The Agency That Protects US Worker Rights Isn’t Helping Trans People

Jay Redmond loved his job as a child welfare worker in Vancouver at the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families. He did it for almost a decade and heard no complaints about his performance, he says. He received glowing annual reviews in 2022 and 2023, around the time his trouble began.

In mid-2022, Redmond filed a report arising from one of his cases, alleging misconduct by a supervisor. He says the complaint was never investigated and afterward the supervisor and other co-workers turned around and “bullied me for years.” Some of that bullying, Redmond says, was related to his being a trans man; he’d publicly transitioned in late 2019. “Transphobia is the tool that they used,” he says. The supervisor started saying that Redmond had become too “aggressive,” and other co-workers began calling him “hostile.” Redmond recalls that one of them repeatedly commented on his facial hair. A different supervisor who’d known him for years began referring to him using female pronouns, even in case meetings with clients or police, despite Redmond’s frequently correcting her, he says.