EDITOR'S NOTES

By Tim Redmond

› tredmond@sfbg.com

The woman in the photo on this page is an electrical engineer. She also has training in business and 13 years of experience doing tech work. She was born in Guatemala, but she is a legal resident of the United States. On paper, she looks pretty employable to me.

But Claudia Cabrera can't find a decent tech job. Instead, she works for a nonprofit, doing low-paid queer-community outreach. When Tali Woodward asked her about her efforts to find a job more in line with her skills, she explained that everywhere she's applied, she's been told she's "overqualified." But she knows better: Cabrera is having trouble in the world of traditional employment because she's a transgender woman.

For years, Robert Haaland, a local trans activist who works for a labor union, has been telling me how brutal the employment market is for TGs. And now we have the evidence: A new survey shows that 75 percent of transgender people in the Bay Area don't have full-time employment. Equally shocking: 58 percent make less than $15,333 a year.

The details of the survey are on page 13. But (since I'm unable to control my obsession with economics, employment, and taxation) I want to mention a fascinating element of all of this. On March 22 the Transgender Empowerment, Advocacy and Mentorship Team is holding a transgender job fair, and 14 employers have signed up. Exactly 4 are from the private sector.

Other than Good Vibrations, Ameriprise Financial, Bank of America, and American Express, the people who are looking for TG employees are either public agencies or nonprofits.

That makes a lot of TG activists angry: "There is a stereotype here in San Francisco [that] transgender folk are only good for doing HIV work — or just outreach in general," Cabrera told Woodward. And that's no doubt absolutely true.

There's also another way to look at it: The public and nonprofit sectors are (and often have been) far ahead of the private sector in hiring people who aren't straight white men. And in the case of the public sector, we're talking about good, unionized jobs that pay a living wage and come with health benefits.

I know that's a sweeping generalization. There are plenty of good private employers that make a real effort to create diverse workplaces. There are also, I'm sure, plenty of trans people who have horror stories about working at City Hall and in the nonprofit world.

But I think the roster of employers showing up at the job fair is worth noting because it says two things. One is that the private sector needs a lot more education (and, I would suggest, regulation) when it comes to nontraditional gender roles. The other is that the government creates jobs too — and that's not at all a bad thing.

It's easy to look at city employees the way the (badly misnamed) Committee on Jobs does and say: Look at all those workers sucking up our tax dollars and stifling the economy.

But overall, the local economy is heavily dependent on public-sector and nonprofit employment — and if you cut taxes and eliminate government programs, you don't help create new jobs. You destroy them. And you destroy some of the very jobs that are open to some of the most marginalized people in society. *