Why do trans women struggle so much in the hiring process?

There was some discussion a few days ago on Bluesky about the present unemployment crisis among trans women. Being an unemployed (or at least underemployed and scraping by on writing donations and occasional freelance work) trans woman, and with my annual "Iris bitches about workplace transmisogyny" article being almost due, this obviously caught my attention. The gist of the issue is that for the last few years trans women have universally been struggling to find much in the way of work at all, especially in the USA: back-channel communications from recruiters mention that clients feel that they simply don't have to hire trans people any more, and while people generally can't be bothered to collect data on trans employment rates, the best indication we have is that the high point of trans employment in the USA had something like an 18% unemployment rate, with people not engaged in the labour market at all excluded from that figure and a very high rate of underemployment. And this was the 2022 high point: the cratering tech industry and resurgent fascism across the entire anglosphere have almost certainly made this a whole lot worse.

Of course, this could all be coincidental and due to the fact that we're all a bit messed up (gender dysphoria will do that to a girl), so we'd better see if we can't find some data about transphobic attitudes in the worplace. The best data we have on transphobic attitudes comes from a 2017 report by Crossland Employment solicitors, and while the applicability of the data is somewhat questionable (the survey was performed in the UK and the phrasing on some of the questions is odd), it's the best data we have available. The report makes for grim reading: a full third of companies surveyed stated that they would be "less likely" to hire a trans person, which while the statement is vague enough that it's not directly admitting to illegal discrimination, should probably be interpreted as a flat "do not hire". Both retail and IT (the low-end and high-end of "jobs in theory relatively accessible to trans women") have even higher "do not hire" rates, sitting at 47% and 45% respectively, and a full 77% of businesses don't think that their company is "liberal enough" to be a good place for trans people to work. With the caveat that this is UK data and the UK is unusually transphobic even by anglosphere standards, even the most charitable reading of this is disastrous for trans people in the workplace and would easily explain the observed unemployment data for trans people.

What's interesting about this is that, while in 2026 we're of course dealing with resurgent fascism across the anglosphere, we previously had a solid decade-and-a-half of consistent anti-discrimination and DEI programs happening in workplaces and in the wider culture. For all their flaws, they had a significant impact on how a lot of minoritised groups were treated in the workplace including, importantly, groups that weren't directly talked about in the programs. However, they appear to have had approximately no impact on transphobia and transmisogyny specifically: while we don't really have data for this, I think it would be a stretch for 45% of the tech industry to openly admit that they would be less likely to hire candidates of colour, even though this is manifestly true. The fact that people are willing to openly admit to bigotry against trans people in this way says an awful lot, and clearly shows that for all its merits, the work we've been doing for the last few decades has had little impact on any attitudes about trans people. This bears examination, and it's what this article's about.

A few disclaimers to get out of the way first. In this article, I talk mostly about the experiences of trans women: this isn't because I necessarily think we have it worse than anyone else, but obviously most of my experience in dealing with this bullshit is from the perspective of a trans woman. In particular, I'm not sure how much of this applies to trans men and nonbinary people: I imagine there's a considerable amount of overlap, but I get the sense that this is also one of those places where there are significant asymmetries of experience.

The second note to be made is about the incapacity framing that I have the sense applies to a lot of other marginalised groups. This is mostly informed by watching how my immigrant community and others tend to be treated: I think it has fairly broad applicability, but certain other marginalised groups could well be stuck with different framings, including the deviance/impurity one.

Finally, the quality of data available to us about trans employment is extremely poor and often of unclear provenance: I'm not actually sure where that 18% figure comes from at all. This is, however, a situation where deciding not to say anything because we have poor data is morally unacceptable, as it leads to the issues that trans people have in the workplace being more or less ignored. Anyways, back to the article.

Were I to guess, the reason for this set of observable data is that on some level, people fundamentally misunderstand the driving force behind transmisogyny. In most forms of bigotry as applied to the workplace, the main line of attack is incapacity: you can see this at work when Donald Trump says that Somalis have "very low IQ", and the gestalt view of people of colour, women and so forth in the workplace is usually that they are, in one way or another, less good at the job than the white man would be. To be clear, this is very, very bad and very stupid. However, it also opens the door to a number of mitigation strategies on both the individual and the social levels.

On the individual level, a sufficient level of accomplishment can, in theory, overmatch initial perceptions of incapacity: while your average racist will think that people of colour are stupider than white people in the aggregate, making the strong claim that every single white person is smarter than every single person of colour requires you to be a Nazi. As even most racists aren't outright Nazis (though more of them than we would like are), a sufficient demonstration of skill and capability by a person of colour is capable of winning out over background bigotry in sufficient cases that capable people of colour, while disadvantaged, can gain traction in professional careers. A similar logic applies to cis women and sexism, though obviously the correspondence isn't one-to-one.

Socially and institutionally, it's important that when attempting to fill a professional position, capability is what is fundamentally at issue. While an awful lot of companies and institutions have deeply warped ideas of what makes for a capable professional and the process is, of course, corrupt, there remain some elements of the hiring process that are about hiring the most capable person. This means that demonstrable capability, even in a fundamentally bigoted process, pushes towards hiring capable people from most marginalised groups, even if it has to outweigh a lot of stupid and bigoted shit. Furthermore, direct intervention along the incapacity line can be very effective: the set of cognitive biases that say that certain groups of people are stupider or worse at things are relatively weak by cognitive bias standards, and techniques such as reviewing CVs in batches rather than one-by-one, training people about implicit bias and similar interventions can work to an extent (though less than we'd like).

This broad theory of workplace bigotry is fairly ubiquitous due to how common it is, and we tend to think that all workplace bigotry basically works along the capacity axis, potentially with some admixture of the "boys' club" type mindset (this one probably needs an article all of its own). However, it's very much not the line of attack applied in workplace and hiring transmisogyny. In my personal experience of interviewing since transitioning, I've not once managed to get any feedback from any of the processes where I was rejected as a late stage as to any concerns about capability, and when pressed the hiring managers genuinely struggled to put reasons for the rejection into words. The usual line of argument is around relatability, culture/team fit and general vibes: none of these are things that you can really put a pin into. And quite bluntly, at this point I know that I'm highly capable: the blog and the people I've met through it kinda speak for themselves, and even if I'm not the perfect fit for some standard tech jobs, I'm clearly good at a whole bunch of stuff. This seems to be a common pattern with most trans women I know in the professions: the reasons, both expressed and implicit, for not working with them are almost never about capability, and in fact the stereotype around trans women professionally is, if anything, one of hypercompetence (there is some truth to this, but also a lot of us are just regular dumbfucks).

Rather than capability, the line of attack for trans women in the workplace seems to run along the lines of social deviance or transgression, shading into questions of impurity. If we look at the stereotypes of trans women that the modern right seems to hold to, we see a couple of themes: that we're false or deceivers and trying to worm our way into spaces we don't belong, that we're delusional and mentally ill in ways that make us dangerous, and (this one comes a lot in the context of sports, which is a major thrust of how transphobes in the anglosphere are trying to covertly push exterminationist politics) that we have "unfair advantages" of some kind. These last ones are usually physical, but not always: people have complained that us trans women have unfair advantages in everything from chess to chilli-eating contests. In short, the unconscious or semi-conscious bias that a hiring manager holds against trans women is more akin to the kind that a person with a criminal conviction on their record faces than it is to capability-model bigotry: we're seen, not as incapable, but as being dangerous, deceptive or a liability, simply by the fact of who we are.

This kind of moral black mark in hiring is much harder to overcome than capability-based bigotry for a few reasons. Most obviously, this kind of social bias is much more deeply-rooted than the capability-based varieties mentioned earlier: given that trans women are marked as people who have already actively transgressed against the community in some way, the human psyche has a deep-set aversion to treating people whom society has shunned well, lest the taint of the person spread to them. Regrettably, this isn't entirely an unfounded fear: I've seen it happen in my own workplace experiences that people who were friendly to me often found themselves sidelined by people in power in much the same way that I was. Furthermore, this kind of stain is much harder to challenge than a stain on capability: after all, arguing that you aren't in fact guilty and don't deserve this kind of treatment only makes your guilt more grievous, and the only way to "repent" of the stain of transness is to detransition, which... uh, fuck that.

A secondary set of problems comes from the fact that while team fit is a legitimate consideration in hiring processes, moral considerations as such aren't: it's not the place of a hiring manager to determine, except for very specific cases, whether a candidate is a good person worthy of social respect and acceptance. That simply isn't the job of a hiring panel and is best left to the courts and to public opinion (both of these are obviously deeply flawed, but they at least have some authority to make that determination). What this means is that the form of bigotry that trips trans women up is not-at-issue in Stanley's sense, making it almost impossible to actually address directly or prevent harm from being done by it. If you ignore it, you tacitly accept the framing, and if you bring it up you're immediately making yourself the problem for bringing up questions of morality and social structure in a job interview (ask me how I know that that's a bad interviewing strategy!). Either way, the not-at-issue bigotry does real damage. The real kicker in the case of trans women comes with the question of capability: given that none of the tropes being circulated about us have to do with incapacity and that some of them actively prime people to expect us to be more capable than baseline, being able to demonstrate capability can actively reinforce the transgression/impurity line of attack, as the better you are, the more obvious it becomes that you have some kind of a priori immoral "unfair advantage".

The consequences of this are not only that trans women struggle to land jobs that they're eminently qualified for, but also that these fundamentally bigoted rejections are extremely difficult to prove or even detect. Furthermore, while people being discriminated against through the incapacity line of attack can find work that they're overqualified for with some consistency (this is obviously a situation that's not at all ideal, but it does at least allow people to mostly earn a living), the deviance/transgression line of attack pretty cleanly shuts off this option for trans women: while a stereotype of incapability and proven ability can in some cases level out to "capable for a job that's below what you're qualified for", in the trans woman's situation capability will consistently make them appear less suited for the role, as it makes us seem like even more of a danger or a liability than we already are: the "unfair advantage" framing fucks us up again. This is how we end up with the abysmal statistics detailed at the beginning of this article.

Making this situation better is difficult because, as detailed earlier, existing workplace interventions tend to focus on the incapacity line of attack and thus have very limited impact on the considerably different patterns we see in hiring transmisogyny. I suspect that in the long run trans women will become more socially accepted as more of us come out, live our lives and people begin to learn that we're not, in general, dangerous deviants who will hurt them but that we're in fact pretty normal people (even if most of us are a little strange). However, that's not really much use to us in the short and medium term, and to make it worse most interventions that I could think of that might work would have to be implemented by the state, which in this year of our lord 2026 is unlikely to happen. We're kinda fucked.

That said, it's not all bad news. Given that what trans women are dealing with is largely the perception that we're deviant and immoral creatures, a decent strategy for pushing back against the bigotry we face might well be to demonstrate that we're well-integrated, properly socialised members of society ahead of time. This is, to be clear, unlikely to work across the general population: there's not really any level of conformity and assimilation that would do the job and besides, we don't want to conform and assimilate anyway. What I would suggest, rather, is that we get involved in our local communities. This does mean that you have to live in a place where trans people are accepted and that has a thriving community life (and I'm putting my money where my mouth is and moving myself shortly), but let's face it, living in a place with a thriving community life is a good idea in general. Once you're there, finding groups to get involved with is the order of the day. This could look like some kind of hobby group, a local volunteering group, or even an appropriately progressive religious organisation. In general, you're looking for groups with high levels of social trust and civic involvement who are also relatively open-minded. Once that's done, show up and get involved consistently: you don't need to do much necessarily, but you should do something to contribute and just... consistently show your face. Evaluate after a few weeks or months whether people like having you around or not and whether you're starting to be considered as part of the group (this can be difficult to gauge in countries like New Zealand that are weirdly stiff, but if you've chosen the groups correctly, you should filter out the difficult people). If you don't fit in well enough, try something else: if you do, you can potentially start opening up a bit and letting people know that you're on the lookout for opportunity. The backing of civic-minded people who are involved in a bunch of social stuff can do a lot to blunt the perception of you as a deviant with people that they know, and that's precisely what you're looking for.

For sympathetic people who are in a position to hire trans women and wish to mitigate some of the worst effects of the bigotry, understanding the nature of the bigotry that we face can also help. Foregrounding the fact that this is the nature of the bias in training materials and when hiring people means that people will be consciously aware of the bias in the process: it effectively turns the not-at-issue component of the bigotry into an at-issue component, which makes it easier to fight effectively. Explicitly stating that trans women are no different morally to anyone else, then, can have a much bigger impact than stating that we're no different in capability does. It can also help, when faced with a trans woman candidate, to look both beyond her transness and her capabilities as a candidate: what are her hobbies, what are her interests, what kind of life does she live? Looking for commonalities in those spaces can do an awful lot to overcome the moral suspicion that otherwise comes up (a note for trans women: this is why community involvement is so useful for us). If you're a recruiter, you can do a lot of this kind of work in making trans candidates look more relatable and human to your clients, and it's definitely worth doing. If you have control over structural factors, moreover, I would strongly suggest creating a quota for trans women hires in your organisation. This is one of these situations where the bias against trans women is so strong that in order to act in your own interests (in this case acquiring extremely highly qualified trans women in your company), you're going to have to do things that feel wrong to you: in this case, the most qualified trans woman in the room is likely to feel either less qualified than a more palatable candidate or as though the vibes are off. If you want to capture this talent, you're going to have to force your organisation to hire the trans woman anyway. You'll also need to fix the social shame problem, which has an unfortunate habit of sinking trans women candidates even when they get through the door: you'll need to demonstrate that your trans women employees are valued and important and that working well and being friendly with them will be rewarded.

Making sure that trans women have a fair shot at employment and at good jobs isn't a marginal concern. We are, after all, a small and very vulnerable proportion of the population and have little money and often little access to social support from family that have either rejected us or made staying in contact with them intolerable. We need the money, quite bluntly. Having work in this society is also a major way in which social respect and standing are mediated: unemployed people are treated like shit, and the fact that so many of us are unemployed is almost certainly reinforcing the negative perception of trans women that our societies currently have. Finally, it's a monumental waste of potential: some of the finest minds of this generation are stuck writing open-source Rust tools because nobody's willing to employ them, and while the tools are very useful, I think we'd all benefit from having them work on larger and more ambitious projects in some of the many fields that we badly need to work on. One way or another, we need to fix this shit.

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