Pride in Practice: Creating Trans-Inclusive Workplaces

SatJ: June was a pride month, and as we celebrate and learn more about the LGBTQ+ community, we thought it would be fitting to get answers to some tough questions about the LGBTQ+ experience in the workplace while signifying progress has been made in the LGBTQ+ rights in the recent years, the workplace is not the most welcoming space more than 40 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, and almost 90% of transgender people have experienced employment discrimination, harassment, or mistreatment. 

Our guest today is Neelam Jain, a dynamic social entrepreneur and founder of PeriFerry, the first social enterprise in India dedicated to improving the socioeconomic status of the transgender community and fostering workplace inclusion. Under her leadership, PeriFerry has created jobs for over 260+ transgender individuals and sensitized more than 22, 000 corporate employees across India. And recognized as a TEDx speaker and a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, Neelam is a leading voice in advocating for LGBTQ+ inclusive workplaces. Neelam will share with us diversity imperatives to help us make meaningful progress towards the LGBTQ plus community in the workplace. And how do we make recruitment and the hiring process more inclusive of the talent that comes from this community? 

To start with, could you just share with us a bit about your journey with the LGBTQ+ community and what led you to become an advocate for inclusivity in the workplace? 

Neelam: This is not something that one plans, that I want to grow up and start a diversity and inclusion consulting company or help transgender people get jobs. It’s not something that any of us thought of as a career choice as well. So I work with a financial investment banking firm. I was a financial analyst over there and pretty comfortable at that job. It’s there that I first learned about the LGBT community. I got exposed to some of the realities, some of the challenges that the community faces. And even within the LGBT community, the challenges of the transgender community in Chennai and in India, we see the community at bus stops, we see them at signals, et cetera. But I don’t think any of us have ever seen them in the same building where we live, or not have we seen the community, at shopping malls or hotels or wherever the larger society is even around. So I started learning and understanding about a lot of that because the organization that I worked for was fairly inclusive and drove a lot of awareness.

So it started from there and from there on, I pursued it by myself. I was a volunteer with multiple organizations. I understood, what are some of the realities and what are challenges and gaps that are there. It was in about, I think, around 2015, 2016, where I started understanding that there are a lot of NGOs and CBOs that are already working in this space.They’re doing commendable work to support the transgender community, but when it came to their livelihood generation, or when it came to actually them becoming financially independent there was absolutely nothing that was happening, right? And also it was thought that, transgender people don’t want jobs, or even if they get jobs, they won’t do it.

There was a lot of stereotyping that was there. There was a pre-fixed mindset that, say the larger society, that’s the HR community, a lot of us had. I didn’t believe it. I was also about 23 at that age, and I thought that anything in the world was possible. I really thought that, it doesn’t look like if somebody got a respectful and a meaningful job, why would they say no to it was my thought.

So by about 2017, I started PeriFerry. What the word itself means is as a society, we’ve pushed some of the people in our society, specifically the transgender community, to the edges, to the peripherals. So our job is to really take them from those peripherals to where they want to be and where they want to be can be the mainstream or literally anywhere else. So PeriFerry acts as a facilitator by creating jobs. That’s the origin and that’s the start of PeriFerry. It wasn’t something that I planned overnight. It took me about 2 years of thinking, volunteering, understanding the community getting my parents to like understand this as well, along with me. So a lot of that took place. 

SatJ: It has taken you a lot of courage. And I guess the time when you started it, there would have been a lot of opposition from friends, family. An unknown territory. 

So do you have advice or did you have friends who kind of helped you in this journey?

Neelam: I think fortunately I didn’t have too many people telling me that you shouldn’t do this. I think I always also stood out as a person that okay, she’ll do whatever she wants. No point telling her anything. So including my parents, and especially if you have like a third child at home, they anyway have very less scopes. They’re like, okay, the other two children are doing proper things, as far as the societal standards. So we let the third one explore, no problem. So that’s the mindset that my parents are. In fact, they were very proud, they were very happy. There was some bit of worry that they had because I was letting go of a very financially viable job that I had and they were also very clear that, you can be in this house, but you got to manage your own finances and everything.

So that thing, I knew I had some runway because I worked in another organization for 2 years. So I had some savings and I thought, let me try. If it works for a year or two, it’s okay. Otherwise I can always go back. But interestingly enough, when I started PeriFerry in 2017 you know, I found the right kind of people with me, people who were, either like me worked in a corporate and felt like, okay, they wanted to do something else or people who were from family businesses and felt like they wanted to give or do something that was a little bit more gratifying or more meaningful as well. So the three of us kind of came together, after six months of me starting. And that team really helped, putting the entire ground of PeriFerry together. Because throughout our initial years, we were only trying to focus on just connecting transgender people to workplaces. And we realized there were a lot of challenges at both ends. Like, with the workplaces, the challenge was that, how do we ensure that the co workers are as inclusive and sensitized? Will they be friendly? Will they be accepting? Okay, someone might work with you, but will that person also work with you? Actually have lunch with you, or will they isolate that person? How would managers react? What washrooms would they use? A lot of those things came up in our first two years, and we were literally just firefighting all the time. And then on the other side was, you know, working with the community. I’m not a transgender person myself.

So there was also a lot of building trust that we had to do. There’s obviously a question, right? Who is she? Why does she want to do it? What is her intention? Especially when you’re not from that community. So that that trust can only be built by doing work. But you’re also not finding people who trust you in the beginning without showing. So it’s like a chicken and egg problem. But thankfully we had a few of them who said that, you know what, if you have a job, we’ll be happy to work over there. So that’s how we placed the first few transgender people we know. A friend of mine he’s doing pretty well for himself and runs the Kolapasi food chain, Mr. Santosh. She was one of the first people to have hired transgender people. So that’s where it began for us. It was through small organizations, small retail chains came together. And then now over the years, we also have really big, large corporate partners that we work with. 

SatJ: So you did mention some of the challenges the communities still face at their workplace today. 

Can you share with us some examples of initiatives of practices that organizations today are following or implementing to foster a more inclusive environment. You know, I’d love to hear how PeriFerry helped these organizations think about such practices and, and, and what help have you provided to these institutions?

Neelam: I think what we often see in the larger society maybe doesn’t see is that every small and big thing that we have, right? For example, walking freely on the road. Being able to enter a hotel without someone staring at you, not having to explain my gender to my parents or not begging them please accept me as who I am or getting married in the company of my loved ones. All of that is a given for us. We’ve never had to fight for it. These are like basic human rights for us. But if you look at the transgender community, all of this is a luxury, you know, walking freely on the road, having your parents who accept you being able to be in an education system without getting bullied every day is a massive luxury.

So, the community is coming from a place that right from the time, they have come out or they have expressed themselves in a way that is not traditionally accepted in our society, that person is just bound to get discriminated against, bullied. It starts very early, it starts from home, then it trickles to school, college, etc. So, a lot of the people that we started working with didn’t have basic education also in place. Didn’t have that family support, etc. So they found their own systems of, foster system that we call, guru Shaila system, etc, through which they’re able to survive, through which they’re able to support each other.

A lot of the trans people that we work with came from the backgrounds of begging and sex work. Now, if you’re engaged in begging every day of your life for like five years, and then suddenly one day, someone comes and tells you, okay, from tomorrow onwards, you have to sit in our office and stare at this laptop and work. It’s a completely different world. There is a lot of fear that is. That even though it’s a better place, maybe, because on the road, you can get abused. Anything can happen to you. So, there is some sense of comfort that is there because the trust community lives with themselves. So there’s a lot of change that they also have to go through for us.

What we realized is that. We were dealing with a lot of changes that had to be brought not just like, say, within the community from a scaling perspective, but also in the larger employee base itself. So what we started doing was number one, start upskilling the community. Today after seven years of doing this work, we’re fortunate enough that we have two training centers. One upskilling center is in Bangalore. Another one is in Pune. And through these centers, we invite transgender people who come stay with us. They get trained and then, for a period of two months, we train them on a lot of Corporate job related skills and then further place them. That’s one way that we started mitigating the gap challenges, because you can’t really put a person through an education system again. But you can, of course, upskill them to the point that they get a job. And then the other challenges that we faced was just a mindset shift. It says now that is not something that can be done in like 1 sensitization workshop for 2 hours or whatever. So for that also, I think we’ve realized that just coming in once talking to the coworkers or managers doesn’t help.

There’s been many, many layers of sensitization that we’ve had to do. And even now, it’s still not perfect. But the good reality is that now that person at least has some sort of financial independence, right? And at least there’s a start and there is a chance that they have in their own life. 

SatJ: So one of the things that I wanted to highlight to you that a majority of our listeners would be talent acquisition specialists, talent supply chain specialists, representing a multitude of organizations. 

Are there any useful tips that you can provide to them? Because today many of these organizations do have the right intent but they may not know what are some of those effective hiring initiatives to attract this talent. So do you help such organizations, walk them through the journey, train the talent acquisition specialists and help them what to look for and guide them to this process?

Neelam: A lot of my own time goes into that. So there is nothing like, you do these five do’s, these are five don’ts. There’s nothing like that because this is such a hard coded reality into us. We are grown up with that thought process like when kids don’t eat food, parents or mothers tell them that if you don’t eat, I will call that person. And we know what they mean by that person. That mindset is so deeply ingrained in us that even for a HR person who is supposed to be very broad minded and inclusive of all people, it’s not easy for them because they’re just brought up with that mindset. But as long as people recognize that, okay, that’s not the right way to look at someone. That is also not the right way to treat.

A community of people just because their identity is different. This is the starting point. So some of the things that we do with the HR community. It starts from firstly understanding who are transgender people, like understanding the diversity of the trans community, who are trans men, who are trans women.

Who are non binary transgender people? The awareness of even that is very low. What does it mean for someone to physically transition from male to female or female to male? So again, I mean, I don’t want to explain all of those concepts right now, but, for anybody who’s listening, I think your first step is to just make sure that you understand what does it mean to identify as a transgender person? And then I think, secondly, what we start looking at is to understand how this plays out at the workplace. So what does a manager do or a HR person do while bringing in someone into the organization? There is a checklist, of course. That we have to ensure that there are inclusive or gender neutral restrooms, even if we don’t have a third restroom, which is gender neutral or so then ensuring that we sensitize our workers so that you know, when a trans woman enters a women’s restroom.

The larger, cisgender population or the women population is not staring at them, not making faces, etc. Those are very minor things to look at when you’re interviewing someone who’s a transgender person, seeing them for who they are and what they can bring in. And also recognizing that, this is a community that is coming from a place of deep marginalization. If you’re expecting all people from the task community to perform like how someone from IIT would perform is not fair. You’re not even giving them a head start. So a lot of the organizations that we work with have buddy programs in place. They have specific mentorship programs in place. Recently we partnered with KPMG for this program, wherein they took about 10 of our candidates that we placed in different organizations. Pair them with their senior leaders and actually coach them for a period of three months because the transgender community needs that we’ve had organizations that have funded our upskilling program because they realized that somebody has to put in the money for the community to get upskilled.

There are many other things to take care of as well. Like, when a transgender person is entering the workplace. Their IDs may not match how they prefer to be called. A trans man’s legal ID might say female and might have a female name on it, typically. But then what do you call them? How do you ensure that you’re giving them that respect and actually creating that inclusive workspace? So a lot of those things have to be taken care of. But there’s one thing I tell the community of, you know, the HR community specifically, is that it’s not so complicated. It’s definitely not even rocket science or anything. It is just basically understanding the human being for who they are and ensuring that the workplace is also compassionate. And sometimes compassion also doesn’t work. We know that there are people at a workplace who will still make fun, who will still do things that are inappropriate. In that case, the organization is standing up and saying that we will not tolerate this. Even if you’re not inclusive at heart, we don’t care, but these are your co-workers.

The organization stands for creating equal opportunities and the organization wants to create opportunities for those who are marginalized. So having that kind of leadership voice, having that kind top down approach is very important. And again, there are organizations wherein there are a lot of people at the ground level at the bottom level who bring about change. They run ERGs, which are creating a lot of awareness about communities like the LGBT community. 

SatJ: Think of one of the things that have happened. I don’t know if you agree with me, but I think organizations have become a lot more sensitive to inclusivity or, but I feel that we have a different problem here more than abuse of the workplace or making fun. I feel people are indifferent and they just stay away from. You know, consciously attempting to include them in the larger environment because they just don’t know what to do. Am I saying the right things? Am I addressing the person right?. A lot of lack of knowledge, lack of awareness which leads to people thinking maybe it’s right to not do anything about it and just stay away.

Have you come across some people in organizations and how do you deal with them? How do you get them to start becoming inclusive, you know, make an attempt to include the other community into the larger ecosystem zone? 

Neelam: Absolutely. And that’s the majority of the population. Like you said, everybody is sometimes very passively inclusive, but at heart it is not that. And that shows at some point or the other, it definitely shows. And, you know, it also makes the person who’s come in the transgender really feel isolated and not feel like, okay, they even belong at the workplace. So it’s a very real and a very valid problem that exists. I think the first thing is to help our co workers understand that you’re not dealing with people, you know, who are not from this world, you know, that they’re just human, they’re just as human as you are, they watch the same kind of Vijay movies and all of that, these are just real human who are just probably wanting to be treated the way that you’re treated.

It starts from there, but then it also goes to more practical things, right? I think the biggest challenge people fear is, what do I call this person? What are the right pronouns to use? I mean I don’t assume your name, right? Like, so I see your name, it’s written Satish. I see someone else’s name and that’s how I call them. In case your name was not written, but I would ask you, what’s your name? It’s the same thing that you do if you’re interacting with someone from the transgender community. It’s like, you know, how would you like to be called? What pronouns can I use for you? There is absolutely no shame, no fear in asking someone for their name or for their pronouns. It should be as normalized as asking someone for their name. And if you feel hesitant in asking someone for their pronouns, then you can always say, Hey, my name is Neelam, I go by the pronouns she/her. What about you? So that we are also not putting someone at the spot, you’re giving away your name and your pronouns as well.

It starts off with small things, but I’ve realized and I mean, we’ve, we’ve placed about 530 plus transgender people as of today across different organizations, and we’ve realized that it eases with time, even for the person who’s coming in, right? The transgender person who is entering the workplace. There’s a lot of fear that they also have, will they be accepted? Will they be treated the right way? They could have a lot of trigger points as well. So it does ease with time when both the ends understand that the intent is not bad. So yeah, I mean, I think it really starts off with small steps and I’ve seen that the talent acquisition and the HR community really plays a very important role here.

Actively having sensitization programs is very, very important. It can’t be a one time effort that we do once in a year during the pride month. It has to be something that happens more often like at least once in three months, a refresher course on, you know, what does it mean to identify as LGBTQ? You said this in the beginning as well, that LGBT folks already exist in our system, already exist in our workplaces. Not that they’re not there. You can, of course, very visibly hire someone, but there are people who are already there. There’s a reason why you don’t know them because they haven’t come out. Maybe they fear what will happen if they come out. Maybe they fear that they will lose the next promotion or they will get made fun of or they will just be isolated itself, right? So you’re thinking that, okay, I can make jokes. Or, because no one around is there who is from this community is, is also not the right thing, not the right way to look at it. 

SatJ: Before I go to my last question I just want to understand how you name the organization Perferry? Is there a story behind that? And what does it mean? 

Neelam: There is definitely a very long story to it, but. A very short summary of this is that me and a bunch of friends were sitting together and we thought about a word that helps us explain that we as a society have pushed the transgender community to the edge. Nobody wants to be on the peripherals of society. Nobody wants to be isolated. Somebody has pushed someone, right? Consciously, unconsciously, it has happened. So that’s the word we started off with. We did a little bit of wordplay on it. And then we thought, what is our own? Our own is to take people who are on the peripherals, who are on these edges. Who are isolated, who have been pushed to the fringes and how we can take them, you know, from where they are to where they want to be. So that’s the meaning of the word. I mean, that’s the meaning of the word PeriFerry to take people from where they are to where they really want to be and where they want to be can be a workplace can be mainstream or, us just being able to be that facilitator where they’re able to be their best version or be more confident as well.

SatJ: So as we wrap up and then we have a quick rapid fire question round. We’ll just ask you three, four questions, and we request you to keep your answers brief. But before that one last question, what advice would you give today’s employees, both within the community as well as the allies, how can they effectively contribute to creating more inclusive work workplaces?

Neelam: I think it starts off by understanding that this is not a workplace agenda. This is not something that, okay, because my CEO told me, or because the new HR person is pushing all these new things. It’s not that LGBT inclusion is a very real thing. You can have anybody in your family who identifies as gay or lesbian or trans. It can also be your own parents. We never think of it from that lens because we have, everybody has sort of had to conceal their identity. A lot of people have had to. So understanding that this is a very real topic and this can be very close to home as well. We don’t think of things like these very personally unless and until it touches our home. Unless and until our kid comes out and tells her, Ma, I’m gay, Ma, I’m trans, right? So. The thing is that okay, this is a very natural human process itself.

That’s number one. I think what employees can do and should absolutely do is volunteer outside of the organization. Because if you want to learn more, if you want to engage, and I tell this very openly is that as someone who is not trans and who has worked with and for the community for the past seven years, I have learned so much. I have grown so much. My own thinking, my own perspective, my own growth has been incredible. So I mean, of course I really have tried to give my best to the community, but I think I have received so much more. So you evolve and you grow as a human being when you learn more about diverse communities, especially those that are at the center of marginalization itself.

So it starts out by simple volunteering, especially in cities like Chennai, Coimbatore, et cetera. We have so many NGOs that do incredible work. It barely takes us any time, even 1 hour per week. or one hour per month. You can go and train someone who needs those skills, and because of your effort, someone might be at a workplace tomorrow. The other thing can be really as small as if somebody in your workplace comes out, but coming out is a very lengthy process, but sometimes you might have someone who just comes out saying that I am a trans person. How do you react at that moment? How much support you show, or just sort of listening and not really making it about you or giving your opinion is absolutely important.

So, showing up with a lot of kindness, practicing it in action, and not seeing this as, I need to be inclusive at the workplace, and then I’ll go back home and I’ll make those jokes again. It’s not that. So really making it a part of your DNA and something that you can practice on a day to day basis is important.

SatJ: So we’ll just quickly go through our rapid fire question round. I know that June was a pride month. 

So what does a pride month mean to you personally? 

Neelam: To me, it is actually one of the most exciting months of the year. Because of course, Pride started as a protest. That’s the origin of the Pride month. It started as a lot of the community members coming together and saying enough is enough. We’re here and rallying and all of that. But for me personally, it’s a celebration of the community of them just unquestionably or like without any sort of remorse being their best version, then all of us celebrating them. So for me, pride is equivalent to just happiness, pride and creating that space for the communities and for people to just be themselves. 

SatJ: Any memorable pride moment that stands out to you that you would like to share with others? 

Neelam: No, I mean, I, we have a lot of those moments almost every day because of the nature of the work that we do. But I think in the last month we had one of our trainees who had come back and this was a person that we had. placed at Walmart, one of the leading retail firms, but they have a tech back office in Bangalore. She’s been placed there. She got promoted last month after three years of working there. And she came back and she also offered that, okay, you know, my salary has grown, this has grown, I want to contribute back to PeriFerry. So we, of course, told her, no, that’s fine, but it was very nice to see the people that we’ve been able to kind of touch and sort of see them grow in their own lives. And that’s immense because when they grow, they also positively impact their own community. They’re able to influence so many others and they don’t necessarily need a PeriFerry to m move forward. 

SatJ: So Neelam, who’s your biggest inspiration? I mean, do you have a mentor who kind of guides you? Because sometimes, especially an initiative like this will require a lot of courage, require a lot of advice. So do you have someone like that in your life? 

Neelam: Yes. I mean, today we do have an advisory committee. We’re fortunate enough to have that. And personally, some of them are my mentors. My mentors are, usually some people were just literally a call away and who’ve guided me through all of that. But inspiration, such as my father, he’s about like 65 right now, and he has the excitement for life and he has the kind of aspiration to do so much more in this life, even in the 60s, sometimes I wonder what am I doing looking at him and his energy. But yeah, I mean any organization that has, especially in the social sector space that has done really well is because of some of these mentors who’ve really come together and supported us. 

SatJ: The last question is what message would you like to share with the LGBTQ+ youth today?

Neelam: Yeah, I mean, as someone who is not from the community, I don’t know if I wanted to kind of give a message, but I do want to say that you have a lot of people rallying for you. You have a lot of organizations that are right behind you and you’re not alone is all I want to see.