Btw people elsewhere reverse searched the image and confirmed it’s a stock image of a trans woman. This was a conscious decision to degender her and give her a masculine name
everyone saying "what if Toby is just nonbinary" needs to think very deeply about this. Toby isn't real. its a stock image of a transgender woman, given a masculine name and referred to as "they/them". think long and hard about why the person who created this training program would do that.
this is why your lit teachers made you write about the books you read. you're supposed to think about the author's intentions.
Also, they very explicitly described Emerson as a “transgender man”. As a paired adjective and noun. “Toby” is just “transgender” as an adjective with absolutely no further clarification. If “Toby” was meant to be nonbinary, do you think that the company wouldn’t have just said “Toby is nonbinary”? Plus the very obvious “male/female” juxtaposition that these sorts of trainings love to take. And while yes, that binary framed juxtaposition is exorsexist on its own merit, understanding the presence of that implicit exorsexism is part of what makes it the transmisogyny obvious.
And undoubtedly the bonus aspect of transmisogynoir in this particular case, but I am not black and am still working through my learning on the subject, so I’ll leave that part of the discussion to someone better qualified
something i haven't seen anyone else point out:
since i switch jobs a lot, ive seen a lot of these discrimination training modules. this question is specifically one where the test taker is supposed to identify which scenario actually counts as discrimination, and which is "normal workplace behavior" that legally isn't harassment.
the green around Emerson is to indicate that that is the correct answer, according to the test, that it is actually discrimination based on gender, and that "Toby" isn't being discriminated against, according to the person who created the test.
its training the person who takes this test for an hr position to gloss over microaggressions. show of hands, girls, how many of you have been fired or reprimanded for a made up bullshit reason when you know for a fact the actual reason is because you're trans?
here's how it usually goes. Lisa, who is out to HR but isn't out to the company yet, files a report. she says that Leighton yelled at her for low sales, despite Mark having even lower sales. HR asks Leighton what happened. Leighton says "i had a critical discussion with Tony about their sales quota." HR remembers this moment from their training module, and since nothing obviously transphobic happened, HR decides to ignore it, or even yell at Lisa for a false report.
wanna know how i know this shit happens? because it happened to me! (fuck target btw)
shit like this makes it effectively legal to discriminate against trans women if you're subtle enough. this is why we get paid less. this is why less of us have stable income. this is why so many of us are homeless. transmisogyny is a systemic issue that festers its way into every facet of society, so much so that most people don't even realize its there. they can't even recognize it when its staring them in the face
that's why you have so many people confused about why the training module is transmisogynistic. to them... its not transmisogyny. its normal.
