the idea that equality legislation promotes segregation

Since a certain Supreme Court case, the national narrative about trans inclusion seems to start from a very false premise: the idea that the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act promote segregation, not equality (as they were intended to do).

Conversations about, for example, toilets, start from the idea that having separate gendered toilets for men and women is proper and right and that this sort of segregation is normal and expected.

In this example, the most equal and inclusive form of toilet is the one you most likely have in your house: a single-occupancy bathroom where the washing facilities are included behind the locked door. If all your workplace bathrooms were like this, there would be no debate about how to gender these bathrooms because everyone is already treated equally.

This example extends to all other uses of equality legislation: segregation is meant to be the exception, not the rule. If you are segregating people by gender (or any other characteristic) you need to be able to demonstrate why that segregation is necessary. The current narrative has flipped that, like suddenly we have to explain why we don’t want to segregate people.

Don’t fall for this - it’s a trap set by those out to erase us from public life or force us to live as the gender we know we are not.

3. Use inclusive language

Most of this is really just general gender inclusion stuff. When you’re at work, try to use gender-neutral terminology wherever you can. Don’t say “he” when talking about a hypothetical customer, don’t say “hey guys” when joining a meeting etc. Moving away from gendered language creates an inclusive environment for people of all genders and removes the “male by default” that seeps into English everywhere. But remember to do this even if you think a room is full of men - you don’t know whether some of those people might be uncomfortable because their gender is not what you think it is.

There are a few other things you can do beyond general gender-inclusion to include trans people more:

• Using “they” to talk about unknown people is natural in English but is sometimes considered informal or bad grammar by people who haven’t studied the history of English. Moving towards using this pronoun instead of clumsy constructions like “he or she” makes sure that non-binary people are included too.
• When talking about something to do with human biology, it’s better to talk about this as the thing it is, rather than generalising using a gendered term. For example, saying “parental leave” instead of “maternity leave” or “period products” instead of “feminine hygiene” can go a long way to making trans people feel safe at work.
• Speaking of biology, in recent months in the UK people have started using the word “biological” where it doesn’t belong. A trans woman is not a “biological male” - to say such denies the very real role that biology plays in our gender identities. This is still a live topic in science, but even if being trans was only in the brain, the brain is very much a part of our biology! In most cases it’s unnecessary and distasteful to refer to the gender someone was assigned at birth, but if you do need to do this, you can say just that: “the gender they were assigned at birth”.
• If you’re comfortable, it can help to add your pronouns when introducing yourself for the first time or in an email signature - this normalises the idea that you can’t know a person’s gender by their name or what they look/sound like and can make trans people feel safer. But remember not to require this from team members: some trans people will be very uncomfortable sharing their pronouns, either because they are not out, or because they’re still figuring out which pronouns work for them.

Plug alert: By the way, you can use Fish Percolator’s product name.pn to create a really nice URL for your email signatures or work profiles that helps people understand your pronouns and name pronunciation. For example, my page is: https://name.pn/quinn-daley

4. Remember your trans colleagues might have additional needs

Sometimes there are workplace needs that are more pronounced for trans people. The main ones I’ve encountered are:

• When something at work has been unnecessarily gendered. A good example would be including sanitary bins in the women’s toilet but forgetting to also include them in the men’s toilet. Even if you have no trans men, this one can also help certain disabled men in your workplace.
• The right to rectification. When trans people find our former name or gender marker showing up in internal systems it feels crushing and dehumanising, and it is illegal under GDPR to not correct this immediately. Even in inclusive workplaces, you can find this stuff seeping through in partner systems used for things like HR or occupational health.
• Time off for healthcare. Trans people, like disabled people, often have more healthcare needs than some other colleagues. Having a transition at work policy can really make trans people feel welcome, especially if it’s understood that elective surgery counts as sick days not holidays - especially if they don’t count to any limit.

5. Get training for your team

I said at the start that I’m not a trans awareness trainer.

This blog post is no substitute for actual training for your team, if you can afford it.

I’d highly recommend the UK’s leading trans advocacy charity Gendered Intelligence to provide your training.

(And I would have recommended them before I was involved in helping them to build that very nice page on their site 😉)