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Many people cannot get through a workday without using the restroom at least once. This paper addresses workers’ rights to access the restrooms of their choice. It begins by defining the term “transgender” and briefly reviewing the current legal status of transgender employees in the USA. It then presents the results of a case study in which business students were asked to play the role of a manager who must decide whether or not to forbid a transgender employee from using the preferred restroom.
The workplace issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees have been under-researched despite substantial interest in this topic within the academic community (Schmidt et al., 2012), and within that group we may know least of all about transgender individuals (Gedro, 2009). Transgender is used in this paper as an adjective because transgender individuals find the term “transgendered” to be offensive (Bender-Baird, 2011), so the term “transgendered” only appears in this paper within quotations from other scholarly works.
A typical definition is that transgender individuals are those who exhibit “all manifestations of crossing gender barriers. It includes those who cross-dress or are considered to otherwise transgress conventional gender norms, and all others who wish to describe themselves that way” (Davis, 2009, p. 111). Their numbers are growing, as “individuals are more likely than ever before to affirm a gender identity different than the one traditionally associated with the sex assigned to them at birth, and the gender expression of more and more people fails to reflect the normative stereotypes expected of them” (Currah, 2003, p. 707).
Collectively, transgender individuals are estimated to account for <1 percent of US citizens, which means that a typical organization may have no more than one transgender employee. LGBT employee networks have been shown to be effective voice mechanisms (Colgan and McKearney, 2012), but they necessitate more than one participant. The concealment option which is available to lesbian, gay, and bisexual employees is closed to those who begin transitioning without leaving their current employers (Barclay and Scott, 2006) and the process of transitioning at work is so stressful that it can lead to suicidal thoughts (Budge et al., 2010). The most common direction of transitioning is from male to female (Brown et al.