Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Transition in the workplace
The impetus for transgender employees to change received a boost as the pandemic raged
For years, Deke Wilson was ambivalent about undergoing a medical transition to male. He felt it was critical for his happiness, but there were plenty of reasons to put it off: the expense, the difficult recovery, the potential medical complications.
But while sitting at home during the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Wilson said he felt the urgency. “You’re trying so hard to avoid getting this one sickness,” he said. “Why? Because you want to live — you want to experience life fully to the best you can. For me, that means being comfortable in my skin.”
Wilson, 41, who works at a logistics company in Cleveland, underwent five surgeries from March through December last year at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, recovering while working from home. He expects to return to in-person work this month.
For some transgender people, the era of remote work during the pandemic provided an opportunity to take the next steps in their transitions, according to interviews with more than 30 transgender people, their doctors and advocates.
Data on medical transitions during the pandemic remains hard to come by, although anecdotal evidence from the interviews suggests an increase in surgeries compared with previous years. No database tracks the total number of people in the United States who undergo medical transitions each year, but seven regional and local health care providers reported stronger demand for transition operations in 2021, compared with 2020, when many surgeries were paused because of the pandemic. Demand was also higher in 2021 compared with 2019, before the pandemic.
While some of the increase can be attributed to operations that were postponed while hospitals were overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, doctors in the field offered other explanations as well.
They note that more employers are covering transgender health care in insurance plans, that surgical techniques are becoming safer and resulting in better cosmetic outcomes, and that more hospitals are offering these services to patients.
Many transgender people do not feel that costly surgery is necessary. For those who do seek medical transitions, common surgeries include chest and genital reconstructions, and hairline and lip lifts.
Even as access to transgender medical care has increased, the subject remains a flashpoint in the United States, where Americans are roughly evenly split over whether they believe others should be allowed to legally switch their sex, according to a September YouGov poll.
These tensions also play out in the workplace, despite efforts at greater inclusion by some employers, although research into the experiences of the estimated 1.4 million transgender people in the United States is limited.
A McKinsey report published in November found that transgender employees earn 32% less than the rest of the population, even when they have similar or higher levels of education. Nearly two-thirds of transgender employees in the United States remain in the closet in some or all professional interactions with clients or customers, out of fears that they will experience hostility, harassment or discomfort. Transgender adults are twice as likely as other adults to be unemployed, the report found.