One strategy that’s worked really well for me, being queer, is to stick to environments where I’m overqualified: Even if you’re an average fish, in a small pond, you look like a big one. This works as an excellent shield: Though I do have coworkers who come from backgrounds where being queer was not only socially reprehensible but a literal crime, what are they going to do about me? I do so much complex technical work that I just can’t be replaced for the wages the company’s hiring at, while they’re constantly humiliating themselves by failing at their most trivial responsibilities. I simply out-leverage them when push comes to shove (unless they try to kill me, which is a whole separate can of worms but unlikely in my circumstance).

Sure, it means working extra hard and more often for no extra money, but that’s a decent price to pay for being able to go to the restroom in peace! Well, that and bringing my career stability up to par with conventionally presenting folks.

I think that old story, Rudloph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, is really grim in that sense. If you’re a minority group or have some trivial defect like a red nose that’s outside of your control, your community is going to reject you, flat out. So, get used to being a second-class citizen unless you’re useful! Since a red nose in meatspace is of absolutely no practical merit, the correlate is being willing to haul butt to work extra and make yourself indispensable. Then your community will have no choice but to respect you! How devious.

Even more dreadfully, I know in the back of my head that my actions will set expectations for other queers, even though we really don’t tend to have anything substantial in common. Bias formation patterns and all that. It adds this icky moral overtone to what I’m doing. Is working hard as a queer going to improve how non-queers treat people like me? Probably not. They’re just going to recognize that they can demand more of minorities, because they’re desperate and have no recourse. This whole “Rudolph” strategy to securing my own civil rights certainly isn’t making anyone else’s life easier, especially with people who just don’t have the privilege to take these extra measures as comfortably as I do.

This is worsened by my observations about people with credential-oriented qualifications for careers. People in minorities groups in STEM, for instance, tend to outperform majority groups on average. This isn’t because there’s anything intrinsic about those groups, but rather because the certifying administration verifies the skills of the majority group more easily than it does the minority group, thereby pushing all but the most qualified members of the minority out of any prospects in the first place. The main place I’ve seen this happen is in public engineering university. That makes sense, ‘cause faculty there tends- no surprise- to be of the majority demographic in the sector.

No idea what to do about it. I hate this Christmas carol.