While training to become a pharmacy technician, Memphian Ellyahnna
Hall was denied several positions. In one of the interviews, Hall was
told that she wouldn’t be hired because she was a transgender
woman.
“They told me they wouldn’t know how the other employees would feel
about working with a transgender person, so they couldn’t hire me,”
said Hall, a slender African-American male-to-female trans woman.
Though the new county ordinance designed to protect lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) county workers wouldn’t have helped
Hall, her story is an example of the job discrimination LGBT people
face throughout Memphis and Shelby County.
At a County Commission meeting earlier this month, University of
Memphis professor Sharon Horne presented findings from her 2006 study
that showed 25 percent of LGBT Tennessee residents had reported
discrimination in housing, services, or employment based on their
sexual orientation or gender identity.
“Our Tennessee discrimination numbers are right in line with the
national percentages of discrimination,” Horne said.
That counters a claim made by Shelby County commissioner James
Harvey during the recent discrimination ordinance debate. Harvey
claimed that a study by the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA
School of Law, found no LGBT discrimination complaints in
Tennessee.
“Tennessee is not listed in this report, so we don’t have any issues
here,” Harvey said.
The report Harvey cited only looked at the 21 states that already
have laws in place protecting LGBT people from workplace
discrimination. Tennessee has no such law and therefore was excluded
from the study.
“To be fair to Commissioner Harvey, he didn’t have our data until
the County Commission meeting,” Horne said. “But there’d be no reason
for statistics to show up in Shelby County before this ordinance
passed. If you went to a lawyer with a complaint, they’d tell you there
was no recourse for you.”
According to Horne’s studies, which are based on online survey
results, 39 percent of gay men and 23 percent of lesbians in Tennessee
have reported workplace discrimination.
“In general, there’s greater discrimination against gay men,” Horne
said. “Some straight men have a harder time accepting gay men than they
do [gay] women. It’s definitely stigmatized for men to be perceived as
more feminine.”
According to data from the 2000 census, gay men also tend to earn 10
to 32 percent less than straight men.
“The median income for [same-sex] couples is 15 percent less than
that of married men, which goes against the stereotype that gay men
tend to be rich,” Horne said.
The University of Memphis study did not include any data on
discrimination against transgender people, but the Williams Institute
found that about 60 percent are unemployed because they cannot find
jobs.
Though the county resolution protecting gay and transgender workers
doesn’t extend to private businesses, Jonathan Cole with the Tennessee
Equality Project believes it’s a start. Next, the gay rights group will
be working on getting the same protections for Memphis workers.
“The city has a draft of an ordinance before them, and now we’ll go
forward with that,” Cole said. “This whole debate has really sensitized
the community to the need for workplace protections for LGBT
citizens.”
