Gender is a key part of many business practices and systems, whether intentional or subconscious. Gender is at play in interactions between employees, types of washrooms available, or filling out forms with gender categories. In the work that TransFocus undertakes with companies, we function as gender detectives investigating the mystery of why transgender people face challenges, or missing from company life. What we encounter in our explorations and discoveries is that there are often age-old practices that are deeply ingrained and unquestioned that complicate trans participation in or access to companies. The common response to reason(s) for these practices is: “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”

While these practices are helpful in many respects, these approaches can prevent businesses from growing and reaching new heights, including attracting new customers, streamlining processes, or adopting innovative approaches. Companies that partner with TransFocus have been pleasantly surprised that they can leverage the unique insights and perspectives of gender diversity to unlock some of their most persistent challenges. We have been able to provide fresh ways of undertaking business to meet their objectives. When we share this with others, they are often skeptical and incredulous at first: “How is this possible?! What do you mean?!” In this blog, we will share some examples to make more tangible the fact that companies can also benefit from transgender inclusion. And we’ll show how this benefits cisgender* people, too! This makes it the elusive holy grail of win-win-win (i.e., trans people win, cis people win, and companies win).

Taking a step back to look at gender as a whole throughout a company’s systems allows for fruitful discussions and creative solutions. In some instances, this entails exploring whether gender is needed at all. Sometimes organizations are set-up with too much emphasis on gender differences, or distract from important work and decisions.

When TransFocus works with organizations to remove gender, it is not simply about taking gender out, which creates a vacuum along with great uncertainty and anxiety. We carefully explore with our clients ways to remap gender onto stable alternatives. This allows for the maintenance of system integrity and sustainability for the benefit of all people across the gender spectrum.

This all sounds great in theory, but how does this actually play out in reality, you ask? One of the most common uses of gender in companies is as a proxy for safety. For example, we assume that if we have all of one gender in a designated washroom, we will ensure safety. It is often assumed that there are fewer issues among people of the same gender. But data TransFocus has collected across various organizations does not support this. In fact, in some instances, there are more issues in single-gender spaces than in all-gender spaces. That is, there is conflict within genders that goes largely unaddressed! So, gender may not be as reliable a measure of safety than we’d like to believe. And perhaps an overfocus on gender has distracted us from more nuanced issues of safety.

As such, TransFocus has supported organizations to shift from relying on gender to determine safety by remapping onto an alternative method. Safety still remained at the core as an important business objective for both employees and customers. In many instances, TransFocus found that behavior is a much more direct and reliable way to measure and address safety. No matter someone’s gender, if they exhibit certain unacceptable behaviours they are determined unsafe and in violation of company policy (e.g., staring, lurking, touching).

TransFocus has guided many organizations to develop successful and creative solutions to solidify safety on a more solid basis without using gender. These have had far-reaching, positive impacts on employees, customers, and leaders. In particular, employees often appreciated the greater clarity and support for when and how to intervene in unsafe situations. Customers enjoyed greater freedom of choice between options and had greater confidence in the organization’s ability to make informed decisions where inappropriate behaviour was at play. There were also positive impacts on the organization’s bottom line, including:

Less loss of transgender customers upset by being misgendered or mistaken as risks they do not actually pose;
Staff time freed up by not having to guess customer’s gender (usually based on how they look) in order to assign an arbitrary level of risk; and
Staff time saved by not having to take corresponding action based on assumed gender (e.g., move customers to another dorm to maintain a gender balance in an all-gender dorm).

This shows how reimaging gender and taking a comprehensive approach is beneficial not only from a transgender perspective, but to organizations and their other stakeholders. If you’d like to explore how this process could benefit your company, check out our services.

* Cisgender is used to describe anyone whose gender is aligned to their sex (e.g., cisgender women was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman).

Re-imagining gender to improve business practices