I made a new contact on twitter the other day, her name is Susan (not her real name). After a few tweets we e-mailed and then a day or so later had a phone conversation. Getting to the point she said she was a self-employed Management Consultant. When she came out of the wardrobe (Tranny Closet? ) to her customers she was assured thaty it wouldn't change anything, and she was congratulated etc., etc. She then found that 70 odd percent of her customers went elsewhere.........She's getting by, doing menial jobs that she's overqualified for, but she obviously didn't fit in with British business culture as a Trans Woman.

Now I've got pretty left of centre political views (middle of the spectrum Labour Party) and I'm a member of LGBT Labour, an organisation that advices the Labour Party on LGBT issues. So you might guess that I'm pretty disgusted with what happened to Susan. I've been invited along to another LGBT meeting In Redditch (to the south of Birmingham 15 miles or so), it's a group that is in it's infancy and another Trans Friend and myself will be the only Trans people attending. I thought it'd be good to put a slide show together with Keynote showing the issues and thoughts that we have whilst transitioning.

So I put a few photo's showing the stages of feminisation that I've been through amongst the slides of bullet pointed text. One of the photo's showed myself with another friend who is still very part-time, luckily I asked her if she was comfortable with a picture of her in the presentation. Where and whom willl it be shown to she asked, when I told her Redditch (her home town) she started to make non commital noises, she was obviously uncomfortable with the idea.

She was actually afraid the company she works for might somehow find out about her, and make life difficult for her, I thought yes look what has happened to Susan. Part of the problem is that she works for a company that has been split up, bought and sold 3-4 times over. Staff are not really valued by those who have ultimate control over companies, and it only takes a customer whom my friend might be sent to, to complain about sending someone who cross-dresses.

Faced with this, the easy thing for the company to do would be to fire her, or victimise her to the degree that she went off sick with stress, and they could eventually get rid of her on medical grounds.

I've blurred her face out so that it can't happen, but I thought that it was, in this case, going to be a good example of the fears that a Trans person has to show others, when coming out or being found out, which can easily turn into paranoia. I remember it myself. Luckily I work for local government, who are upholders of Equality........

I don't know if you have the equivilent to our Equality Act in the US, but even though we have it here in the UK, it doesn't stop discrimination, by the unscrupulous rich companies who often fund the political parties.

Eve x