Originally Posted by
tsmirandameadows
All I can say was I spent 3 and a half years being unemployed out of college, despite being intelligent, well-spoken, and having both a record of academic excellence and employable skills. I could not get a job to save my life. One by one, I watched my highly talented classmates, with whom I stood shoulder to shoulder, get hired and started in remunerative careers. Within a few months, even the C+ average classmates who had cared far more about getting crunked than learning got picked up for entry level professional jobs with salaries in the $50-60k range. Soon it felt like I was the only one left who couldn't get a god damn job. What was my problem? I was trans, early in transition, and did not have any money to accelerate my transition to the point that I would be even remotely passable.
It quickly became apparent that I needed to get a job, any job, even being willing to settle for the grocery bagger job I had had in high school, but even that was evidently beyond my reach. I was turned down at Burger King, In-n-Out, Walmart, Ikea, Target, Macy's, etc. Any place that was hiring I applied at, because 6 months of a targeted job search for a professional position relevant to my skill set had led no where and I was desperate for work. When bottom of the barrel jobs weren't panning out, I figured I could recalibrate again, and taught myself linux system administration, some scripting languages, and various enterprise network services, all in the hopes of getting some sort of paid sysadmin internship. I interviewed at several firms, always doing well in the technical interviews, but never getting a callback. At this point I began to despair.
Finally, after three and a half years of a job search filled with constant rejection and discrimination, I landed, by pure luck, a job as a residential counselor at a group home in the California foster care system, having lived in a similar group home myself as a teenager. The work was paid minimum wage, offered no benefits, holidays were work days, and time off requests could not be accommodated the 18 months I worked there. The work environment was extremely stressful, facing highly emotionally charged situations day-in, day-out. One day you're breaking up a fight between residents, another you're performing CPR on a resident whom you found in her room having attempted to hang herself, another you're watching kids who have been dealt horribly shitty hands completely self-destruct because their lives are so miserable, and meanwhile there's so little you can do to help them.
I could not hang with those working conditions, working conditions which led to an average attrition rate of three months for residential counselors. I did my best because the work was important to me, but in the end, after a year and a half, it was too hard and my mental health utterly collapsed on the job, requiring a leave of absence. The minimum wage I earned at that job, however, was used to finance a better a hormone regimen, and some facial hair removal, so that by the time I burnt out, I was actually quite passable. Still my ID documents did not match my new appearance, so even despite no longer being visibly gender variant, I found myself just as unhireable as I had ever been, as I looked for work after leaving the group home job. This was crushing. The take away was that as long as people know I am transgendered then they do not want me, no matter what my qualifications, no matter how well I blend into my new gender role. I could fix my ID with a legal name and gender change, but then I'd just be living in fear that any potential employer would eventually realize I was trans and change their mind about continuing to employ me.
So I got into porn and sex work, because this is the only industry which will hire transsexual women without hesitation or discrimination. I also happen to like it. If my new profession gives society the wrong idea about transwomen, then society needs to fuck off because it never gave me an honest chance. That some transwomen have been able to find a way to survive in mainstream society is great, but that's because they beat overwhelming odds, not because the deck isn't as stacked against us as is possible. Frankly, I've only known two under 30 transwomen who haven't had to resort to sex work as a result of exactly the kind of experience I just described.
As to those of us who become "party girls", what do you really expect? Society has made it perfectly clear how unwanted we are. There's no loving husband, white-picket fence, and two and a half children waiting for us if we plan for the future. What exactly do we have to look forward to, aside from aging out of sex work and no longer being able to make a living at it? Sure, I can carefully invest my earnings so as to live off passive income by the time I retire from sex work, but to what end? What use is a living when you will always be an outsider and unwanted? What else is there but to have a few fleeting moments of fun and enjoyment before even that too is gone?
Sorry, but I have a big problem with someone who has never been through what I have just described trying to say that any transsexual who wants to make it in the mainstream can. I was so wounded by society's rejection of me that, at this point, even if there is something out there that I could potentially achieve -- like a career, a home, a family -- I simply have to engage in self-protection by not even trying for it, because the continued rejection such trying would entail is no longer within my capacity to endure.
