Poof! Just like that, Glenn Morrison became Vandy Beth Glenn. And got fired. Was it wrong?
Glenn Morrison wrote and edited state laws for his boss, Georgia Legislative Counsel Sewell Brumby. Then one day, he walked in as Vandy Beth Glenn, wearing a knee-length black skirt and a red turtleneck sweater.
Poof! Just like that, Glenn became Vandy. And got fired. Vandy is transgendered, diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, a psychiatric classification signaling conflict with your biological sex. She couldn’t stand “fronting” at the office while she lived privately as a woman, so she came out. On Halloween no less! If she was confused about her gender she was positively clueless about her timing.
Vandy’s boss didn’t cotton to her new identity, firing her because she would be “extremely harmful to our work operations.” He’s got a point. Having a male co-worker suddenly appear in the bathroom stall as a woman would unsettle anybody in the ladies room. What do you say to clients when they call asking for him? “Oh, he’s a she now. Please hold and I’ll connect you?” What if other employees want to start cross-dressing as a goof? How can you tell them Vandy’s allowed but they’re not?
Vandy’s boss is right: Her new identity posed a potentially huge disruption, with consequences on office morale and work productivity. But is that enough to fire somebody? Or not hire them in the first place? Because if it is, women would have never entered the work force. They actually posed a MUCH greater threat to morale and productivity. After all, the C-suites had to either get rid of their all-male executive washrooms or build new ones, costing lots of money. In fact, if you look at sexual harassment, you could say that “allowing” women to work was one of the biggest, costliest work disturbances ever created–for everyone. From employers to employees to contractors and clients. Corporations had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensatory damages for sexual harassment suits and Human Resource policy changes, making women in the workforce not only a major disturbance, but a whopping financial burden.
And yet, could Business now argue that it was wrong for women to work? Would anybody seriously say the “disruption” wasn’t worth it?
You can make the same argument for EVERY minority. If you want to talk about workplace disruption, what the hell do you think happened when the military made room for African-Americans? And if you want to talk about cost, what about creating easy access for the disabled?
Accommodating differences always looks like the few creating a burden on the many, but it always ends up benefiting everyone. It’s hard to see now, but once the transgendered get full worker protections in the same way women, African-Americans and the disabled have, the world will scratch its head and say, “What was the big deal?”