In what may have been an intentional last fling prior to starting college, I drove my Honda CB 350 motorcycle on a long and unrushed summer trip through the beautiful state of Vermont, and then down into southern New York. On August 16, 1969, I drove into the Catskills on State Route 17, passing right by Bethel. Just a very short distance away, the Woodstock Festival was in full swing—and I drove right by. Unlike Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s portrayal in what became the anthem of that era, I was feeling neither stardust nor golden. I was in a funky mood, the weather was threatening rain, and it just didn’t seem important. A lost opportunity to be sure, but I’ll stay with my claim to be a member of the Woodstock generation. I’m proud that my high school and college years were characterized by a firm if naïve conviction that my generation was indeed going to change the world for the better. My friends and I would talk late into the night about peace, about meaning in life, and about community. We were all feminists, pacifists, and some of us were even toying with the notion of being anarchists. The Born Again Christians were crusading across American campuses, and I would go along to hear what they had to say. I also listened to the political talk, which was everywhere: glorious notions about ending poverty, supporting civil rights, and stopping war. My friends and I read books and discussed them fervently, and we were catholic in our literary tastes. I recall impassioned conversations about Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. No one talked about making money.
I completed my college education in England, and when I returned to the United States in 1976 and moved to Eugene, Oregon, it felt like I had come home to a country I barely recognized. The hippies had fled to the backwoods of Oregon and Vermont, college students everywhere were enrolling in business programs and focused on honing their competitive skills so that they might aggregate personal fortunes, and even the language of feminism seemed subdued. There was considerable pressure to get a good job in a respectable career, and to “get on” in life. While not abandoning my values, and while feeling a genuine affinity for the hippies I regularly saw in backwoods Oregon, I was perceived as being among the respectable ones. I had already qualified as an architect, with numerous professional suffixes appended to my then-male name, and I used these qualifications to good effect when my spouse (from my first marriage) and I made the rebellious and patently naïve decision to move to Kenya. People assumed our idealism would come unstuck through such a grand but foolhardy adventure, but within three days of arrival in Kenya in June 1979 I already had five job offers. I accepted one, and happily settled into doing architecture in East Africa. More importantly, I began an unintended education in multiculturalism, and I began to open my eyes to see the places where ideals ran aground against the shoals of human failings, corruption, bias, and ambition, amidst a backdrop of grinding poverty, warmly hospitable people, and remarkable natural beauty. Within a year I had discovered that my boss was falsifying charges to institutional clients to inflate revenue, and I chose to confront him about this. He quite literally threw the book at me (but missed), and I was fired on the spot. It was the first such job termination, and there’ve been two more since then.
Given my career’s unpredictable trajectory and the wide variety of job roles I’ve filled, that number may not be unusual. I began my career in the United States, but over the decades that followed I worked in far-flung locales, only returning to a more settled existence in my native Maryland in 2006. Employment in five different countries, in various capacities, in pursuit of international development and human rights projects in over forty countries isn’t exactly a straightforward climb up the career ladder, especially when that globally dispersed progression of jobs was interrupted by breaks for advanced education in London, Washington, DC, and College Park, Maryland. It did not make me wealthy.
My initial fifteen-year career in architecture was carried out almost entirely outside the United States, designing and overseeing the construction of buildings in England, France, and in many African countries. In fact, my only building of record in the United States was the first actual building of my architectural career—a small school bus garage in the tiny town of Crow, Oregon. When my career shifted from the architectural profession to town and regional planning, the door truly opened to becoming a practitioner in international development. That’s a very wide doorway; over the two decades that followed I embraced projects in conflict mitigation and peacebuilding, in anticorruption and leadership training, in gender equality and women’s empowerment, in good governance, and in decentralization. When, much to my surprise, I became an Obama administration political appointee to the federal government, my attentions were drawn to democracy strengthening and the human rights of LGBTQI persons abroad. It’s been a diverse career so far, filled with many meaningful accomplishments around the globe—and I’m not finished yet. In between these various permutations of identity and focus, of advanced degrees and overseas placements, I’ve engaged in no small degree of reflective thinking on where I’m going, where I’ve been, and why. I’ve labored in the for-profit sector, the non-profit sector, and government, and each offered their own variations on the pursuit of that central mission and linked identity I’ve long cherished: making the world a better place. There have been ups, and there have been downs.
Oh yes, and in the middle of all of this, I changed gender.
For someone whose career is anything but ordinary or stable, it’s hardly a surprise that situations occur that lead to involuntary job loss. Each loss of employment seems to entail an intense sense of injustice—and a rankling irritation at the manifest impunity for the three persons who, at their respective moments in the drama of my life, decided to be rid of me. My identity has perhaps been too closely linked to the job I’ve been doing, the position and responsibility that I’ve held, and my own perception that each job provided an essential platform to cultivate my ability to pursue those old Woodstock-generation ideals: make positive, worthwhile, durable changes in the world around me. Earlier idealism and naïveté notwithstanding, I have also felt a healthy respect for personal economic security. For someone now with no savings and only minimal assets, who cherishes a simple and uncluttered life, I’ve been reasonably successful in the judgment of some of my peers. Others are not so sure, as they look askance at me and return to planning their comfortable retirement years and their next cruise. Whether my lack of savings (the byproduct of paying for a gender transition, exacerbated by long bouts of under-employment), and my long struggles to secure new full-time employment, allow me a future life of any degree of comfort or dignity remains to be seen. I am anguished by doubts, and I lose much sleep thinking about it.
As so many people my age are prone to saying, the time has gone by so quickly. I’ve been at it for over four decades, not counting those early summer jobs, first hauling sod and cutting grass on the college grounds crew and then later sanding and painting gigantic hydroelectric water pipelines for the local electric utility. Yet even there and then, the camaraderie of my fellow workers (and they were all fellows, as was the norm in those days for manual labor jobs) and the feeling of being bone-tired at the end of a long day of intense (and very “manly”) physical labor under a hot sun was ennobling in its way. In each job I worked, I never doubted that those who hired me got their money’s worth. Both my parents exemplified an ethos of hard work and commitment, as do all of my siblings, and through the unquestioning adoption of their lived values I never had a job (well, maybe one in the very early days) where I did not give it my very best. The idea of actually being fired was never something I gave a thought to, being imbued with that all-too-American conviction that hard work and dedication would inevitably meet their just rewards. At the end of many years of employment, I was convinced that I would do like my parents and grandparents had done before me, and retire to a life of financial security and well-earned rest.
In my case, no such Elysian field awaits me—I’ve taken too many risks, lived in too many insecure settings, and covered the cost of changing gender by tapping into the only source of funding available to me at that time: my modest retirement savings. Now there remains no financial cushion to retire on. For me, it’ll be work until I drop or through ill health I, regrettably, become someone else’s burden—all the more reason that finding a job has meant so much to me, as does staying employed. My next full-time job really has to see me through. The alternatives do not warrant contemplation.
Thinking back to each of those three terminations, it’s difficult to avoid taking unto myself the mantle of innocent, undeserving victim at the hands of immoral, venal, or otherwise corrupt or incompetent employers. My ego has done its best over the years to insulate me from any blame for each of those losses of secure and mostly happy employment, yet who I am and the decisions I have made have had their consequences. In any event the cloak of victimhood is an itchy one, and hardly a garment I choose to wear. I certainly did not view myself as a victim when I confronted my Kenyan architect employer in Nairobi in late 1979 to challenge him regarding the fraudulently inflated invoices he’d been sending out to the client I’d been assigned to design a new seminary for. The consequences in that case were immediate; while I was visiting a friend’s office the next day the Kenyan police tracked me down and detained me. My former boss had pulled the requisite strings to encourage my rapid deportation from the country, lest I spill the beans to the good Irish priests that they had been overcharged. The police informed me that if I would agree not to consult a lawyer, they would only charge me with a minor offense and all would be well. If, however, I opted to demand access to a lawyer, I would be deported on a plane that very night. My entire sense of purpose, not to mention my very modest but total financial assets, were embedded in Nairobi and would not be extricated from me in a police station over an afternoon. I agreed to forego the legal counsel, but the promise of an easy way out by the police was a sham. Instead, I was promptly charged with violation of a work permit (a charge totally without merit, having that morning received a new tourist visa and not having worked since my dismissal). I was convicted that very evening, and given a three-thousand-Kenyan-shilling fine (equivalent to just over 400 USD at the time). In 1979 that was the largest such punishment on record in Kenya, and it is a comment on my lack of deep pockets that it pretty well cleaned me out. After paying that fine, I would have been promptly and unceremoniously expelled from Kenya for having stood up to a corrupt but politically well-connected architect who had previously employed me, but I was rescued by an eleventh-hour job offer. It came from the US State Department’s on-site project manager, Jim Lovell, who asked me to assist him in overseeing the final design and construction of the new American Embassy in Nairobi. That job offered sufficient diplomatic insulation that I did not require a Kenyan work permit.
In relatively short order, that State Department job elevated me to take on the overall responsibility for that project, including a significant architectural redesign, and for the next three years I presided over the construction of the building that sixteen years later, on August 7, 1998, would fall prey to terrorists’ bombs. The loss of life was severe, including some Kenyans I knew and truly grieved for, but I take modest comfort in knowing that we built that structure to a very high standard of strength; the number of fatalities in this inexcusable tragedy would otherwise have been far worse.
If not counting once being laid off along with all staff when the shareholders of a large British environmental, architectural, and landscape architectural firm decided to close down their London branch office where I was the director, it would be thirty years after the Nairobi termination that I came to be fired once again. A well-established international development firm in the north of Washington, DC, had hired me as Stephen, but they fired me as Chloe. I was deemed an embarrassment, and I suppose in their worldview I was.
Following that termination, I filled the year with a variety of short-term consulting assignments, punctuated by seemingly countless commuting hours. I felt numb, my self-esteem was at an all-time low, and the future looked bleak. It only took one day to turn that around, when an unfamiliar voice on the telephone invited me to interview for a job I had never sought—to be a political appointee of President Obama’s administration. That initial interview at an elegantly hardwood-paneled office at the State Department was followed by six others at the US Agency for International Development in a recruitment screening process that was poorly managed, disjointed, and undirected. I was more relieved than surprised when the job offer finally came fourteen months later, for an opportunity that completely redirected my future in ways that were nothing short of miraculous. When I left that job almost three years later, of my own accord, I left with a sense that I had just carried out some of the most valuable and meaningful work of my entire career.
The last time I was fired was without doubt the most painful. I was nearing two years at a job that was the best fit of any job I’d ever held, serving as vice president for global programs with America’s oldest human rights organization. It was a job I adored, affording me deep satisfaction in the principled work I helped conceptualize and oversee. The job was a natural follow-up after the human rights and LGBTQI work that I had carried out while a political appointee, but unlike working for the government I was free to express my views on issues that were of pressing concern to me and my new employer. I enjoyed the many opportunities to advocate in public for issues I felt deeply committed to: freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, gender equality, freedom of the Internet, and the human rights and social inclusion of LGBTQI persons. I also had the privilege of overseeing a remarkable team of committed and tireless individuals who implemented the world’s largest program of emergency assistance for human rights defenders under threat, mostly in countries in conflict or under harsh authoritarian rule. Day after day at that job, situations would arise that allowed me to draw upon my long years of experience to the benefit of the shared mission, and the work that I oversaw went from strength to strength. I was able to work alongside the other program-based vice president, Bobby, who has been a friend and admired professional colleague for many years and whose passion and principles have always been and continue to be an inspiration. The president of the organization was almost entirely focused on fundraising and on public political advocacy against (mostly Russian) authoritarianism, which consumed all of his time and left him with little opportunity to attend to the programs side of the organization. My vice presidential colleague and I carried on to the best of our shared abilities, and the programs thrived. By securing a significantly increased level of grants despite intense competition, we generated important and often life-saving impacts around the world, while simultaneously bringing in the funding that kept the organization afloat.
In due course, the organization’s president decided to resign and move on to a new opportunity on the staff of a prominent Republican senator. Being summoned to his office on his penultimate day on the job was unexpected, but even more surprising was his intent: to fire me. Given a legal provision all too common in the United States, many organizations including this particular human rights organization employ people on an “at will” basis, which allows them complete discretion to fire people whenever they choose, for any reason—or for no reason. Under these terms, such employers bear no requirement to justify such life-wrenching decisions; it is arguably an odd stance to adopt—legally and morally—for an organization committed to human rights. While he did not mention the fact that I had made it to the finalists’ stage in the competition to replace him as president, he did assert that I had been too engaged in the promotion of the human rights of LGBTQI persons, and he stated that my open, quiet, but steady internal advocacy to make the organization a leader in human rights and democracy in the context of gender equality was misplaced and unwelcome. In neither case were these assertions supportable, but he wasn’t inclined to discuss this; the decision had been made and what I had to say was simply filling time. I left that room convinced—as I remain to this day—that I had been fired for reasons that had everything to do with who I am as a transgender feminist, and nothing to do with my proven competence and demonstrably excellent performance as a senior executive.
There remained the choice to try to fight back, and I did make an effort to reassert my human dignity while staying resolute in the identity I knew to be genuine, and the record of performance that I knew to be accurate. It’s a tactic for the confident, in which you demand that you be valued on the job for that which you have accomplished and contributed, as well as for your demonstrated record of personal integrity. While this direction offers a transgender person more empowerment, it’s extremely difficult to sustain in the face of power exercised by supervisors who are adversely inclined, with lawyers all too willing to impugn your reputation, and with a convenient “at will” clause to fall back upon. The practical options for the transgender person in such a situation are few, except to cling tightly to what those in power are unable to wrest from us—the sense of who we are and the conviction that at some point justice, decency, accountability, and basic civility will come to characterize our relationships on the job.
We’re certainly not there yet.