Guest post: The duty of an employer
Originally a comment by iknklast at Miscellany Room.
The VP said that [Warner Brothers/Discovery] had a duty to “provide a safe space” for trans employees to “live authentically”
This is not a duty of an employer. An employer has a duty to follow proper safety procedures and maintain a safe workspace in the physical sense, and they have a duty not to emotionally abuse employees. There is no duty to provide anyone a space to ‘live authentically’. In fact, most employers don’t do that; they have certain requirements about dress, behavior, language, and what the hell you are to do with your time while you are at work. For a gamer, ‘living authentically’ might involve using the work computers for nothing but gaming all day. For someone who is a slob, it might mean dressing so horribly that the customers complain. My employer had rules for me, and all of us. I could ‘live authentically’ only within those rules, which included not talking politics with my students, though I am a political junkie, and not using bad language, though I do appreciate the ability to swear now and then. (Have you heard of a college that won’t even let the theatre teacher swear? That’s forbidding someone to live authentically, if I may be so bold as to point it out.)
When did bosses get so lily-livered that they allow one group of employees to dictate so much? This isn’t an across the board duty, apparently, since they are not required to give the same allowance for women. I suspect they also wouldn’t be required to allow ‘furries’ to ‘live authentically’ in the office, or ‘trans-babies’. Men who want to be women? Bow down and genuflect to the most marginalized community ever…who manage to be marginalized without having to suffer any actual marginalization.
It doesn’t help that the way to this degree of subservience was paved by governments. Thanks to them, the duty to provide “safe spaces” for trans identified people to be “accepted”, “validated”, and “celebrated” as the sex they are not is now seemingly incumbent on everyone. Anything less is now considered hateful bigotry. Criticism and pushback of trans over-reach (now considered a “right”) is portrayed as incipient genocide, with the deliberately manipulative, guilt-inducing, police-supported “rememberances” of all those non-existent trans “victims” designed to make everyone think there are lots of them rather than none. With captured state resources at trans activists’ disposal, it’s not surprising that businesses might wish to avoid the hassles of dealing with legal or “human rights” complaints launched by aggrieved, downtrodden trans employees or their surrogates.
Warner has had over 1000 layoffs in the last year. I mean, it isn’t like they’re providing a safe space for any of their other employees to live authentically. You don’t live authentically when you’re trying to keep your head below the parapet in order to not get fired.