Coping with a Binary World: Trans* Experiences in the Italian Labour Market

In Italy, sex reassignment and legal gender recognition are granted by Law 164/1982, which forces to a long and pathologizing procedure, ignoring people’s self-determination (Voli 2016). A law that protects from transphobic discrimination and violence is absent (Cimaglia 2013), and the norms that safeguard discriminated workers for factors such as disability, race or religion, don’t consider gender identity and sexual characteristics amongst vulnerability factors (Spinelli et al. 2022). In a country distinguished by a culture strongly rooted in gender binarism and where working conditions keep getting more and more precarious, having access to fair treatment at work is particularly difficult for trans* people, who face high rates of demotion, unfair dismissal (Lelleri 2011), and harassment (Spinelli et al. 2022), with non-binary people being especially vulnerable (FRA 2020). The mismatch between the ID and the affirmed identity and/or gender expression, and the distribution of tasks based on gender stereotypes, create further barriers in entering the labour market (FRA 2014). Considering the early results of my PhD research - which uses the qualitative methodologies of semi-structured individual interviews, and group discussions as part of an action research - the presentation will discuss obstacles and forms of discrimination faced by trans* people when looking for a job or in the workplace. Leaning on bell hooks (1989), the situated knowledge of who’s at the margin of the labour market can offer an epistemic advantage to understand how labour organises itself through the reproduction of social and institutional oppressions. In this perspective, queer experiences can shed light on gendered and racialised capitalism’s contradictions emerging when an unexpected subject (Puwar 2004) comes in.