Transgender Cultural Competency Training

Transgender Cultural Competency Training (TCCT) is a training I give to organizations that involves education around the basics of gender, what being transgender is, the problems transgender individuals face within a given organization, and tools that organizations can use to better interact with the transgender community.

It’s similar to safe zone training, but instead of focusing on people being allies, it focuses on effective tools any organization can benefit from and use, regardless of personal or political belief.

The benefits of this training vary depending on the organization, but for businesses it can increase hiring pool potential, lower turnover, help to prevent lawsuits, and prepare organizations for the gender-diverse youth that are now entering the workforce.

In healthcare and outreach organizations it can help understand the best protocol for interacting with or treating trans patients, without losing their trust or putting them at risk.

In government or education it can provide effective learning or communication tools when dealing with transgender individuals.

A common question I get is, “Isn’t the transgender population too tiny to be worth devoting resources or training to?”

The first datum I can offer is that the estimated population of our community in the United States is around 1.5 million. If an organization is looking to hire from out of state, that is a lot of people to ignore. Because it isn’t just ignoring trans people, it’s also ignoring their friends, their family, and the entire LGBTQ+ community. All said and done, we’re talking millions and the number is only likely to increase as the stigma surrounding gender diversity lessens.

In more concrete terms, the North Dakota Safe Zone Project surveyed 374 people in our state: 42 percent of those survey reported working with someone who they perceived was transgender and 66 percent reported having interacted with someone who was transgender as part of their work. That means nearly half of a company's workforce has had a transgender coworker and two thirds of them will have at least one transgender customer, student, etc.

That is a significant amount of employees to not be equipped with any tools.

On the other side of the coin, there are organizations that feel they don’t need this kind of training, either because they wouldn’t benefit from it or because they already accept everyone and will be fine. The problem is that if an organization hasn’t had training, then it doesn’t have adequate knowledge to self-assess its situation. Even if a place has trans-inclusive policies, without training or protocol there is no consistency in how employees will treat trans individuals, which can have consequences ranging from risking a lawsuit to losing customers.

The training doesn’t need to be time-consuming or expensive. First, my trainings are sliding scale, where I ask organizations to pay what they can, and they are free to nonprofits. There really isn’t a cost excuse.

The North Dakota Safe Zone Project surveyed 31 individuals, all from different organizations. We asked them how much knowledge they had about LGBTQ+ issues before and after a training we gave them. Over half of them reported that they didn’t realize how little they knew and every one of them reported an great increase in general knowledge of problems to look for in their sector in just thirty minutes!

What I offer with the TCCT is typically a two-hour training session, with the first ninety minutes being presented material and last thirty being open for questions or discussion, but I can go shorter or longer.

I’ve been giving these presentations for over two years to a wide variety of organizations within the sectors of healthcare, business, government, outreach, and education. I always tailor the training to the organization and offer myself as a mentor for anyone to email if they have questions in the future.

The greatest perk to my training is that it constantly updates with new information. Our understanding of gender is evolving rapidly, with more and more people distancing themselves from our old cultural understandings of a strict male and female binary. We have new surveys, medical research, laws, and cultural terms coming out or changing every year.

It’s moving so rapidly that a training that was top-of-the-line just three years ago would be outdated today. I honestly recommend getting human resources or managers trained at least once a year.

If an organization is interested in TCCT, please contact me via email. I’d like to share above all else that I bring to this training my experiences as a trans person, the knowledge I’ve learned as a community leader, and the passion and humor that have defined my life.

Next week I’ll be giving a detailed preview of what my training entrails!

[Editor’s note: Faye Seidler is the North Dakota Safe Zone Project Spokeswoman]