Mocked, rejected, KC transgender engineer on court ruling: ‘It’s not the finish line’
In the nine years since coming out as transgender, Una Nowling, 51, of Overland Park has been mocked, slurred and publicly rejected.
“I was thrown out of a Leawood doctor’s office for being transgender,” the Black & Veatch mechanical engineer said this week.
“They said they didn’t treat people like me. They called me ‘sir,’ and very pointedly told me not to show up on the premises or I would be trespassing.”
She has been verbally assaulted. “People just walking right up to me and telling me how much they hate people like me,” she said. “They’ll ask, ‘Have you had your (penis) chopped off yet or are you still a complete freak?’ There’s a lot of misgendering saying, ‘I refuse to call you a woman because I know you were born a man.’”
Strangers have ridiculed her. ‘‘So, I want to settle a bet,’“ she said they’ll ask. “’Are you a man or a woman?’”
For transgender people, rancor and ridicule, even if only a minuscule part of daily encounters, is rarely far off. “It is very chilling and horrible when someone tries to invalidate everything that you are,” Nowling said.
On Monday, gay and transgender people celebrated the validation of a historic 6 to 3 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender employees from workplace discrimination.
“An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the majority. “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
Until Monday, it was legal in more than half of the states, including Missouri, to fire workers for being gay, bisexual or transgender. Kansas City had already banned such discrimination. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed an executive order in 2019 protecting state government workers and contractors. Numerous cities in Johnson County, as well as Wyandotte County, also protected private employees.
Nowling didn’t always feel protected.
When, in 2012, she let it be known to her employer that she would be transitioning from her physical presentation as male to female, she held great fears. The company already had a policy protecting gay and lesbian workers.
“At the time I came out, there were no workplace protections that covered me whatsoever,” she said. “So when I came out it was a tremendous leap of faith.
“You have to do this, yet in doing this you risk your livelihood, putting your family at risk, your health insurance, which is a very serious thing, particularly for me, being a diabetic. Yet it was something where I had reached a point in my life where I simply had to do it.”
In July 2012, hiding who she was led to a suicide attempt.
“It came to a crisis point,” Nowling said.
Hiding who she was
Born in Wichita but raised in Olathe and Overland Park, Nowling said she knew from age 7 or 8 that despite her male presentation she was transgender. Due to her genetics, she was also intersex, meaning she was born with a mixture of reproductive organs and attributes of males and females.
Raised male, she knew she was female.
“I learned very quickly to keep it hidden,” Nowling said. “When I tried to tell my family and others that I was really a girl, it got you punished. You got beaten. So I buried it and buried it and hoped that it was something that would go away, somehow I could be like everyone else.”
Ten In 2002, 10 years before she came out, Nowling married her wife, Fiona, who knew Nowling was transgender before their first date two years prior. They had met online, where Nowling was already presenting as female and lesbian.
“She asked me out on a date, actually, thinking I was an executive woman from Kansas City who was coming to visit her in London where she lived,” Nowling said. “I said, ‘There is something you should know. I’m an intersex, transgender person.’
“I told her my whole coming out story. Her only reaction was, ‘Oh, cool. Do you like Indian food?’“
When the pastor at their wedding asked Fiona if she took Nowling to be her husband, Fiona mouthed the word “wife.”
“She fully accepted me from the very first moment she met me,” Nowling said. “She proposed to me, calling me her ‘girl.’ She always, and consistently — even when I had to dress in a suit and tie — she used female pronouns, called me by my female name. She never deviated at all. When I came out, she militantly fought for me, even telling her family that if they did not accept me fully and unconditionally that she would walk away from her entire family.”
Only Fiona and a few friends knew. But no co-workers were aware, a lot of whom she thinks assumed Nowling was male and gay.
‘Until I got married. Then they didn’t know what to think,” she said.
Nowling wanted to come out to others, but without workplace protections she feared the loss of her job.
“Not just because of the loss of income,” Nowling said. “Or the loss of health insurance. I put so much effort and energy and spirit into my career, throughout my life, that the thought of losing that thing that I had put so much into was almost the most devastating thing to me: my profession that I enjoyed so much. And I loved working for my company. And I loved the work I did.”
Nowling travels the world as a mechanical engineer specializing in power and environmental projects.
But after 18 years at Black & Veatch, hiding became too hard.
“I could not go on being dishonest to everyone around me and also dishonest to myself,” she said. “You get to the point where it’s either transition or die. You can’t hide anymore. The stress builds up and it’s so horrible.”
She announced her transition in what she described as “an extremely conservative industry,” where she knows a good number of her colleagues are conservative.
“They rallied behind me,” Nowling said of the company. “They wrote a policy specifically to protect me and those like me. They went out of their way and asked my advice at every step of the process. It was entirely unexpected and tremendously affirming.”
Her company pride, loyalty and work performance all improved, she said. She knows her situation is an exception.
Laws only go so far
Gus Maddux, who is 40, transgender and from Independence, works in industrial construction. It’s not his real name, but an alias he writes under. Despite the Supreme Court decision, he doesn’t want his co-workers to know his actual name or that he is transgender, and has been since about age 20.
“This establishes that they can’t legally discriminate,” Maddux said. “But I’ve been around long enough to know they can find a reason: We’re eliminating your position, or we’re changing the quotas, or due to personality issues. They find a way.
“I mean, I work with a bunch of good old boys. I don’t want them to know about me, or they would. There could be instances where I’m up on a ladder, or I’m having someone spot me while I’m moving (materials). If someone wants to hurt me, or steer me wrong — them knowing about me only gives them more fuel to behave in those kinds of ways.”
Law against discrimination may now be on his side, he said, but if he loses his job, “I have to prove that that’s why, and they’re going to deny that that’s why.”
Years ago Maddux worked at an insurance agency. When it became known he was transitioning, he said his managers told him he was not allowed to use the women’s restroom (which he did not want to use) nor could he use the men’s room until he was legally male.
He was relegated to using a single toilet in the basement. Nor would they agree to use his new male name.
“Even though there was a woman named Geraldine, who everyone called Geri, and a man named Terence, who everyone called Terry. I didn’t know what the difference was,” Maddux said. “Why can’t I go by something that is more comfortable for me?”
Gia Bleu, 24, of Kansas City said discrimination is often hard to prove. She recalled how her tips and job changed when she worked as a server in a restaurant — first as self-described feminine gay, black male, but then later as a black, trans woman.
”Instead of getting 20% tips, I was getting 10% tips,” she said.
Applying for jobs was sometimes an exercise in rejection.
“Let me put it to you this way, I have gone into places, applied for jobs, turned in a resume and they never called me back. I contacted them and followed up and they just acted like there was no position available, even though they were still hiring on their sites.
“I guess there’s no way to prove it, but you know what’s going on. They look at you up and down and sideways like you’re crazy.”
What’s next
Transgender people and advocates are beyond gladdened by the Supreme Court ruling. Nowling is the host on a weekly show on women and feminism on the community radio station KKFI, 90.1 FM.
“I have been telling people for months and months and months that there is no way this (the Supreme Court ruling) is going to go our way,” she said. “To hear a 6 to 3 decision, I could not believe what I was reading. It gave me goosebumps. I asked my wife, ‘Is this real?!’
“Friends I know were crying openly. There were celebrations.”
But there are still battles to fight, she and others said.
Violent crime against transgender women, particularly Black trans women, continues to rise as a major concern. Two Black trans women, Riah Milton, 25, in Liberty Township, Ohio, and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, 27, in Philadelphia were both killed on June 9.
Human Rights Campaign counts 15 transgender or non-conforming people killed by violence this year, and 26 last year.
Caroline Gibbs, a therapist who leads the Kansas City-based Transgender Institute, doesn’t discount the progress made in advancing understanding of transgender people and issues.
“I think that within the last five years there has been a big change,” she said, “a dramatic change in people’s attitudes as we have become more educated. There have been more TV shows, newspaper articles. There have been places like mine that have opened, Facebook pages. UMKC is a perfect example of a college campus that is absolutely inclusive.”
But she also sees the backlash.
“Donald Trump is what they continue to face,” Gibbs said.
On June 12, in the middle of what is celebrated as LGBTQ Pride Month and on the fourth anniversary of the shootings at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the Trump administration finalized a rule that would overturn protections for transgender people under the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare.
Last year, in April, the administration implemented a ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. The policy came three years after the Obama administration said they could serve openly. Attorneys speculate that Monday’s Supreme Court ruling could be used as a lever to challenge the Trump policy.
Nowling offers a litany of other obstacles ahead.
“I think they’re going after the kids next, and they’re going after them with both barrels,” she said. “To prevent students from using bathrooms that match their gender identity, to ban them from participating in sports, to ban them from using locker rooms or shared facilities, to support teachers who refuse to use a student’s name or choice of pronouns, even if they have been legally changed.”
In March, for example, Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed two bills into law. One bans transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams. The other bans transgender people from changing their gender on their birth certificates.
“I think the big push is going to try to carve out more religious exemptions that are going to be much more broad to allow people to discriminate,” she said.
But, for now, she’s basking in a victory.
“The importance of this decision cannot be overstated,” Nowling said. “It is at least as big as marriage equality. It falls slightly behind it. But, my God, I’m still in a state of shock. I’m still stunned.
“It’s not full acceptance. It’s not the finish line. But, my goodness, it gets us a long way there.”
