my experience of building a queer group @ work
It’s been, I think, around 1.5 years since I tried building a queer group at work with 2 others. The reasons for wanting to do so were that the needs of queer people were not represented anywhere; we have a disability rep (“Schwerbehindertenvertretung”) we have an equal opportunity commissioner (“Gleichstellungsbeauftragte”) and we have the general staff council (“Personalrat”), and nothing else. The equal opportunity commissioner only has a legal basis for working for the equality of men and women, and explicitly avoids anything about sexual orientation and gender identity. People who are the target of homophobia and transphobia have nowhere to turn but the staff council, who acts as a catch all I guess, but they have no one there who is well versed in this type of discrimination (they said so). So our plan was to create a separate group or at least be a group the staff council can contact for advice when a case like this comes up.
That this whole thing is an afterthought to the officials in that house is also proven by the fact that I submitted the idea of some gender neutral toilets to our idea management, they accepted it, then refused to pay the usual premium for ideas they accept, and now 4 years later, nothing has changed. I wanted this done because while I am cis, we hire and have people that aren’t men or women, and they should have a toilet. Their idea was to label the bathrooms for disabled people as gender neutral… big sigh. But as I said, not even that happened.
The way our group was beaten down was by first insisting on legal precedent. This is crazy, because staff councils, disability reps and equal opportunity offices became a thing after people created them and enacted enough change to solidify it in a law. The fact that they think we can all wait around until someone somewhere wants to give a legal basis for a queer representative seems silly to me. Like, YOUR job exists because others historically were brave enough to create this in their workplace, why can’t you see that?
Then they said we can’t use the workplace logo in our logo, because it’s their corporate design and we have no right to use that. Which is silly, because we are your queer group, not the one from some other workplace? It’s clear they don’t want anything to do with queer issues, I guess. We even showed countless other queer work groups doing the same, but it was no use.
We met up with the staff council and had a mostly productive session where we could work out that we can get our own page on the staff council intranet site. We also got our own email address sorted. But then we were repeatedly rejected by leadership and our company email address was deleted without notice or reason why.
That was a little over a year ago. Since then it’s been dead. I got very sick in the meantime and things were overwhelming and stressful for the other two in their jobs, so it didn’t continue further.
I think in retrospective, what I would have done differently would be to not drop the ball and pepper them with reiterations and requests over and over again. Tire them out. Insist. Now with the huge break, it’s harder to start back up and to be taken seriously. They could even use it against us to say it must not be that important then, but if we had stayed persistent, they could have insinuated we were doing a worse job at our respective main work tasks to fit this in.
I also have to acknowledge that it isn’t entirely our fault; I mean, this is how movement against folks organizing and creating groups works - exhausting you and making it feel futile so you’ll give up. I know they’re glad because none of the people we had to ask for permission and cooperated with checked on us to see how it was going and why things stopped.
In the face of Nazis likely winning the vote again in 2 weeks, I would love to start back up. But I’m tired and I feel defeated and the other two do, too. I don’t know. Recently, leadership sent out an email about how this establishment is “colorful” (“bunt”) and all that, and it took everything in me not to hit Reply All and air all this shit out. It’s disgusting. Almost none of the employees know that our little movement existed or how it was beaten down.
Now I’m sharing it here. May someone learn from this.
Shoutout to my boss though, she was the only one who celebrated us hard and showed it around like “Look what Ava is doing!! So good!!” Lol.
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Published 10 Feb, 2025