The Politics of F*ckability in the Workplace

Transgender and nonbinary people talk to UTDN about their nightmare workplace experiences, what to look out for, and the need to defend comprehensive workplace protections for gender diverse people.

“I don’t know. You were the first nonbinary person in our newsroom,” my editor told me over the phone after a contentious nine weeks of work. I asked why I was hired, and this was part of the response.

All I could think about was how disappointed I was. I thought I was being invited to the table. I thought those that hired me did so to take me under their wing, to hone the nonbinary, transgender, social justice lens I reported from. Instead, it felt like I was being made an example out of.

I didn’t understand why I was hired. For this tension to arise?

I will never forget my editor was one of the few gay people on staff, and was cautious with me as if our vague homo-similarities produced an instant inability to be objective, while some in the newsroom acted like they’d given me the opportunity of a lifetime.

This is one of many experiences, a more mild, yet loaded one, but an experience that led me to question my own value in the workplace. I imagine others have experienced situations just like me, especially if you are like me.

In interviews with Under the Desk News (UTDN) three nonbinary and transgender people spoke about their experiences in the workplace with additional contextualization from a queer scholar, amounting to what I call the undressing of the politics of fuckability in the workplace. Or, where workers, even in LGBTQ+ work environments, are objectified, tokenized, and discriminated against as a result of their gender identity, expression, and sexual nonconformity, while cisgender, and assimilated, colleagues are celebrated for conforming to those expectations. These expectations are often associated with objectivity, the voice of unbiased expertise.

“Unfortunately, it's not surprising,” Williams Institute’s Distinguished Senior Researcher Brad Sears told UTDN.

More than 80 percent of transgender employees and 59 percent for nonbinary employees in the U.S. have experienced discrimination or harassment at work at some point in their lives, according to two 2024 Williams Institute reports, “Workplace Experience of Transgender Employees,” in addition to another report with a similar name for nonbinary employees.

Sears says two things stand out in the two reports in terms of discrimination and harassment. And that is employees, co-workers, and customers are disproportionately focused on “fetishizing” gender expectations. Unfortunately, harassment takes the form of criticizing people for not conforming to those gender expectations, and often responds with threats of violence, “threats to fix people and make them conform” to expectations, Sears said.

Many interviewees validate this finding through their own experiences.

Spencer Bull, a tattoo artist from the Jersey Shore, tells of ongoing discrimination and harassment in response to them being a trans masculine and nonbinary person from the time they were an apprentice until now. For years, they were objectified and deemed insufficient in comparison to other men’s tattoo work. For all that time until now, they’ve had to self-advocate, and push back against the abuse.

Bull tells UTDN that apprenticing for tattoo artists that are straight, cisgender men has been filled with misogyny, racism, anti-transness and sexism. From clientele to colleagues, the abuse was rather constant.

Bull had experience with male clientele checking their crotch before getting tattooed. If the tattoo artist built trust with women clients, the men in the shop would consider them “too close” to them. In the meantime, one of the men they’d work for would have women inappropriately take their shirts off for arm tattoos. Then, their boss would ask them inappropriate questions like “why are you wearing boxers to work,” or “why do you want to dress like that?”

Any compliments directed at Bull focused on their body rather than their tattoos.

However, Bull said there was a completely different “coddling” standard for tattoo artists that were straight, cisgender men.

“These guys can go in with fucking flip-flops and crocs when you're not even allowed to wear those shoes in fucking tattooing places, because, God forbid you dropped a machine on your foot…” Bull shared, annoyed.

Sears says this behavior is shown relentlessly in the data, and is often replicated in the nonprofit space too.

One worker told UTDN anonymously (out of fear of retaliation from their current employer) that; in their experience; management and colleagues “think they’re being rational” when they are discriminating.

Oftentimes, this person, a queer nonbinary, person of color working for an LGBTQ+ inclusive nongovernmental organization, found that when they would pitch articles about the global trans experience they’d get rejected for projected bias, but when a cisgender, white man pitched the same article, it was accepted without qualm.

Similarly, this kind of behavior was common at fundraising dinners.

These dinners were often moderated by a white, cisgender man who spoke about why individuals should give money to the organization. In order to do so, their colleague would speak about the experiences of people other than his own, including the presumed experiences of trans people around the world. When the anonymous source was asked to speak at these events, it’d be under more extractive conditions. They could only speak about their experiences as a nonbinary, queer person. Never about their work in relation to their world or experience.

They emphasized feeling as though they were making up a fake personal story for extraction.

“I had a hard upbringing, but in terms of my queerness, it wasn't that hard,” they said. “...it wasn't perfect, but it wasn't that hard. But they always expect me to come with some harrowing speech about how I had to overcome all this shit that's not real. Like, that's for some people, for sure, but you shouldn't make those people speak about it. And second of all, that's not my queer experience,” they continued.

But when they weren’t being mined for traumatic stories, they were being sexually harassed by cisgender coworkers, who’d receive nothing but a slap on the wrists.

“We did a report just looking at public sector employees,” Sears said. “What stands up in the research is, I would say, consistent with my own lived experience, is that the nonprofit or government sectors, even in the most liberal places, are not necessarily protective environments.”

Over one in 10 LGBTQ+ adults in the U.S. workforce are employed in the public sector, according to the report Sears references.

Ravanna-Michelle Menendez, a retail worker in Nashville, has also worked in LGBTQ+ nonprofits in addition to white collar workplaces, but they all seem to prove a similar end result: “expendability” as she called it.

“And I thought that I had, especially being the only trans woman there, some bit of security, especially working specifically in the talent field with recruiting and DEI, and knowing that, that was such a strong importance [to my employer]” said Menendez about working for Lyft. She was let go in 2020 after three years of employment.

While at Lyft, Menendez made sure the company, wherever they were headquartered, followed the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) for trans employees, which she herself was able to rightfully benefit from. Menendez thought she had accomplished something enough to secure her job at the company long-term. But as time went on that security dwindled.

For months after Menendez lost her job, it remained difficult for her to land one.

“I felt like they really just wanted me to die, to be very honest,” Menendez said with pain in her voice. “I felt like I’d just been subjugated to being a tranny with big tits, essentially.”

The advocate said that once the administration took to power, people started to go radio silent on her. Nonprofit leaders she once worked with, ghosted her. She was left to survival work, having to make money in any way she could manage.

In fact, the federal agency responsible for enforcing laws against workplace discrimination already stopped taking complaints filed by transgender employees. On July 15, that same federal agency back peddled this decision by announcing they would allow some trans discrimination cases to move forward, reported AP News.

Unfortunately, according to the evidence, trans and nonbinary people tend to exist in the workplace under a certain scope of adherence to normative gender roles, attractiveness, and perceived sexuality that make it impossible to thrive in the workplace. And unless one’s gender and sexuality adhere to the explainable, they’re often exposable, sexualized, and otherwise left at-risk to the employer who wishes to profit, without risk, before learning, or empathizing with the struggle of workers with minoritized gender identities and expressions.

“We need to be the ones that are fighting like a chorus for a better tomorrow. That is truly what we need [at] this moment,” Menendez said. “And until then, we're going to continue to see people [in power] allowed to walk all over us as if we are nothing and that our existence, leaders, to workplace leaders, are turning their backs on trans people in almost every possible way. It feels our rights, our health care, everything is an expendable opportunity for them to excel.”

Find more of Lana’s work on Substack at

Lana Leonard

Lana Leonard (they/them) is a transgender, nonbinary freelance multimedia journalist, and social justice activist based in New York City. Their words have shown up in Assigned Media, LGBTQ Nation, The Los Angeles Blade, GLAAD among other publications. They are a former GLAAD staffer under the GLAAD Media Institute where they worked as an associate for the Education & Advocacy team. In this role they presented messaging and media workshops for LGBTQIA+ people and allied communities throughout the country to elevate accurate and fair media inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people throughout the globe in media outlets throughout the country. They're the recipient of the NLGJA's 2025 Excellence in Online Journalism Award.