In this week's Urban Explorer, I followed Julie Yoo — the former transgender Tarpon Diner owner — on a job search. If you think finding a job in Tampa Bay is hard in this economy, try doing it as a transgender person. As I note in the article, there isn't much research on this issue, but I did report on a 2006 survey of San Francisco transgender persons that found only 26 percent of trans people had full-time jobs and more than half lived below the poverty line. And that's in San Francisco, a famously tolerant city with local nondiscrimination laws.
But there are resources out there for transgender folks. Mik Kinkead, the Transgender Advocacy Fellow for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), sent me a link to one recently: TJobBank, an employment networking website for transgender individuals. TJobBank launched at the end of July, billing itself as the first employment site for transgender professionals.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2008.