An Embodied Social Demography for Trans and Nonbinary Workers

Recently, the separation of “sex” and “gender” has seen intense debate in public discourse, stemming from skepticism about the social sciences and the measurement and study of gender specifically. Meanwhile, the United States population is becoming more gender diverse, with roughly 1 in 200 people now identifying as trans gender or gender nonbinary (that is, as a gender that is different from that person’s sex assigned-at-birth or outside of the sex-gender binary). This growing population experiences numerous disadvantages across social life, including obstacles in one particularly important aspect of the American Dream: the right to have and hold a job. I use this dissertation to study how the norms and practices that undergird a rigid sex-gender binary affect the employment of trans and nonbinary people. To do so, I use statistical tests from a large survey and a close reading of workplace narratives from about 1000 trans and nonbinary people. Drawing on these data, I make three points. First, I illustrate how detailed measures of gender identity and expression help us understand the employment outcomes for large and diverse groups of people. That is, viewing the population as a collection of “males” and “females” is not enough to understand real trends given that social treatment is highly dependent upon how masculinity and feminity are actually expressed. Second, I show why social scientists should study workplaces to understand inequality thoroughly because these organizations circulate income, status, and other resources according to the detailed expression of individuals’ social identity. Third, I publicize how several kinds of friction related to employment are associated with harm to trans and nonbinary people’s health. Together, this dissertation illustrates how ideas about sex and gender create an environment that is extremely taxing and difficult for trans and nonbinary people to navigate, a takeaway relevant to numerous kinds of social oppression as well as access to other institutions, such as education, medical care, and more. I discuss ways of reducing workplace friction both from inside and outside of organizations, making the case to pay more attention to fined-grained aspects of gender and other social identities, not less.