“Too Much Trouble”: Transgender and Nonbinary People's Experiences of Stigmatization and Stigma Avoidance in the Workplace

Abstract

Transgender and nonbinary (TNB) people in the U.S. navigate significant employment and economic inequities. Gaps in knowledge about their workplace experiences limit our broader understanding of how social inequality is interactionally constructed through employment contexts. We conducted and analyzed interviews with 26 TNB young adults. Routine hiring processes and structural constraints made participants vulnerable to interactional stigmatization and subsequent discrimination, with deleterious consequences for employment as well as mental health. Participants deployed a variety of strategies to avoid or resist anticipated stigma, including exiting the workforce or changing careers. One's ability to avoid stigmatization at work was partially shaped by structural and managerial support, organizational form, and one's gender and gender conformity. Beyond contributing to economic inequality by limiting job and career options, our findings suggest that these social processes comprise minority stressors that diminish the well-being of TNB participants and exacerbate their economic marginalization. In contributing empirical insight into the experiences of TNB people, we demonstrate the salience of stigmatization and stigma avoidance strategies for social closure within organizations and thereby advance sociological understanding of the relational generation of inequality at work.