Career Coaching +
People Ops Strategy

When people ask me, “What are you doing here?” (a question I got at least five times a day at the contact center), they’re telling me they would rather be in NZ than the USA. The people who said they wanted to leave were mostly cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white people. The very people who are least at risk and have the most privilege to use.

I’m a transgender immigrant, and the Venn Diagram of those two identities feels like a bullseye on my back. I could leave and go back to New Zealand, but I refuse to. The fight for trans acceptance needs to be won here, and now. Because if America falls fully into fascism, the rest of the world will follow.

My flavor of neurodiversity is that I like to understand systems. Understanding and making sense of systems is how I am able to best determine how I will move, interact, and engage. It also helps me identify the bare minimum I need to do on days when I am low on spoons. Thus, the practical aspect of learning how to business was both helpful for me as someone with a liberal arts background but also someone who is neurodivergent.

I gained strategies or tips for negotiating, engaging in power and politics at the workplace, and ways to gain and leverage influence to my advantage. These are the skills that make surviving and thriving in the corporate world easier for everyone, but especially for those of us who are neurodivergent.

Once it's about optics, it becomes personal. Code-switching, masking, the CROWN Act, AAVE, culture fit. Those are prime examples of where professionalism crosses the boundary into profiling.

When a company uses abstract descriptors that don't claim anything in particular, it gets the perfect ammunition to make anyone it deems inconvenient the problem at any time.