Daily Loaf

In this week’s Urban Explorer, I followed Julie Yoo — the former transgender Tarpon Diner owner — on a job search. If you think finding a job in Tampa Bay is hard in this economy, try doing it as a transgender person. As I note in the article, there isn’t much research on this issue, but I did report on a 2006 survey of San Francisco transgender persons that found only 26 percent of trans people had full-time jobs and more than half lived below the poverty line. And that’s in San Francisco, a famously tolerant city with local nondiscrimination laws.

But there are resources out there for transgender folks. Mik Kinkead, the Transgender Advocacy Fellow for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), sent me a link to one recently: TJobBank, an employment networking website for transgender individuals. TJobBank launched at the end of July, billing itself as the first employment site for transgender professionals.

From a recent press release:

Jillian Barfield, Director of Implementation of TJobBank, said “In addition to being a part of history, the presence of job listings posted by proactive companies on our site spotlights their organization’s commitment to true workplace diversity while at the same time tapping into an all too often overlooked but vastly impressive community of talented individuals.”

The need for such a service seems overdue and may help to make what some of us take for granted, the dream of secure employment, a reality for many unemployed transgender professionals.

When an employer posts a job on TJobBank, prospective candidates apply for positions using a process that lets them reply to postings with as little or as much information as they would like to provide. This option allows trans-people to protect their anonymity, which can be very important to those in the transgender community. A searchable resume database feature is promised in the near future which will allow prospective employers to search for employees with a required skill-set without disclosing their personal information unless provided by the candidate themselves.

For more information on the service, visit tjobbank.com. As of yet, there are only 22 jobs on the site. So a call out to Tampa Bay area employers: Can you bump that up a notch?

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