This is a pretty old idea (see the French movie The Closet from 2001, for example), but with more states adding protections for workers who are gay or transgender I am wondering if it wouldn’t be rational for employees who fear that they are losing the rat race to come out to their bosses prior to their next performance review. A white male worker can thus transform himself from a non-protected worker into a difficult-to-fire member of a protected class (depending on the state).
Employers aren’t supposed to be asking a lot of questions about who was sharing an employee’s bed the previous night or what activities took place in that bed. Nor is there any business situation in which an employee’s identification with a different gender and potential for medical procedures could be discussed. If an employer crosses the line and asks “But aren’t you married with two kids?” an employee can always answer “My wife is very understanding.”
What’s wrong with this idea in practice?
[How much is a meritless employment discrimination case worth in California? Kleiner Perkins offered Ellen Pao $964,502 (Mercury News), too much of a discount from her $10 million demand, apparently, and about the same as she would have received by having sex with a $250,000/year earner in Massachusetts and harvesting guideline child support for 23 years (though the child support would be tax-free whereas the settlement money might have been taxable as a substitute for lost wages).]
Pao can pursue both rackets. She had a kid with supposed billionaire Buddy Fletcher. He is now broke, but maybe she can persuade the judge to impute some earnings based on his past riches and lifestyle. News reports about the trial have not mentioned him, so she does not seem very attached to him.
I proposed that the reason the Defense Department accepted gays in the military was that “coming out” (even if your not) has advantages and very little disadvantages. Draft dodging would be easy. You could even be “deprogrammed” after the call up if you wanted. While there isn’t a draft now, they wanted to be prepared. The two long wars were taking a toll on recruitment.
I never thought about it as a strategy to stay ahead of the cost cutting axe.
Interesting question. If an employee ‘comes out’ to the boss, in fairness, he/she must also come out to colleagues to prevent inadvertent sexual harassment. If I think you’re a guy (Y-chromosome and it works), there are things I might say that are “okay talk” guy-to-guy. However, if you are a guy with a kink in your Y-chromosome, you may take some of my guy talk the wrong way and sue me for making you feel uncomfortable. No?
Wasn’t the premise of this column the main plot point in the movie “Tootsie”?
In answer to the question – no, rational employees will not come out as gay and/or transgender. A straight cis employee who was performing poorly would not benefit from the additional protections and would be inviting discrimination which would harm his or her career.
Visibly transgender women in particular suffer a huge amount of employment discrimination. It is a great that more states are adopting employment protections and disappointing that this has not yet been enacted on a Federal level.
Here in the UK we have had protection against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation for 7 years and protection against discrimination on the grounds of gender identity for 15 years. I am not aware of one case where a cis straight person falsely came out to try to claim employment discrimination.
” I am not aware of one case where a cis straight person falsely came out to try to claim employment discrimination.”
How would you know that such claims were false? Any effort by an employer to prove that you were not really gay would surely be regarded as an invasion of privacy.
That being said, I think Phil meant this more as a joke than as a serious road map for how to avoid being fired.
No, there are two reasons why this idea doesn’t work:
1. A straight, white, cisgender man already belongs to four protected categories. You can’t be fired for being straight (if in a state with protections), white, cisgender (in a state with protections), or being a man. The laws anout discrimination protect *both* advantaged and disadvantaged classes, which is why white men sometimes sue and win in affirmative action cases (aand why old-school affirmative action basically doesn’t exist anymore…people hire to expand diversity, not because “group X gets extra points.” The difference matters in a lot of specific cases.
2. It would only cover you if *you could prove you were fired for being gay*, which would be a tough case to make. If you read the cases where people have won LGBT discrimination cases, the discrimination was obvious, persistent, severe, and wewell-documented. You’re not going to win a discrimination case unless anti gay statements are littered through your personnel file.
“You’re not going to win a discrimination case unless anti gay statements are littered through your personnel file.”
That’s nonsense. Even the most bigoted employers are not so stupid as to actually put anti-gay statements in an employee’s personnel file. Most of these cases are made thru “hostile work environment” – management “permits” (in reality has limited ability to control without creating a totalitarian environment) nasty remarks made by co-workers, etc. Of course, a totalitarian thought control environment is considered a feature, not a bug, by many “social justice warriors”.