[News] [USA] Man tells senators transgender people 'lose their careers' when people find out

[Stephanie Stevens]

The Republic, IN, USA


Man tells senators transgender people 'lose their careers' when people find out

By Jamie Goldberg Tribune Washington Bureau

First Posted: June 12, 2012 - 12:38 pm
Last Updated: June 12, 2012 - 12:38 pm


WASHINGTON — When Kylar Broadus told his employer he would be making a
gender transition from a woman to a man, he was harassed and
ultimately forced out of his well-paying job at a financial
institution, he said. It took him a year to find other employment.

“People lose their careers. It’s over when people find out you’re
transgender,” said Broadus, Founder of the Trans People of Color
Coalition, who some senators said was the first openly transgender
person to testify before the U.S. Senate Tuesday.

Following a letter from Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; Mark Kirk, R-Ill.;
Robert Casey, D-Pa.; and Susan Collins, R-Maine, the Senate Committee
on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions reopened discussion on the
Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill that would prohibit
nonreligious employers with at least 15 employees from discriminating
on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Forty-two percent of homosexuals and bisexuals reported employment
discrimination because of their sexual orientation, according to the
2008 General Social Survey, a sociological survey conducted by the
National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Seventy-eight percent of transgender people reported harassment at
work because of their gender identity, according to a 2011 report by
the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Among those who say they have faced discrimination are Jacqueline
Gill, a temporary instructor at a community college in Texas, who was
told by her supervisor that “Texas doesn’t like homosexuals,” and
Vandy Beth Glenn, a transgender woman who was fired from her job at
the Georgia General Assembly for her gender expression.

“We have decades of social science research that tell us that those
stories, which are just a sample of many, are repeated in workplaces
all throughout America,” testified M.V. Lee Badgett, Research Director
for the Williams Institute.

However, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act has had little success
in Congress. ENDA has been introduced in nearly every Congress since
1994, and in 2007 a modified version, without protections for
transgender individuals, passed through the House before dying in the
Senate.

While committee chairman Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, expressed a
commitment to seeing the bill move quickly through committee, he could
not give any time frame. No Republicans attended what was supposed to
be a full committee hearing.

Freedom to Work, a national organization committed to banning
workplace discrimination against LGBT Americans, sent a letter to
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Tuesday urging him to bring
the bill to the Senate floor. Freedom to Work President Tico Almeida
plans to continue to press Harkin to push the bill through the
committee.

Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have laws prohibiting
employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and it is
illegal in 16 states and the District of Columbia for employers to
discriminate on the basis of gender identity.

While Broadus finds himself lucky to be employed once again, he still
hasn’t recovered financially and emotionally from the discrimination
he faced.

“It will go with me to my grave,” Broadus said.


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