Will California taxpayers pay your employees if they say they are transgender?

“Going From Marginalized to Welcomed in the Workplace” (nytimes):

… TransCanWork, a nonprofit that has teamed up with the California Restaurant Association, among other groups. The program trains employers to become transgender-friendly in their hiring practices and their overall operations. It also connects transgender people with employers; a state grant pays for the first 60 hours of each new employee’s wages.

If you’re an employer, why not ask every new-hire to identify as “transgender” (Wikipedia says that this is “an umbrella term” that covers potentially almost anyone)? At that point state taxpayers are funding most of your costs of bringing a new person on board.

What’s the flaw in this strategy for cutting costs and increasing profit?

9 thoughts on “Will California taxpayers pay your employees if they say they are transgender?

  1. Fraud? Wikipedia says transgender “may include people who are not exclusively masculine or feminine”. Wouldn’t that then be everyone? Or are you saying that a person who identifies as a man cannot have “a feminine side”?

  2. Or maybe you are proposing that a government agency be created to certify transgender status? Then there can be a special ID card. But what about people who are gender-fluid? Do they make multiple visits per day, potentially, to this agency?

  3. I do understand that the point of this post is not to warn Californian’s about the potential for the fraudulent use of their tax dollars. After all, the payroll subsidy goes to employers who hire the agency’s clients. I doubt that the agency has much problem with people fraudulently identifying as transgendered in order to obtain their services, but even if they did I doubt it would be particularly difficult for them to filter out such fraudulent applicants. The point of this post is to call attention to the horrible injustice of California using taxpayers money to help people who the infallible market deems less valuable find jobs – even if that lower valuation is based on prejudice. What I don’t understand is that even if one grants that such state help is a horrible injustice (which I don’t), why it is that this particular government injustice, whose cost amounts to a rounding error in the pentagon’s lawn fertilizer budget, is the one which gets the attention of a blog post.

  4. Who said anything about “injustice”? If I’m a shareholder in a private company and the state government is paying my workers, that’s not “injustice” from my point of view!

    [Separately, “I doubt that the agency has much problem with people fraudulently identifying as transgendered … I doubt it would be particularly difficult for them to filter out such fraudulent applicants.” How would that work? A bureaucrat would use what criteria to separate the authentically transgendered from the fraudulently transgendered?]

  5. Folks are missing the bold text that Philg highlighted, here it is again in case you missed it:

    “a state grant pays for the first 60 hours of each new employee’s wages.”

    I personally love the way our government is paying grant money for this program. I say our government must go further and pay grant money to other programs too beside TransCanWork such as: Sweet16CanWork, GreenDyeHairCanWork, FirstTimeCarOwnerCanWork, etc. and many many more that you can imagine. By leaving out other groups, the government will be faced with a discrimination lawsuit, no?

    Of course, we also need government grant money for: HowToSueGOVToBankruptcy program.

  6. And what’s wrong with saying you are Asian Pacific Islander on a college application if you are feeling a little Samoan after a large spam meal. After all, there is no scientific basis for race is there?

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