'You can't fight for equal pay if you can't get a job'
Clayre Sessoms’s career was on track. After earning a bachelor’s degree in communications, she worked as a freelance copywriter for more than a decade, with a stint at New York’s renowned WNYC radio station as well as at marketing firms and advertising agencies. Between her strong portfolio and network of satisfied clients, she rarely had to seek out work. “I was successful,” says Sessoms, now 40 and living in Vancouver. “It was a great situation—until I started to come out.
Losing work after transitioning is just one challenge affecting the ability of trans women to earn a fair wage. Women overall are paid 87 cents on the dollar compared to men on an hourly basis. But the gap is more severe for trans women like Sessoms, according to Sarah Kaplan, the director for University of Toronto’s Institute for Gender and the Economy. “When we think about the gender wage gap, we tend to think on the gender binary of male and female,” she says.
You can’t fight for equal pay if you can’t get a job “I never had a problem getting a job interview when I presented as a male,” says Mya Hicks, a 29-year-old from Guelph, Ont. With a strong track record in retail and customer service, Hicks says she would easily land at least one or two interviews after handing out 10 resumés to store managers. But like Sessoms, that all changed after she began transitioning in 2015.
Hicks, too, is early in her career, but she’s already facing setbacks. She works part-time at a bar in Guelph where she knew the manager, supplementing that income with Ontario Disability Support, which she began receiving before her transition. But since she started presenting as a woman, she has not had a single job interview. “All a trans person wants is to be respected like everyone else and to be given the same opportunities as everyone else,” says Hicks.
Stories like this are all too familiar for advocate and public educator Dalia Tourki, a trans rights advocate and public educator at the Centre for Gender Advocacy, an organization affiliated with Montreal’s Concordia University.
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