Slowly, Companies Embracing Transgender Employees

Posted on September 23, 2008
Filed Under Gay News Blog

Breanna L. Speed waited four years before announcing to her co-workers that she would not be Wendell anymore.

She was concerned that the revelation that she felt more comfortable living life as a woman than in the male body she was born with would jeopardize her job at Hewitt Associates, an outsourcing company in Lincolnshire, Ill., where she had worked as a database administrator for seven years.

But since Feb. 26, 2007, when she walked into the office as Breanna (with a company ID and a workplace paper trail that carried her new name), Speed said she has received nothing but support.

The workplace piece of her transgender puzzle, the part she had worried about most, “turned out to be the simplest,” she said. “That was a surprise.”

Across the country, particularly at larger companies, transgender workers are being protected and assisted in ways that were hardly imaginable a few years ago.

Slowly, Companies Embracing Transgender Employees
The Ledger, FL