So, I think I am mostly writing this to vent, as this happened about a year ago and I keep thinking about it. For some context before I begin, I am a transwoman, trilingual (English, French, Japanese), and am a relatively prompt and professional person.
Then I worked the worst year of my life, well it was little over a year but the point stands. This might tell people where I live but I worked then for a company called Meijer. Its in MI, USA. And made full time pretty quick because of my promptness and willingness to help people. I saw this as the opportunity I needed to start working on my anxiety and transition after being homeless for 5 years. Another, longer story than this.
Moved to a new department with my full time status, though was noticing a lot of things done wrong when it came to food safety. And was scolded for bringing it up. A couple weeks later was brought in to the office to discuss me using my preferred name when customers asked. Its only two letters different than my nametag at the time BTW and then told that I was only allowed to greet customers and answer the phone under the name on my application. Long story short, I don't believe in “dead names.” Don't know why, but the term doesn't work for me, but it also means that my name on my application is my legal in this case “dead name.”
I being an ignorant dork, ignored it for what it was which was blatant transphobia from my two bosses. Later, we had gotten some bilingual (English/Spanish) speakers in our department and they would often say rude and degrading things to me in Spanish because typical thought is that most 'Merucans don't know English let alone other languages. French and Spanish share some words BTW, which is how I knew they were using the language barrier to insult and harass me behind my back. I called them on it and was verbally insulted, threatened and told by a whiter than me Californian that I was racist for saying they could at least insult me in a language I understood. In which, as I stated earlier have 3. I took off days of work because I couldn't leave my home, and have been diagnosed with borderline agoraphobia, from unrelated ptsd, even before this incident. I took this to the higher ups through the union. That they were misgendering me and using slurs in Spanish to get away with things.
I then get to be talked down to and called a piece of shit as I'm leaving work most days to the point I just couldn't take it. The real kicker, the thing that finally broke me was when I had to work on my birthday. Not once did a coworker, at a company that “values” family and equality and diversity even bother to wish me a happy birthday, which a company email sends out in the morning to alert coworkers its there. I literally cried the entirety of my birthday with just one coworker asking me what was wrong and when I explained it he bought me a cake donut and some apple juice (its a grocery store and I didn't ask him to) which helped me a bit. The next week, one of the main people who had been treating me poorly up to this point was given cupcakes and wished a happy birthday. I asked if this is the treatment for everyone alongside the coworker that bought me the donut and the manager said yes. It had literally been 6 days since I cried for almost 8 hours strait. The coworker who bought the donut went on break and didn't come back. Should have followed.
Once Pride Month was over, I was then fired because it turns out all the things that were being done to me, along with gaslighting and other heavy transphobic things, were done by me and I needed to be thrown out into a thunderstorm that morning with a no trespass. The Union eventually got me access to the store again, but I never want to look at it again. Just having to be their with my friends when they shop there give me a panic attack.