"Oh, s#!t, my coworker just told me they're trans"

What you need to know when someone transitions at work

Foreword: This article talks about legal requirements in several places. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, obviously; I’ve done my best to research and be able to speak to legal realities in the US, the EU, Canada, and Great Britain, which are the only polities I’m even remotely competent to speak to. I’m far from perfect though, and there may be some additional legal requirements that apply to your organization, depending on where you’re based. For instance, New York, in the US, has extra legal protections for trans employees that don’t apply to the US generally. If you have questions, it’s a smart idea to check with your legal team and/or a local civil rights nonprofit, like a state-level ACLU.

Hi there, friend. I’m guessing you’re a bit confused right about now, huh?

Let’s talk about it.

When a coworker comes out as trans, whether it’s just in private to you or publicly, for everyone, it can be a bit of a mystifying moment. It can feel pretty spooky. Maybe you’re one of their coworkers. Maybe you're their immediate supervisor, or they’re yours. Maybe you’re in Human Resources at a small company and one of your people just told you to get ready for their transition. Like, what do you do when someone you’ve known for years, seen pretty much every day, is suddenly… different?

This is a no-shame, no-knowledge-expected guide for folks like you. Each trans person’s story is different, but we often have a lot in common, and I’m going to try to lay out as much of the common ground for you as I can.

And yeah, I’m gonna give you sources for everything. That’s kinda my jam.

Just so you know I’m not some random dummy on the internet, my name’s Zoe, and I’m an associate professor of technical writing. One of my areas is biomedical communication, which is just a fancy way of saying that I specialize in explaining complicated medical research in terms everyone can understand.

Stuff like this. So, let’s get to it.

Vocabulary

There’s a lot of terms that the trans community uses, so let’s get you comfortable with a couple of the most common ones, so that you can feel like you understand what the heck we’re talking about, okay?

• Transgender/Trans: Anyone whose gender doesn’t match what the doctor guessed when they were born.

  • This is something known as an umbrella term. That means that it’s sort of a bucket that exists to describe a whole lot of different experiences that generally fall into a single category.

  • Nonbinary people count as being transgender, but not all nonbinary people vibe with the label. That’s fine!

• Binary: Someone who’s just a guy or a gal.

• Nonbinary: Someone who’s not just a guy or a gal.

• Cisgender/Cis: Anyone whose gender matches what the doctor guessed when they were born.

• AGAB: An acronym for “the gender you were assigned at birth.” Sometimes you’ll see AMAB (assigned male at birth) or AFAB (assigned female at birth), but they’re getting less common.

• Transmasculine or Transfeminine: modern replacements for AMAB/AFAB. Generally, they mean “someone who is transitioning towards masculinity and/or away from femininity” and the inverse. They’re not perfect, but at least they don’t tie trans peoples’ identities to some doctor’s wrong guess a few decades ago.

• Dysphoria: Distress of some sort that your body or place in society doesn’t fit your gender.

• Euphoria: A feeling of joy and relief when your gender fits well.

• Presentation: How you dress and look. It’s the main way we tell other people what our gender is without saying anything.

• Transition: The process where a trans person changes their body or presentation to fit your gender, whatever it is. This does not need to include any surgery or hormones.

• In/Out: Short for “in or out of the closet”, meaning the person is public with their trans status (out of the closet) or not (in the closet).

See? Not so bad. And, just to let you know in advance: I’m going to use gender-neutral language to refer to both you and your coworker, because I don’t know who, if anyone, is a man, woman, both, or neither. But knowing these terms will help us answer some questions you’ve probably got on your mind.

Now, let’s get to them.

What do I have to do to not get in trouble?

This is the most common work-related question I hear from folks when someone they work with transitions, and it’s super fair. They don’t exactly train you on this stuff, do they? The answer here is different depending on whether or not the person who told you they’re trans is ready to be out publicly or not, so let’s go through both:

If they told you in private:

Okay, first thing’s first: don’t tell anyone that they’re trans without their explicit permission each time. Like, I cannot stress this enough. If someone told you in confidence that they’re trans, whether they haven’t transitioned yet or they transitioned years and years ago, if they don’t want that to be public knowledge, you absolutely cannot tell people without their permission.

Why not?

Well, at the very least, it’s sexual harassment to do so most places—the US, Canada, the EU (though laws vary from country to country), and Great Britain all have protections for trans and queer folks’ right to privacy about their gender and sexuality, if they want it. If and when a trans person lets people know about their transgender status is their business, and their business alone.

Beyond that, it’s a good idea to ask your coworker what, when, and where they would like you to do about what they told you about their gender, and respect those wishes. They’re usually going to be pretty simple—and if your coworker isn’t ready to be out yet, it’s probably going to be “mostly nothing.”

If they came out publicly:

Dropping them an email to welcome them out is good form, or poking your head into their office when they have a spare minute. Beyond that, just treat them like any other member of the gender they told you they are.

One thing that often trips people up when someone they know is early in transition is that they accidentally use the trans coworker’s old name—sometimes known as a deadname—or old pronouns. If you find yourself doing this, the best thing for you to do is practice in private. One trick that works well for me is that for every time I mess someone’s name or pronouns up, I just say three sentences to myself using their name and pronouns correctly the next time I'm in private, to help cement what they are, rather than what they were.

This can be important, not just because it’s polite—persistent misgendering and/or deadnaming is also typically seen as sexual harassment. I know that seems a little extreme in a vacuum, so let’s draw an analogy to something that probably makes more sense. Say a coworker of yours who’s a woman gets married, going from being Betty Smith to Betty Campbell. She lets you know she wants to go by Campbell now, and to not use “miss” instead of “missus,” when you need to talk about her formally. If you refused to do so, constantly using the wrong title or last name, she’d also have a case for sexual harassment, just like your trans coworker, and for the same reason: you’d be creating a hostile workplace on the basis of something that’s affecting her because of her sex or gender. Basically, if a typical, reasonable member of that demographic would find it to be “intimidating, hostile, or abusive,” you’re gonna be in legal trouble.

If you’re in Human Resources:

If you work in HR, you’re going to be one of the first people to know when someone at work is getting ready to transition and come out, because you’re in charge of making sure that a bunch of practical things—stuff like the employee’s email alias, their login information, their name tags, their employee directory information, and more—are all ready to switch over to their new name, pronouns, or what have you when they come out.

With some luck, your workplace will already have gender transition guidelines, a formal process for what to do, in detail, when an employee is transitioning on the job, and ideally those guidelines should have some paperwork for your employee to fill out to tell you what, specifically, they need you to do and when. If not, now’s the time to write those policies, and to be thorough and careful about it, to make sure your employer is compliant with all of your local laws!

If you don’t have those policies in place, the Human Rights Campaign has a pretty good starter guide. Beyond basic stuff like that, here’s the essential information you need to get from your employee to be able to do your job:

• If and when they’re coming out.

  • If your employee isn’t ready to be out, but is making a complaint about persistent transphobia in the workplace, for instance, you have to pursue the matter without ever outing them.

• What their name is, and if/when they’re changing that name legally.

• What their pronouns are, and how they want that communicated by HR, or whether they’ll handle it themselves.

• What, if any, new uniforms, dress codes, washing-rooms, or locker rooms they’ll need access to as part of their job.

  • The law requires that they have the right to use the facilities that best match their gender. Don’t expect trouble from them on this, though—we tend to be pretty shy about these things, and most of us will prefer to use unisex facilities, because bathrooms are one of the places we’re at the most danger from other people.

  • Be ready for other employees’ complaints. There’s a bit of a political hullabaloo on right now about trans folks in most Western politics, and if you’ve got a big enough staff, someone’s probably going to make some noise. In the event that you get a complaint about which bathrooms a trans person is using, the person complaining may not know that they have a legal right to do so, so some coaching is probably for the best.

• What accounts they’ll need updated, and when those updates should go live.

• Who, in other teams—IT is the most important here, though Payroll and Benefits managers may need to get involved—you have their permission to talk to about all this to get everything else ready for them.

  • If they’re not comfortable looping other people in before they come out, let them know that the company will change things over as quickly as they can after they come out, and then have emails ready to go out as soon as the employee comes out.

It’s a fair bit of work getting things ready, but if you have well-established transition guidelines—and keep in mind that between one in fifty and one in twenty people are trans, so a little investment in them now will save you lots of work later—it should be easy to make sure nothing gets missed.

If you’re their boss, or have some level of influence over their role at work:

This is really important, so pay attention for a moment. Whether in the US under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, in the UK under the Equality Act, in Canada under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or under the various equal protection laws in effect in the EU, there are a series of things you absolutely must not do when your employee comes out and/or transitions. Here’s what they are:

• You can’t fire them, or decide to not hire a trans person.

• You can’t change the terms they’re employed under, and their opportunities for promotion and training can’t change.

• You can’t change their position—most specifically, if they’re in a client-facing role, you can’t put them in a non-client-facing role.

  • This most often comes up when an employee is in sales or customer relations, and an employer is concerned about losing clients. Even if you lose clients because those clients don’t like that they’re working with a trans person, you absolutely cannot reassign the trans employee to try to skirt the problem; this is one of the most common sources of an employment discrimination lawsuit.

    • It’s usually okay to move a client threatening to cut ties to another salesperson or customer relations point of contact, provided the trans employee is backfilled with similar replacement clients.

      • This is particularly important if the trans person is paid commissions. Stripping a high-value client from a trans person who’s paid on commission and then either backfilling with a low-value client or not backfilling at all is effectively cutting their pay, which is a discriminatory act even if it’s not intended that way.

  • If your trans employee asks for a role change themselves and cites their being trans as a reason, it’s absolutely OK to make that move—but if they’re making that move to get away from the way people are treating them, including clients, it’s a really good idea to take some proactive steps to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future, because the next trans employee to come out may not want to change their role.

• If your employee needs to take medical leave for anything related to being trans, that can’t affect their employment status or prospects in any way.

  • This is most common when a trans person has surgical recovery, which may mean they need to take short-term disability.

  • If they’re planning on taking that leave in the future at some point, that can’t affect your decision to hire, retain, promote, or train them.

    • It’s the same basic legal reality as if someone needed to take maternity leave. Each of the three countries I’m speaking about plus the EU see both events as a gender-related medically necessary healthcare event.

In essence, there’s a golden rule here: treat your trans employee just the same after they come out as you did before they came out, with the simple exception of addressing them by their chosen name and pronouns. The less of a deal you make out of it all, the more right you’ll be under the law.

So, my coworker is going to change a lot, aren’t they?

Maybe. Maybe not. You see, not every trans person transitions. Even when we do, transition looks different for every trans person.

I know a lovely couple where one member is nonbinary. They don’t feel dysphoria, so they decided that they didn’t want to transition in any significant way. For them, all that transition meant was using an androgynous version of their given name, they/them pronouns, and playing with their wardrobe and jewelry a little bit. It fits them, they feel good, and all they ever wanted was to be more true to themselves. It’s a little bit how like sometimes a bisexual person will come out publicly, even though they’re in a long-term, committed heterosexual relationship—nothing necessarily changes. It’s about being seen for their whole self by the people they love, nothing more.

But yeah, transition involves a lot more for many trans people, and what it involves can change over time. If you just stick with the “respect what they tell you” guideline from when they came out as things move forward, you’ll do just fine.

Why didn’t they come out until now?

While folks are coming out at younger and younger ages these days, the median age of transition is still 31, so there’s a pretty good chance your coworker has a partner and maybe kids. Since we, culturally, are told that trans folks always knew they were trans, it can seem pretty weird when someone in their mid-forties comes out at work.

Thing is? It’s actually super normal. Let’s look at a graph from that article I just linked.

This is all broken down by age categories. Let’s skip the young folks for now and see right in the middle: the 30-50 age groups. We’re looking at 22-29 years on average between the person’s first memory of gender dysphoria and when they started their transition. That means that a 49-year-old person who was completely average on this graph typically didn’t even feel their first twinge of gender dysphoria until they were 20, or that a 39-year-old wouldn’t have noticed until they were 21.

And then they’d have to figure out what that feeling even was, and not just, like, depression or anxiety. Believe me, as someone who’s been there? It can take a lot of work and a lot of time.

But things get even trickier. While not all trans people knew we were trans when we were little, a bunch of us did. To make an average, then, that means that for every 45-year-old who figured out that they were trans when they were 8, you have to have someone who didn’t have the first whiff of their dysphoria until they were thirty-seven.

I didn’t realize I was trans until I was 35. Literally, no earthly idea, and then 11 days of panic, and then I knew I was trans. I know several people who didn’t realize they were trans until they were in their sixties.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying something really, really simple: your coworker might not have even known themselves until recently. Even if they did, employment protections and civil rights for trans folks are pretty recent things in most countries—for instance, until as recently as 2020, you could be fired just for being trans in the United States. They might’ve been hiding this part of themselves to keep their job.

So, when are they getting the surgery?

Gentle bit of coaching here: don’t ever ask a trans person that, and especially not at work.

I know, I know—you’re curious about what bits they have downstairs, and you’ve seen trans people get asked this all the time, including on national TV. Stop and think for a minute, though: what would it mean if you walked up to a random coworker and asked them what their genitals looked like?

Yeah, a quick trip to HR and a firm talking-to would be the best case scenario if you did that, wouldn’t it?

When you ask that question of a trans person, that’s exactly what you’re doing… so don’t. They might be willing to share some information about their transition if they trust you, but that’s their business, not yours, and it’s not okay for them to share information about what they have going on in their pants for the same reasons it’s not okay for you to ask about it.

If you’re in HR:

If you’re in HR, this can be a tricky reality if you’re not ready for it, because unlike most employees, you will need to know when a trans person gets surgery. While most trans people never get any of the many different kinds of surgery—whether we’re talking about breast augmentation or removal, facial feminization or masculinization surgery, or, yes, one of the many forms of bottom surgery—they’ll need to talk to someone on your team because they’ll need to be off of work for a little bit to recover. For some, they’ll need to go on short-term disability, medical leave, or your local equivalent.

If and when that happens, there are a few things to remember:

• These surgeries are medically necessary. Yes, I know, you see “breast augmentation,” for instance and wonder how that can be medically necessary. These surgeries are necessary for us in the same way that breast reconstruction surgeries are for breast cancer survivors, and for the same reasons—and basically every medical organization in the world agrees.

• Your insurance policies, if you’re in the US, might exclude gender-affirming surgeries. If they do, those exclusions are probably illegal. Under the Affordable Care Act, any surgery which is medically necessary must be covered, period. So, if your policies exclude care, it’s time to revise your coverage. Even if your company doesn’t want to because they’re is worried about the extra costs, a trans employee can put the exclusion in front of your state health insurance regulator, where they’ll almost certainly win. It’s much better to get ahead of things, and bring your insurance fully in compliance with WPATH Standards of Care Version 8, the global standards for what’s medically necessary care for trans people.

  • Helpfully, a chart of all of the many gender-affirming surgeries that WPATH says are medically necessary as gender-affirming care is on the very last page of their Standards of Care. If you're in the US, one of the easiest things you can do is cut that page out, send it to your insurance provider, and let them know that the procedures on that chart need to be covered under Diagnosis Codes F64.0-F64.9, which are the diagnosis codes for gender dysphoria.

    • And before you worry that this will let all of your women employees get a boob job under insurance, for instance, and drive your costs through the roof, that’s what the diagnosis codes are for—it means these procedures are only covered as a treatment for dysphoria, not for anything else.

• Your employee doesn’t need to tell you what surgery they’re getting, only how much recovery time their doctor is recommending, same as any other surgery.

  • If they volunteer that information, it should be treated as protected, private medical information. If you’re in the US, that means that HIPAA applies.

Oh, hey, our DEI team could use some help!

No! No, absolutely don’t put that on your coworker, and especially not right now. Please, don’t even ask them. They know it’s there, and they’ll let you know if they’re interested in doing the work.

Look, I know you’ve got the best of intentions. You want the experiences of trans folks to be heard by your DEI team, with the hope that your company can be a better place for trans folks to work. That’s a good goal. But they're not ready for it.

Your company is almost certainly cisnormative, in the same way that it’s heteronormative, kind of sexist, and accepts whiteness as standard. After all, if it wasn’t those things, it wouldn’t need a DEI team, now would it? The problem here is that members of marginalized groups—Black folks, women, LGBT+ folks—often get saddled with the work of fixing those things, but are asked to do so in a way that doesn’t change anything too big and where they aren’t fairly compensated for all that extra work and professional risk.

Well… turns out the people in power generally don’t like any of that stuff. Like, they like the idea of it, but they don’t like the reality of what changing those things means in a day-to-day, boots-on-the-ground way. So, in bits and bobs, and eventually in bigger chunks, the minoritized person is thought, more and more, to be the source of the problems, until they are often ushered out of the company in one way or another. This effect has been best-studied with Black folks, from whom we can get some great educational materials. Now, while this specific diagram speaks to the experience of women of color, the same general process applies with variations to all minoritized people who are charged with reforming an organization.

This diagram comes from the Centre for Community Organizations, and the whole article attached to it is a fantastic read if you’re a leader at any level. Loading a DEI team up with minoritized people, and then charging them to fix big problems—and sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia are really big problems—without having the power to effect those changes is a recipe for frustration, conflict, and it puts those minoritized folks at real career risk. DEI work is urgently important, and it’s essential that white, cis, straight folks lead the charge to reform these problems.

Trans folks are at our most vulnerable when we’re just coming out. Don’t put us at even higher risk while we’re in such a vulnerable spot.

So, if I was on our DEI team instead and I wanted to make things better for our trans employees, what should I work to make happen?

Oh, gosh, that kind of help would be tremendous!

Some things that you can do are small, but really make an outsized difference to us, and some larger, structural changes can make a really massive difference.

Here’s some smaller things your company can do to help your trans employees:

• Encourage—but do not require—your employees to include their pronouns in their email signatures, and to either give them when they introduce themselves to each other or to wear a pronoun pin to do the work for them.

  • Never require people to include or share pronouns for a simple reason: not everyone is ready to be out. If an employee is closeted, requiring pronouns puts them in an impossible position: either they have to come out before they’re ready, or they have to misgender themselves.

  • Normalizing pronoun sharing makes a really outsized difference to nonbinary folks and people early in transition, whose presentation and pronouns might not match up in ways you expect.

    • Keep in mind, as well, that some people’s pronouns may change over time. This is entirely normal!

• Set up Display Name functions on all of your digital stuff where an employee’s name shows up, and let your employees edit them if you can. If direct employee editing is too much trouble, keeping the display name entry process simple on the backend will keep your IT crew happy.

  • Ideally, a single preferred name input that feeds to each of your systems can simplify things for everyone.

  • You need to know your employees’ legal names for tax and payroll reasons, which is just fine! But there’s no reason anyone outside HR should ever see that information.

• Get your HR team trained on LGBT+ issues, and particularly on trans issues, and make sure they take things like deadnaming and misgendering seriously.

  • If you need some help with this, reach out to your local LGBT+ Center—most cities have one. They’ll either have someone on staff who you can bring in to do that training, or they’ll know someone you can hire to give it.

  • Remember: these may seem like small potatoes in a vacuum, but they can turn into a labor lawsuit if they’re not taken seriously. It’s much better to have proactive policies to protect your trans employees from harassment.

• If and when your company has a virtual meeting, do not require everyone to have their cameras on.

  • Transmasculine people can only safely bind their chests for eight hours a day, and putting a binder on is… a bit of a process, but one that becomes crucial if they need to be on camera. Similarly, a transfeminine person with hair loss may need to put on and style a wig to be presentable for an on-camera meeting. Either way, this eats up work time from their day—time they could be using to be productive.

  • Especially early in transition, being forced to stare at their own face can be quite painful for a trans person. It’s so bad that some of us take down the mirrors in our bathrooms, or tape sheets over them. An hour-long meeting where we have to stare at our face can be torturous, and we often have to take some pretty dramatic steps to fix this problem.

    • If a trans person doesn’t want to be on camera, I promise there’s a good reason. Especially as we fit our better bodies to our souls as transition progresses, we tend to turn into shutterbugs. Once we’re comfortable, I can pretty much guarantee that we’ll be on camera consistently.

• Advocate for pay equity policies for your organization. Trans folks make about 70% of what their cis coworkers make for the same work in the US, and trans women fare even worse than that, at only around sixty percent of what their cis coworkers make.

  • Salary transparency is best, but it also tends to be very unpopular with leadership. A workable middle-ground is to have your team members’ total compensations regularly reviewed for fairness by an external auditor. This lets you quietly address any problems, and also provides you with evidence that your organization can use to show it works proactively, in good faith, to fight pay discrimination across every identity.

    • In a lot of ways, it’s like writing better documentation for your products: it costs more up front, but saves you a boatload on the backend.

And, if you want to make a real difference for your trans employees, here are some much bigger things you can do:

• When you’re building or renovating a workspace, make a single high-quality, gender-neutral bathroom instead of pairs of bathrooms divided for men and women to use.

  • This website is aimed at school design, but includes floorplans and examples that can be used in any building.

    • As an added bonus, good gender-neutral bathroom design, with full-height stall doors, can protect your employees from being harassed when they’re using the toilet.

  • Many places around the world, from the EU to Korea, have commonly used gender-neutral bathrooms designed like this for decades, because they’re both safer and highly cost-effective.

• Revise your company insurance plans to cover the medical procedures trans folks often need—including things like hair removal, which might seem cosmetic at first glance, but aren’t.

  • Remember, adding F64.0-F64.9, if you’re in the US, as condition codes will limit this coverage to trans folks and keep your costs pretty much the same.

    • Research has shown that covering these procedures actually has a pretty trivial extra cost, because it reduces the rates at which, for instance, trans folks get assaulted on the street, which results in ambulance rides, emergency room visits, and lost work—all of which health insurance needs to pay for. This is a good example, which found that covering facial feminization surgery increased net costs by only $0.02 per month per employee.

• Offer genuinely flexible schedules to your employees.

  • Transition is rife with frequent, one-hour appointments that recur every week, every few weeks, or every month, and many providers keep the same hours that your business typically does, making it impossible to schedule those appointments without interfering with their work schedule. The ability to simply make up that time in the morning, evening, or weekend will take a lot of strain off of your trans employees, and let them deal with their medical needs without stressing out too much about their jobs.

  • As a bonus, parents will be able to more effectively take care of their kids. These sorts of policies tend to be real crowd-pleasers, and pretty much never affect a company’s bottom line.

• Establish transition PTO policies—a bank of one-time sick hours that trans folks can use for our medical transitions when we need to.

  • Surgeries like the facial feminization surgery I linked a bit ago often mean we have to travel across the country or around the world, and come with some pretty significant recovery time before we’re clear to be back at work.

  • A good way to think about these policies is like paid maternity leave, which your company probably offers new moms. Some medical events happen just a few times in someone’s life, and require weeks or even a month or two of recovery time before we’re physically ready to be back at even office-type jobs.

That’s a lot of stuff I never really thought of before, but it mostly seems pretty simple.

I mean, yeah. That’s kind of what transition is like in a nutshell, as someone who’s been through it. Lots of “weird, I never thought of that, but okay,” moments and a lot of small, mundane, boring stuff.

And that’s kind of the bottom line. A lot of people make a big deal out of trans people and our transitions—and trans folks ourselves can definitely be part of the cause for that, because this stuff is cool and wonderful for us—but in the end, it mostly boils down to paperwork and a change of appearance, same as most of us go through for one reason or another over the course of our lives, whether it’s simple age, marriage, divorce, pregnancy, or bad luck with our health. Sure, it’s a significant life event, but everybody has those sorts of things now and again.

In many ways, if your response—and the response of your company—when someone comes out to you is basically, “Cool, congrats! What’s going on with the Loeffler account, by the way?” when a coworker comes out to you, that’s pretty much on-the-nose perfect.