Since I graduated in 2006, I've stayed involved with my alma mater's LGBT Office. A month or so ago, I was on a career panel called Out At Work, co-sponsored by a bunch of queer/trans* groups on campus. There were five of us on the panel, all white, two female, one male. All identified as gay/lesbian and none mentioned being trans. The moderator was also a white gay man. I was the youngest by about four years, and I think I was the only one who had gone to the school as an undergrad. Three people had post-grad degrees -- one doctor, one lawyer, one MPH -- and the other may have, but I'm not sure. (I do not.) This sort of crowd isn't unusual to me when I do work with this particular school. It's a very white, very heteronormative, very patriarchal crowd. It was an old-money Southern school that now has significant regional, if not racial, diversity. This may be obvious, but it's also a private and very expensive school with a huge endowment, so everyone expects to end up in white-collar and/or professional jobs.
The evening went mostly as expected. The five of us sat at a table in the front of a room, the moderator asked questions, occasionally students in the office would ask questions. There were two remarkable moments when it took effort to keep my jaw from dropping. First, one student asked about how to decide whether to put LGBT activities on his resume. I was surprised to hear the doctor on the panel, whom I respect quite a bit, say that it's entirely up to you because it's an activity, and there's nowhere on your resume where you would write in your sexual orientation. To the satisfaction of two women sitting in front of me, I interjected that actually, it comes up very often on job applications, specifically when they ask if you've ever used a different name, and how many people applying for jobs won't necessarily be using their legal name and/or may have an incongruous gender marker on their documentation. It does come up, it just never did for the people on the panel. The original respondent was sweet enough to say "oh duh, I can't believe I just said that" and correct himself, and mentioned it to me again after the panel. I wasn't surprised to hear this kind of gaffe, but I was heartened by the fact that I wasn't the only one with a quizzical look on my face.
The second moment was one I should have expected, but didn't. We had all had pretty pleasant experiences at our jobs, and found them to be queer- or gay-friendly. Sometimes, as with me, we had been standard-bearers who were able to change things in our offices without much of a fight, and we shared that. But the moderator, in an effort to get us to bring up and discuss some problems that could arise, said, "None of you have experienced discrimination at work, but what are some issues that you think could come up?" I didn't feel bad at all to nearly cut him off and say, "I haven't had any discrimination issues come up about my sexual orientation, but I work with a bunch of gay people. I deal with gender-based discrimination every day, and I'm really tired of beating that back." The moderator was dumbfounded. I kept talking about examples because I thought it was really important, and in the end, I was proud of how it went. But egads. Really? We exist in vaccuums?
*Most of the groups on campus use "LGBT," but they're moving away from it slowly. Overall it's a very LG(bt) campus, with significant differences between the experiences of cis queer folks and the experiences of trans folks (whether queer or not).
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