“I’m trans,” said Kristin Durh to the recruiter lining up her orientation schedule. She had to take a deep breath before telling him what she was pretty sure he already had figured out.
As a transgender woman, she was used to the ways companies filtered out her application once they spoke to her. That’s why, when she was finalizing details for orientation at Autumn Transport, she decided to inform her recruiter. To her amazement, the recruiter replied, “Oh, OK. Can you start on Monday?”
Julie Andrich, president for Woodbury, Minnesota-based Autumn Transport, says the decision to lease Durh and her 2015 Freightliner Coronado was based purely on Autumn’s standard criteria: driving record, pre-employment screening program, work history and safety record. But in Durh’s case, comments from her previous employer were icing on the cake. They praised her work ethic and said, “We will miss her.”
“That’s unusual for our industry,” Andrich says. “We knew we were hiring a great operator.”
The openness of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer (or questioning) community has increased in trucking, as it has elsewhere, in recent years. There are signs of tolerance in major sectors of the industry – fleets, truck stops and truck makers – and in some cases active endorsement of diversity in sexual identity.
At the same time, gay and trans women truck drivers often struggle with hatred, prejudice and violence, says author Anne Balay. She was briefly a trucker before writing “Semi Queer: Inside the Lives of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers.” Balay, who teaches at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, estimates that LGBTQ drivers account for nearly 10% of all truckers.
Shelle Lichti founded the industry’s largest online support group for LGBTQ truckers in 2008 to honor a close, gay trucker friend who was gang-raped and committed suicide. She says the nearly 4,000 members of the Facebook group, LGBT Truckers, offer support, tips and a safe place to talk about the gay bashing that many endure.
