Workplace Acceptance

I get to show up at work in a skirt when I feel like it. I've been hired to do data entry at NYC's Department of Health. It's a job I'm eminently qualified for (I'm fast at typing and data entry). The option of working skirted isn't due to my proficiency (although it contributes to my confidence in exercising the option), it's because it's DOH, and that's just how they are. There are required new-hire orientation videos in which gender and sexual orientation variations are explained, complete with video footage of people discussing their identity or that of their child. The new employee is taught that it is an offense that can get you dismissed from your job to question or challenge whether someone's presence in the bathroom is appropriate for their gender. People include their pronouns of choice in their email signatures. There are gender neutral bathrooms on some floors and prominent signs directing people to them.

There's a similar orientation about race and ethnicity and why it is wrong to have a set of standards for things like hair style and clothing that are derived from white eurocentric culture but promote them for everyone in the name of "professionalism".

DOH is committed to being in the forefront of efforts to address racism and heterosexism and other institutional systems of oppression, and they focus on it internally. I've already attended two workshops where I was being paid on company time to discuss such matters with my coworkers. (I like this job. Does it show?)



I've had a skirt or two in my wardrobe ever since I plucked up the first one in a Salvation Army thrift store 30-someodd years ago. I've worn them out and about on the sidewalks of the city, to grocery stores in the suburbs, on mass transit, on college campus as student and as a grad student teaching the class, but until now not to the workplace as an employee.

It makes more difference than you might think. There's nothing intrinsically feminine about a skirt; it's a piece of apparel that fits and functions well on bodies male and female alike, and is only designated as female apparel for cultural and historical reasons; in other cultures and at other times, garments that were essentially skirts have been worn by male people. And so when I say I was born a girl, I certainly don't mean I was born with a need to wear this item (or paint my nails or wear shoes with pointy tips or whatever).

But they are signifiers, tools of communication, precisely because they convey a femininity message in this particular society. I like skirts in part because I just do (in a way that I don't like, for example, those pointy-tipped high heeled dress shoes), but I've embraced them because of their symbolic value. I don't have to wear one every day; being seen in one once or twice can have a permanent impact on people. It shapes how I'm seen and reacted to.

In previous places of employment, I've often been out about being differently gendered. I've brought it into conversations and talked to coworkers and employers about it whenever the topic seemed to come up. But long abstract complicated conversations are often less effective than a good visual, you know?

I was introduced to a new colleague by my supervisor on Friday, and the supervisor used "their" and "they" in reference to me. (Those are not pronouns that I've chosen for myself but that's entirely OK. It reflects the perception that I'm differently gendered. I don't need the details to be precisely accurate; just noting that there's a difference here is sufficient to keep people from making the usual assumptions!)

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