Abstract
In Just One of the Guys? Schilt draws upon in-depth interviews with fifty-four transmen, a content analysis of news stories and legal cases about transgender employment, and questionnaire data from transgender conferences. While not included in her formal methodological section, Schilt also takes her reader through the varying understandings of transgender folks from the 1960s through the 2000s. She reminds us that clinicians pathologized transsexual people during the gender clinic era of the 1960–1980s. Here, Schilt focuses on The Stanford Gender Dysphoria Clinic that opened in 1969 under Dr. Donald Laub, a plastic surgeon and Dr. Norman Fisk, a psychiatrist. The goal of the gender clinic era was to help patients who felt that their internal gender identity did not match their physical bodies, a condition pathologized at “gender dysphoria.”
During the clinic era time, the appropriate treatment for gender dysphoria was hotly debated. Psychoanalysts like Robert Stoller (1968) argued in favor of psychotherapy while endocrinologists like Harry Benjamin (1966) promoted hormone treatment and surgeries to make the body and mind match. Benjamin’s surgical model prevailed and gender dysphoria (now referred to as Gender Identity Disorder) was formally medicalized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). While transsexuals now had a medical definition for their “condition,” in practice, access to surgeries and hormones was not guaranteed. Many transsexuals who did not specifically meet the DSM criteria would have to wait until the 1990s when more surgeons and endocrinologists accepted transgender clients regardless of their DSM match.
The rise of medical professionals in the 1990s who were willing to work with transgender clients reflected the sociocultural shift away from transsexuality as mental illness. This new cultural frame promoted the idea that a society that upheld two-and-only-two gender categories was sick, not the individuals who could not appropriately fit within such narrow categories. As the medical frame shifted toward a more sociocultural one, so too did the terminology: by the late 1990s, transgender began to replace the use of transsexual, avoiding the medicalized stigma held over from the gender clinic era.
Building out from these frameworks, Schilt draws her reader into her main thesis: does gender inequality persist with the inclusion of transfolks in the workplace? More specifically, do transmen gain from the subordinate treatment of women in the workplace? It is common sociological knowledge that women receive less benefit (material and symbolic) than men in the workplace. Do transmen receive the same benefits as cisgender (non-transgender) men or are they also similarly subordinated like their cisgender women counterparts?
Two-thirds of the transmen in Schilt’s study described their workplace experiences as consistent with cisgender men. These transmen experienced an increase in workplace authority, perceived competence by coworkers and bosses, reward and recognition, and increased economic opportunities. These transmen were either “open” (transgender; status was known) or “stealth” (always known as men). Going stealth at work, while beneficial in terms of economic and symbolic rewards, did have its disadvantages. Schilt reports that past paperwork and past job loss were risks that stealth men were constantly aware of. Legal names and biological female sex marked on legal forms were part of the paper trail that transmen (whether stealth or not) were forced to explain away.
Interestingly, while transmen may have to eventually come to terms with a past paper trail, Schilt reports that some employers and coworkers put effort into keeping the gender status quo in place once they discover that a stealth transman did not always present as a man. Employers explained this inconsistency away using appearance as a proxy for being male. Bosses and coworkers alike used appearance as the primary means of identification. In other words, if one’s appearance aligned as masculine and male then they were indeed male, regardless of chromosomes or genitals.
Being accepted as men in the workplace has institutional consequences because transmen (especially if they are white) benefit from camaraderie and mentoring from other men, usually at the expense of their female counterparts. Schilt discovered that some men even went to the extent of becoming a “gender apprentice” to transmen by offering them advice about appearance and personal hygiene. Schilt found four strategic responses used by workplaces to deal with stealth and open transmen: (1) transmen were pushed out of the workplace; (2) transmen were marginalized as “token trannies;” (3) legal consequences enticed transmen into working as women; or (4) transmen were viewed “as one of the guys.” By treating transmen as one of the guys, transwomen are more likely to face workplace barriers than transmen.
To establish whether a culture of inequality exists between transmen and transwomen in the workplace, Schilt attended over fifteen workshops about transgender experiences and collected questionnaire data. Similar to cisgender women, transwomen also faced resistance from employers. Decreases in salary and barriers to employment were the problems most cited. Whether it is a loss of status as transwomen abandon their male privilege or loss of homosocial networks that tend to promote men over women, it is clear that transwomen lose out when compared to transmen according to Schilt’s data.
Because white, middle-class, and heterosexual men benefit the most in the workplace through the institutionalized subordination of women, these benefits were transferred to some transmen if they are willing to shed their femaleness and transition to social maleness. Whether stealth or open, transmen present a case of continued socialization and institutional processes in the workplace that account for gender inequality. Schilt is careful to point out that while transmen may receive similar privileges to their cisgender counterparts, some transmen do challenge gender inequality. Some transmen took on a “gentleman persona” in order to avoid conversations that devalued women. Stealth transmen found that they could actually disrupt institutional practices of gender inequality using their assumed cultural competency as men to convince employers to advance women.
These practices of the “gentleman persona” and the disruption of institutional practices are few and far between. If there is something left wanting from Schilt’s book, it is more discussion of resistance to institutionalized gender inequality. Schilt makes a plea not to walk away from this book thinking that transgender men are simply complicit dupes in the subordination of women; however, the evidence of resistance is so sparse that it might be read as simply an outlier. Regardless of this minor flaw, I look forward to using this book in my Sex and Gender class this spring. Schilt calls out to sociologists and gender scholars not to exclude transfolks from our teachings or only use them as a “special case.” Clearly, Just One of the Guys? is just the book to rectify this misdemeanor.