“We can’t hide” - the transgender job hunt

by Sara Ritsch
Staff Writer

Elaina Walker, 35, is a chromosomally XXY transgender woman on the search for a job. But her goal of becoming a car sales person is not as easy to reach as she expected.

“I’ve lived a pretty normal life as a woman,” she says. “Aside from when someone finds out through jobs, taxes or paperwork, I don’t deal with discrimination. I know a lot of people have, and I feel for them.”

But Walker feels like discrimination looked her right in the face in her most recent experience at Reynold’s Ford OKC.

She walked into her interview donning an expensive white dress and reeking of confidence, and they loved her. Walker went through five rounds of in-person interviews, meeting everyone from the receptionist to the General Manager. According to Walker, each of them gleefully welcomed her on board.

Her final moment at Reynold’s Ford consisted of the receptionist’s final goodbye – “We look forward to having you,” she said, as Walker explains it.

Walker considered herself a shoe-in, receiving calls right up until they ran her social security number and saw the face of a man. Her background check was clean, but it displayed a previous life. A past untouched by the present.

“I stopped getting calls. Dodged,” she says. So she called the GM, hoping to find the truth about why she was not, in fact, on board.

“What you found out,” she told him, “Was that I’m trans. You don’t want me to work there. That’s what I need you to tell me – the truth.” She said, “He acted like he had no idea. ‘I told you, we need women here,’ he told me. I said, ‘Yes you did, before you ran my social security number and background check and you talked to me like I was part of your company – that’s discrimination. Admit it.’ He said, ‘I’ll do no such thing. I had no idea until you told me just now.’”

Walker is now considering moving. “Hopefully I won’t waste anyone else’s time. I can’t change their ignorance to intelligence.”

An intellectual perspective is what Walker longs for the world to embrace. She says that people who have been manipulated by the facets of the Bible Belt are more likely to oppose transgender people and “become fools.”

“They are complacent. Content in their little world. They treat people how they want with their crosses on their wall...and it’s an old way of thinking that needs to go.”

This is not the only transgender person who has experienced opposition when attempting to find work. Allison Blaylock, a special friend to The Gayly, is currently picking up her life and moving to Los Angeles in hopes of finally finding a job.

In her case, discrimination has spit in her face. “They see me in person and all of a sudden it’s, ‘Oh, never mind.’ Or, I typically interview with a female, and when a male comes into play it becomes a ‘no.’ It’s happened at multiple places around here.

“No one directly says why. The best is, ‘You’re overqualified,’” Blaylock says. “It’s kind of hard to over-qualify for a position that you just got out of. By saying that, it’s not gender specific, not age discrimination; it’s nothing of that nature.”

In Reynold’s Ford’s case, their Human Relations officer, Ashley, insists they have no preference for or against the LGBT community. “We would not be discriminatory by any means. As long as the manager is interested in that person, it would not be an issue.”

But in Walker’s experience, the managers seemed extremely interested until they ran her background check.

Blaylock understands Walker’s distress. “Realistically, people aren’t comfortable here in Oklahoma with transgender people. We live in a state that does have the freedom to hire and fire whoever they want,” she commiserates.

“Your history is out there. You can’t hide. Your name is shown when your name is changed. You can’t hide that. ‘That’s my past, this is my future – accept me for who I am.’ But they can’t [accept you], because they have to run a criminal background check.”

And even though the background check is to determine if you have any arrests or convictions, it will also reveal that you are trans. Blaylock says, “We can’t hide.”

The Gayly – June 3, 2016 @ 1:05 p.m.