How to make your tech company a safe home for transgender people: an Open Source Guideline
“Everyone should be treated with dignity and respect. That’s the way I look at everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation, regardless of their religion, their gender, their ethnic history, regardless of their gender identity.”
Tim Cook | CEO, Apple
For many people in tech, I am the first transgender woman they’ve ever met. I’m the first transgender person they’ve met full stop, and they’re often thrown by how to respond.
People have so many questions, and those questions can be exhausting, but I answer them. I know they’re asked with a good intention and they’re coming from good people.
For many trans people, the outlook is often quite bleak. We have high rates of unemployment, low salary growth, and huge levels of prejudice and discrimination. For many of the people I know, transitioning at work is such a non-option that they can only truly be themselves when they clock off. Tech is a more progressive space, generally, and it’s been very kind to me. I wanted to create something that I would make that space kinder to everyone, and reach across company boundaries to lay the groundwork for transgender and non-binary inclusion. Although it’s a short piece, it has taken now over a year to reach a point where I am happy with it. I spoke with other trans and non-binary people working in tech, and sought their feedback to make sure that there would be more than one voice speaking through it. After all, my voice is never the only voice that should be heard.
This piece started out as a policy for transgender inclusion. I drew from a range of documents from human rights and transgender organizations, technology companies like Mozilla and Atlassian, and institutions such as LaTrobe University. Much of the content has been taken from these documents, remixed and re-written to make them suitable for startups and technology companies today. I used a curation plus creation approach, because it mattered to me that I was building on what had come before, and what was working elsewhere.
If you’re committed to making your own company a safe place for transgender and non-binary people, feel free to copy and use this piece as your first inclusion policy. And trust me — even just having it in place would make a measurable difference to free your staff feels to be themselves.