[begno]

I've met more than one hiring manager who tacitly refuses to hire anyone who is transgendered. Of course this is only revealed in confidence, and they'll deny it if asked.

The reason is typically one or more of:

- they don't want the rest of the team to have to walk on eggshells regarding pronouns and so on, or

- they don't want to have to deal with any fallout from female employees getting pissed about males using their bathroom, or

- they've had a bad experience hiring a transgender previously (typically due to the previous two reasons) and don't want to repeat it with another.

Kind of sucks for the transgendered applicants, but understandable I suppose, given the circumstances these days.

[ajross]

> Kind of sucks for the transgendered applicants, but understandable I suppose, given the circumstances these days.

Yikes. That's true in exactly the same way that segregation kinda sucked for the black kids, but was understandable given the circumstances of the postbellum south.

Discrimination against a minority solely for the social conveniences of the majority is a terrible sin. Haven't we had this fight a thousand times already? Why do it again?

[cogman10]

Yup. Catering to bigots makes you a bigot. The fact that "they won't ever admit to it" is the problem with bigotry.

[tonymillion]

Thank you for this comment, I was just about to rage and you eloquently expressed a great reply!

In addition I was about to add:

How about the manager not use their internal prejudices to influence their decision and hide behind a thin veil of “what about my employees” and actually let their employees LEARN how to correctly interact with transgendered, queer, ethnically diverse co-workers and possibly come out of their cotton-wool lined shells.

It would be better for all of us, right?

[DannyBee]

I mean, this kind of "fight" is basically what society is about, and it is unfortunately always hard earned to get anywhere, but i'm also honestly not sure there is a way around this.

The principle you give is essentially limitless - your "social convenience" part is doing all the work here - but you can't just define away the things you like but the majority doesn't currently accept [1] as "social convenience" whether the causes happen to be "good" or not.

Because everyone who is part of a group that is discriminated against thinks they are in the right and that the majority doesn't accept them for, essentially, social convenience reasons.

And people in the majority don't see it as social convenience reasons.

If the two "sides" didn't have this disagreement, the minority wouldn't be discriminated against in the first place!

You are essentially arguing that the right things should just take hold immediately, without any work, and people shouldn't fight about it, but they would if people agreed they were the right things in the first place.

You can't just pre-define people as wrong and then say "why are they fighting about things when they are so wrong, and are always so wrong about these things"?

Humans as a group are slow to accept, and fairly wary of acceptance of new social things - it's incredibly rare for significant social change to take less than a generation to take hold overall, or to gain acceptance across all living generations simultaneously.

There are lots of reasons for this, most (AFAIK) to do with our survival over the long term. That sucks, for sure, in the short term. But i'm not sure what the better answer is.

I certainly wish there was a way to ensure society reaches a reasonable fixpoint on good ideas faster, if for no other reason than the obvious pain to people living it, but if there is, we haven't found it so far, and attempts to reach faster fixpoints have not .. always led to good paths, and attempts to legislate away resistance has never worked ...

[1] I honestly don't know if being inclusive of transgender folks falls into the category of what the majority of folks accept or not, i'm just presuming it doesn't based on your statement. The surveys i see seem .. complex and varying IE https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...

[mikrl]

I’ve heard of managers who are so inclusive of trans women that they talk down to them and give them menial clerical tasks (as an engineer) as if they were cis women.

[ikiris]

I've literally met people who brag about trashing resumes with pronouns, openly because they think they're immune to consequences.

[pcthrowaway]

It's a common enough sentiment here and on reddit when the topic comes up. But if Blind is any indication, it's possible more people would trash a resume that lists pronouns before just... using it to inform how they address the candidate

[refulgentis]

It's not understandable. Some things you don't let yourself do and speak up when other people do.

[lliamander]

As is the case with many anti-discrimination policies, often the actual result can be the opposite of what was intended.

Many employees are not comfortable with the accommodations for trans colleagues required of them by their employer (and by our current legal environment). Those employees don't really have a means to have their concerns addressed: it is either comply or quit/get fired. A way around that is to simply avoid hiring trans people.

That you do not understand those concerns does mean they are not understandable.

[CoastalCoder]

Perhaps parent and GP comments are using different definitions of "understandable".

[0xcde4c3db]

And frankly, my experience has been that people with such "concerns" tend to also have corresponding ones for other minorities.