I want to hear some good experience fellow gq people have had at businesses, govt offices, or wherever else.

I actually work at Walgreens. Long explanation short, I'm on HRT for MtF transition, but I'm still kindof murky/questioning about how I identify; it's something like trans-sexual and gender-queer.

So anyway the Walgreens uniform for 'store leadership' requires 'men' to wear a tie, which is severely triggering to me. Finally it just got to be too much and I ended up telling my manager that I'm gender-queer and that I'm not going to wear the tie because it's for 'men' only and I don't identify as a man. Upper management, I guess, discussed this a bit, then my manager came back a few days later with: 'We completely support you if you want to transition to female, but either you're transitioning to female, and we'll change everything over to female identifiers and you'll use the women's bathroom, or you're not transitioning and you have to wear the men's uniform.' Etc. I was pretty upset about this but I held firm. Took a little back-and-forth but basically I explained things like, 'Look, I'm in medical transition, and I might end up wanting to identify and present as female, but right now I identity as gender-queer and that's how I present myself.' [Manager indicates confusion as to WTF I'm talking about.] 'Gender is not a binary. I don't identify as a man and I don't want to wear a uniform that's "men" only. But I'm not at a point where I want to present and identify as female. I still present in a mostly male way and right now I feel safer using the men's bathroom. If there was a gender-neutral bathroom here I would only ever use that one. If and when I'm ready to transition further in a way you need to know about I will tell you. For right now I don't have any preference for what pronouns you use for me.' Etc. (I think management wanted to be supportive but wanted to make sure they were covering their legal obligations w/r/t bathroom usage; and I think framing this as "I feel safer using X bathrom right now but I will be cooperative with your concerns" was the set of magic words they needed to hear.) So, I switched from my legal name to my actual name, which is not gender-specific, I don't ever wear a tie, I sometimes wear nail polish or a feminine hair style, etc. It's been over a month since I came out to management, no one's given me any trouble about it, and I'm up for promotion.

So, long story short, Walgreens is a pretty decent place to work for both trans and gq folks. At least where I am.

/r/genderqueer Thread