Summary Of Kristen Schilt's Work

In this book, Schilt interviews a number of both open and stealth transmen over their experiences, many of which had experience in both positions. From this she was able to show how both open and stealth transmen are at constant risk, due to the environments that they may work in and depending on the support that they receive from their superiors. According to Schilt, regardless of their choice between being open or stealth, transmen possess an innate outsider-within viewpoint to the male viewpoint, being included and taught behaviors expected for men while still being able to view them critically from an outsider viewpoint. This results in their ability to recognize the prevalence of sexist behaviors and rituals among the males in the workplace

In reality, coworkers and administration learn how to look past this issue, justifying it with excuses such as exceptional cases or the belief that they are simply remedying a biological error, rather than any issue being present in the social schema being circumvented. This tells us more about the persistence of workplace gender inequality that is Schilt's focus in this book. As a matter of fact, it is in the subtitle on the cover of the book. By finding ways to avoid any direct questioning to the natural difference schema that serves as a foundation for human social interaction, coworkers learn to navigate past a potential disruption without questioning core beliefs, provided that the transgender individual in question behaves and changes in accordance to social perceptions on gender. These processes are integral to Shilt's conclusions for her research, as she proposes solutions to move beyond this barrier and work towards greater gender

Schilt did a good job using evidence gathered through her interviews to convey the experiences of these transmen in a way that shows the various methods that the workplace reestablishes the status quo after the emergence of a transman in the workforce. That said, the main flaw in her argument on gender inequality is the lack of counterpointed evidence with transwomen losing power after transitioning. Schilt discusses in the introduction that her choice to focus on transmen was due to lack of coverage and diverging experiences, as transwomen have already been extensively researched. Nonetheless, Schilt's extremely sparse inclusion of transwomen into the work limits her overall success at discussing the existence of the gender boundary when only one side of the dichotomy is