Creative Non-Fiction
How to Get Fired in Style (A Trans Guy’s Official Guide)
A how-to guide for those who are struggling to get sacked ASAP
I’m proud to say that I’m not one of the good trans people.
I’m a very bad boy. In fact, I’ve been officially certified as one of the “bad ones”. You’ve been warned.
As such, it felt like the perfect time in my life to go ahead and get axed, just for a little life experience. I firmly believe that everyone should get canned at least once in their life to build character and have a good story to tell.
You, dear reader, are the real beneficiary of my spectacular termination because you get to hear the story of how I got dismissed from duty in the (almost) best way possible.
Seriously, I’d rate my firing experience to be at least a well-rounded 8 out of 10, if I had to grade my terminator. There was a little room for improvement, but overall it was pretty solidly done.
I’m 37 years old. I have a long, stable resume and just lost a terrible new job that I’d been working at for a fairly short time.
I was a diversity hire. I’m also highly qualified, but that’s irrelevant. My real job was to be the token trans dude who spiced things up every once in a while, without getting too spicy to digest. A pinch of white pepper was the spice level they were going for when they selected me.
Perhaps they were craving grits or oatmeal with a side of Southern hospitality for racism and exploitation. I am from a Right to Work State, after all. They might have tolerated the flavor level of a little garlic or even horseradish sauce, especially if I served up some fresh trans tragedy porn for cis entertainment.
They weren’t counting on biting into a whole raw onion.
I’m white, after all, and apparently a Southerner to boot, so surely I was likely to rubber stamp my name onto the racist behavior of a Liberal white woman from the Progressive West of the United States in exchange for being her marginalized charity case. I guess I wasn’t so easily swallowed.
It hasn’t been as fun as I might have expected, being a diversity hire. I’m supposed to be grateful, but instead I’ve felt rather irritable for some reason. I do have another promising career lined up, though, so don’t worry about me.
With that in mind, this very white diversity hire decided to send a letter directly to the equity consultants hired to broker the “uncomfortable conversations” that the staunchly Liberal leader of the organization I worked for “welcomed” so benevolently.
I didn’t call anyone racist, transphobic, a SWERF, or a TERF directly. I just explained how our work culture and certain individuals contributed to all of these attitudes in a list of clearly numbered points, suggesting actions the organization could choose to take if desiring to improve the workplace by eliminating some obvious racism and transphobia. I included documented dates, evidence, and citations.
Since I was the only person like me on staff, anonymity wasn’t an option. No one else would have cared about transphobia or my deadname outing enough to formally complain.
Did I mention I’m white?
Did you catch that I was a white diversity hire? I caught that and think it’s just as absurd as you’re thinking it is. We’re on the same page here. I know. It’s absolutely ridiculous. The week before I got fired, I had to fill out 2 separate assessments explaining exactly how I was diverse, so that my presence would serve as evidence that my office was “improving” at making its staff more inclusive of marginalized populations. One survey was used to help with grant funding.
Anyway, the morning after I submitted my formal complaint and last round of diversity survey responses, I was told that I had been terminated from my position, effective immediately.
The reasons were vague.
I wasn’t working out for the team. I hadn’t progressed enough in the position, based on unknown metrics.
My immediate supervisor, a middle management messenger of the powers that be, disabled my zoom camera so she didn’t have to look at me while firing me. She was reading a script given to her by her boss on a Friday, as recommended by standard corporate wisdom.
Her eyes moved back and forth horizontally across the screen as she explained “her” decision, ensuring she would likely have taken the fall had I opted to sue the organization. I don’t envy her. That must have been awkward, uncomfortable, and maybe even a little scary.
She need not have worried about getting sued, though. As she might have known from receiving my free lesson on the trans experience, my legal name (or my deadname) essentially blocks me from having any functional access to the legal system by rendering me nearly non-functional in situations where it gets used repeatedly.
Guess who was a highly qualified, extremely intelligent, and also completely expendable diversity hire representing the only one of her demographic on staff?
Her loss, like mine, would have represented the loss of a voice for an entire population, had she decided not to cooperate in firing me.
That’s setting aside the personal consequences of losing a job like this. There’s an element of emotional blackmail in being made to represent an entire people single handedly.
In a situation like this, a diversity hire can be asked to choose between their own demographic losing a voice and another population losing access to any seat at the decision-making table. It’s an impossible situation.
After firing me, she texted me and requested a copy of my recording of my own termination. Her recorder apparently hadn’t worked properly.
To get a 10 out of 10 termination rating, I think I would have needed an acknowledgment that I was fired because they don’t like to engage in uncomfortable conversations about their transphobia and racism in the workplace. I might have given them bonus points if they removed the “anti-racist” policy statement from their website. That would have been refreshingly honest.
I’m sharing this story to demonstrate why representation in the workplace matters.
As the only token trans person on staff, I couldn’t whistle-blow transphobia anonymously. Any complaint I made was essentially public record, ensuring that my own supervisors would have seen it and recognized me. Knowing this, I saved myself some suspense by copying them, so the timeline of their response would be obviously linked directly to my complaint.
This power dynamic of being the only trans person on staff left me to choose between losing my job and being complicit in racism, while tolerating transphobia. The reward of staying was to represent all trans people poorly by not advocating for better treatment.
I think I made the best choice for my future. I’d hate to endorse a place like that by continuing to work there long term.