Unobscured privilege
Jul 9th, 2008 by Rebecca
I’ve been realising recently, in the wake of having gone mostly stealth as trans, just how much that experience tends to obscure the privileges one has in other quarters. When you’re trans, you’re always the one with the life that no one wants. Take that out of the equation, though, and the picture can be very different.
I work in a pink-collar job. It’s the sort of place where you’ve got women who’ve worked there for the majority of their lives, through to a few younger girls just starting out. It’s a lovely place to work, especially for those of us who’ve come from more troubled backgrounds; the stability of the place, and the way in which the older women tend to act as kind of mentors for us younger ones means a lot. It’s probably the nicest and most friendly place I’ll ever work. It’s also a job with relatively low pay and minimal career prospects, for those people who don’t have an out.
It’s a pretty social workplace, and most of my friends there tend to be in the latter group; mostly from working-class backgrounds who either didn’t graduate high school, or finished with just their high school certificate. I’ve never had the advantages that I have had illustrated so clearly as they have through having friends who will never have nearly as many opportunities handed to them. I love this job, but I also can expect that I won’t be in it forever; for several of these girls, if they don’t stay in this job, they’ll be looking to move up into the sort of public service work that many of those I go to uni with are doing already. I have a couple of other middle-class law student coworkers who, I later discovered, are completely fine and friendly to me, but will roundly snob off most of my friends. This is not a position I’m used to being in; being told basically “I wish I had your life” is not something I’m used to hearing. But take the trans element out of there, and it’s not bloody hard to see why I’ve been hearing it a bit lately.
I may have had a bloody hard time getting here, but I will walk away in a couple of years having, on paper, graduated in the top four percent of the state from a private school, and having a law degree from the top university in the country. I discovered recently that two of my senior supervisors can’t get public service jobs which I’d be considering seeking once I walk away with the arts half of my degree at the end of the year, despite their having twenty years experience and me being 22 and still at school. Getting here for me was unconventional in many ways, and not only for being trans (which is an issue for another post one day), but I’ve never had it hit home quite so obviously how much my own class privilege has saved my arse when it’s really mattered.