The Pink Frontline

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2020

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A lack of legal protection in many parts of the world leaves many transgender employees vulnerable. Few countries offer legal protection against discrimination of transgender people. This week is transgender awareness week - what role do companies play in the rights of transgender people? Manuela Saragosa speaks to Caroline Paige, joint chief executive of a UK pressure group called Fighting with Pride. In 1999 she became the first transgender officer to transition openly while serving in the UK Armed Forces, some 19 years after she’d first joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot. South African author of The Pink Line, Mark Gevisser describes the fight to get laws to protect transgender people from discrimination as a new culture war along a human rights frontier. He says one of the most significant markers is which countries allow people to legally change their gender on official documents. Manuela also speaks to Lily Zheng who is a diversity consultant to businesses and organisations and is herself transgender and to Thai university lecturer Kath Khangpiboon, living and working as a woman in Thailand although official documents only recognise her as male.

Pic of Kath Khangpiboon, via Kath Khangpiboon

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Zaragoza.
0:07.0	Coming up when a man becomes a woman in the workplace.
0:10.7	So I would walk into a room and people would turn their backs to me, sniggering, giggling, pointing, laughing, mocking.
0:17.7	You know, I had a role, I had a job, I had experience.
0:20.7	Why throw all of that away just
0:22.4	because I happen to be transgender? This week is Transgender Awareness Week. What role should
0:27.6	companies play in the rights of transgender people? When it comes to issues of inclusion,
0:33.0	you do in fact have to take a side and companies do in fact have to take a side. That companies do in fact have to take a side.
0:38.1	That's all here on Business Daily from the BBC.
0:44.4	Well, hello world.
0:48.4	It's me, Amy Stevens.
0:52.8	And in case you don't know what this is all about, I'm fighting for my rights and the rights of others to be who we are.
1:08.1	Amy Stevens there, a transgender woman, speaking in a video put out by the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union.
1:16.4	In 2013, Amy was fired from a Michigan funeral home when she told colleagues she would begin living as a woman.
1:23.8	She sued for a wrongful dismissal and her case went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
1:29.3	I did not realize there was that many people in support, but to hear them outside of the courthouse steps, chanting my name, telling me that they loved me. That has a big effect on you.
1:50.9	We love you. In June this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Amy's favor in a landmark
1:56.7	anti-discrimination decision. Gay and transgender workers, the court said, are protected
2:02.2	by federal civil rights laws. It was a bittersweet victory. Amy died before the ruling came.
2:08.8	She was just 59. Here's what Kevin Jennings, the chief executive of the LGBT Plus advocacy group
2:15.5	Lambda Legal, had to say. Amy should have lived longer and had an easier life that she did.
2:21.7	But because of the pervasive bigotry in our society towards trans people,
	...

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