The term “emotional labor” was coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983, to describe the process by which employees are expected to manage their emotions and expressions to maintain a certain state of mind. As someone with years of experience in a public facing role in local government, I consider myself fairly experienced at professional emotional labor for my age.
While the term has been around for over 30 years, it has only recently been applied to a variety of other tasks, such as the unpaid labor often expected of women around the house. Similarly, the term is now often applied to the emotional labor required for a person of color to explain racism to a white person without raising their voice, or the emotional labor inherent in a gay man calmly describing the indifference of the Reagan administration to the AIDS epidemic.
When I first came out three and a half years ago, I was in a place where I was just stepping out into the world as an out, transgender woman. Every day that I went to school, every day that I showed up at my internship, it took a lot to process the anxiety I experienced.
It took a lot to process being constantly misgendered, constantly having to explain that I was transitioning, and constantly having to answer endless questions from my friends and family about being trans. So, at the time, remaining calm and articulate while answering basic questions about what it means to be trans, and often wildly inappropriate questions about my genitals, hormones, and oddly specific things down to how I shaved my face without getting a five o’clock shadow, required a lot of emotional labor.
Talking about my experience still requires some emotional labor, but the more time I put between those anxiety ridden early days and my current reality of being validated as a woman by everyone in my life and rarely ever being misgendered, the easier it gets, and the more I want to share my experience to help others. So, the point is not that trans people shouldn’t share their experiences – it’s just that we should share them on our terms, only if we are ready and comfortable to do so.
With so many trans people out there in the world educating people about what it means to be trans, answering all your questions, there is no need to ask a trans person you know questions they may not be comfortable answering. If they make it clear they’re open to discussing those things, then go right ahead, but if you initiate a conversation about something you’re not sure they’re comfortable discussing, it’s entirely possible you’ll force them to expend a significant amount of emotional labor to say something more polite than “have you Googled it?”
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