Finding a trans friendly job

(This blog post covers what I went over in my video) in 3 easy steps!

The other week NPR did a story about trans youth and the trouble they encounter finding jobs. Rather than do a story talking about how that's completely messed up, and how recent court rulings suggest that discrimination against trans people is illegal because it violates the equal protection clause - there's no law explicitly outlawing discrimination against trans people. Even the EEOC has stated that they'll treat anti-trans discrimination as illegal. 

If, or when, you are discriminated against - it's still your burden to prove it. Even if you get a pro-bono organization (such as Lambda Legal, the ACLU, etc.) to take your case, it still can be a long time before action is taken - and in the meantime, you need to eat and buy hormones. So this article is really about a simple search strategy to help you find a job. 

1. Start with the HRC best places to work list. Every company with a 100% score has trans friendly policies, as well as trans inclusive insurance (top surgery and bottom surgery for both MTF and FTMs) with at least 75k of funding. 

2. However, there are plenty of great companies to work for that don't have a 100% score (for all sorts of various reasons). Searching the HRC database (scroll to the bottom of the search bucket to search based on trans needs) can uncover some other companies that are trans friendly, often many of them include non-discrimination and insurance benefits too. 

3. Then take the names of the companies that interest you the most (or where your experience might be the most relevant) and put them in the company search field when searching on job boards like indeed.com. While you could search for "transgender" or something to find companies that have gender identity or whatever in the equal opportunity clause, not all job postings necessarily contain that language - so it's easier to search for the companies that have the policies in place. There are also several other job search engines, but indeed (and LinkedIn) are my two recommended sources.

That's it! Hopefully you've carefully crafted your resume and write a good cover letter. You could even mention that one of the things that attracted you to the company is it's HRC score, companies love compliments too and it shows you did some research on the company! Now you're on your way to some interviews and eventually a job with a company where you can be yourself and not have to worry about your career!

The Analytics Behind One Million Views of Trans YouTube Content

My YouTube channel recently passed 1,000,000 lifetime views (probably on/around May 21). Being a digital marketing nerd, and not having a lot of insight into how YouTube analytics work (and there's not a lot of people talking about it) I thought I'd break it down a little bit to point out some general observations. Obviously, the nature of the content limits is transferability somewhat - but it does offer some interesting discussion points. YouTube Analytics aren't as robust as Google Analytics, so that does limit what I can show you unfortunately.

Before we get started, I should point out a couple of things.

• This is the "lifetime" views as of halfway through May 24, 2013
• The first video was posted August 11, 2012
• There were 55 subsequent videos
• Finally, the first video's metrics closely mirror the channel as a whole, mostly because it's an enormous outlier. Statistically, this means the entire data sample is horribly skewed. For example:

The top thirty videos (click any image to enlarge and/or view a slideshow of just the data):

Compared to videos 4 through 26 (which is still pretty skewed, but at least legible):

The brief descriptive titles also suggest that certain types of content are more popular than others, as does the fact that the top three - which so clearly dwarf everything else - only have pictures and music (and show a "transformation") and were titled based off keywords mostly. Discussing the nature of the content is a separate beast though. 

I wanted to do an analysis of 1,000,000 views because it's a catchy number, so here's what the total data set looks like in aggregate over the lifetime of the channel content:

This is how the views look at the weekly level:

At the monthly level:

And at the daily level (the one that is most interesting):

Obviously you can see a trio of outliers: 

• The first jump in traffic (Oct. 22, 2012) is the result of my first mtf transition video actually going a little viral. It appeared on videosift.com and reddit (not sure which came first, but I imagine one led to the other). As a result, views temporarily spiked before trailing off to normal levels.
• The second spike (Jan. 10, 2013) is the result of being recommended by another girl's transition timeline video. I actually know her via a trans internet forum (and you can check out homegirl's video here), but her video was picked up by HuffPo (and as a result, some other media) which blew it up, it went from being a pretty popular video to millions of views in the span of a few days (we had a discussion about it actually). Simply being recommended by her video spiked my traffic.
• The third spike (Jan. 25, 2013) is a result of being shared on the Wipe Out Transphobia facebook page (I did not ask for them to post it, and do not like the language around me being "more down to Earth", but I digress). The content was obviously relevant to the audience and as a result they were pretty engaged with the post - sharing it 193 times, commenting 151 times, and hitting 'like' another 804 times. That drove both traffic and engagement on my YouTube channel.

Here's what those same engagement metrics (shares, comments, and likes) look like for my channel (again, not for the video itself):

Apparently people aren't going to be bothered to share the actual video instead of sharing the FB post: That FB post (shared 193 times) only counts as 8 shares in YouTube (because embedding adds an extra level of complexity to analytics). Overall, 114 of those counted 149 shares were via FB.

Comments:

Likes (the Favorites metric also looks similar, just at a smaller scale - there were only 702 "favorites"):

An additional engagement metric that isn't present on Facebook, audience retention, also looks pretty similar (though not nearly as dramatic): 

If you look in the right hand column (average percentage viewed) you'll notice that for the top 3 videos, all montages, perform a little better than the other content. The one exception, the video at the bottom of the list, stands out because it's an attempt to make engaging content: transgender humor. Overall, I clearly haven't improved at creating content - so at least that makes it more comparable. 

What's interesting about engagement (when compared to total views) is that now there's really only one spike over the course of the channel: January 25, 2013 - the Wipeout Transphobia Facebook post. It suggests that hitting a relevant audience (especially a topically relevant one) matters more than just about anything else that you do to try to capture traffic for the video. This should seem pretty common sensical to everyone, whether or not you've ever done SEO or marketing.

However, the October spike does reappear pretty glaringly when we look at the final engagement metric, subscribers (it also made an appearance in the less impressive "Shares" category too):

October 22 was actually slightly more successful than January 25 (they respectively generated 57 and 55 subscribers). Obviously getting the right audience mattered for the second spike, because that's one share on one site - and it performed really well. The first spike (when I only had 10 videos over two months) shows that getting shared organically is still really important (obviously). The thing that is interesting to me (because it is unknown) is why my video went viral two months after it was posted. What happened? Anecdotally, I have shared some content myself on reddit, but when it has appeared anywhere without me it has done demonstrably better.

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But there's more to this than engagement! Where did all those views come from? So as for traffic sources:

 

This data is pretty easy to interpret, but I should note that because of licensing rights to the music included in my montages, the mobile view counts are probably way down from what they could've been because they're restricted (and the audio can't be stripped after a certain number of views, which these have all surpassed).

The suggested video metric (suggested alongside/after a specific video) has been my main focal point, because it's clearly incredibly important to traffic. And it's some sort of algorithm that I can't figure out yet - probably because I can't even get people to watch longer yet either ;) As for the other traffic sources:

• I optimized keywords (and continue to try to optimize) for YouTube Search, but the correlation between search and engagement seems spotty to discern. Capturing someone searching for trans related terms should mean higher engagement - but there's a reason search is its own industry and intent is the billion dollar question. 
• YouTube - other features is mostly (76%) my own video annotations (such as links to other videos, back to my channel homepage, asking people to subscribe) driving traffic around my channel (which seems better than letting them leave).  
• Recommended video shows up again as the biggest piece of Homepage feeds and subscriptions (37%).
• The YouTube channel traffic is mostly from my own channel (90%), but I haven't done a lot of work experimenting with optimizing the channel pages themselves (beyond trying to keep viewers within my own videos - which is where I've gone back to try to create more playlists).
• The other data points are more difficult to break down at the channel level for various reasons. 

The second to last point is around the value of subscribers themselves. YouTube insists they're important and should be one of a creator's focal points, because subscribers should generally engage with your content more than everyone else. This in turn should presumably give it a higher score in the recommended video algorithm (to what extent, I have no idea). That said, subscribers themselves don't appear to watch this content a lot as a group. I imagine that varies a lot depending on the channel and the audience so I'd be very interested to learn more about that. For my channel, the YouTube Analytics gives subscribers credit for around 30k views (but this is tied to them being logged into Google). It also doesn't consider whether or not those subscribers shared my content and/or helped it go viral - so the point is, subscribers' value is hard to measure, but they are clearly important. 

The final data I'll leave you with is the available demographics of my audience (location and age):

The country breakouts are unsurprising, but the gender/age variation is interesting. While a lot of people's first reaction to the fact that my audience is predominantly young girls and older men suggests the latter are probably creepy chasers - I'm going to assume that a good chunk of those older viewers are either closeted trans women themselves or simply late transitioners who haven't updated their YouTube/Google accounts yet.

And yes, I am secretly hoping that this post goes viral and I can collect all sorts of data on it ;) 

YouTube Heroin(e)

Sometimes I wonder if my YouTube videos really make a difference or have any meaningful impact. I worry that they're some kind of vain narcissistic endeavor that any armchair psychologist could write a ten page dissertation on in a manner of minutes. However, making those videos often does feel like therapy, until I get a message asking me if they can ask me a question. Then I feel crazy again. If you have a question, ask me the question. Unless it's a question for some kind of survey, as though I'm some odd specimen to study. My life is not a petri dish or book report for you to present to your classmates. Still, I think that's better than being told how beautiful I am, for a transexual or some other backhanded compliment. That frustrates me and brings out the bitch. The tragedy is that's the people with good intentions, I'm not even going to get into the daily bowel movements I get in ALL CAPS LOCK WITH LOTS OF !!!!!! so I understand how serious they are when they say awful things about people like me.

So it's perfectly reasonable (and probably expected) to question why I spend so much energy subjecting myself to the stupidity of society's lowest common denominators. And though it is a sociological wonder to observe how widely the reasons for hating trans people vary between groups like religious fundamentalists and trans-exclusionary 'radical' feminists, I must be insane to want to build a social media personal brand off my YouTube (for those curious, it's @loosebricks on Twitter, facebook.com/loosebricks, and my blog lifeisgoodmakeitbetter.com).

I do feel batshit crazy a lot of the time. I don't have any obligation or responsibility to try to make transition easier for anyone else, but it's hard not to feel that way when I get messages like: 

"Just wanted to say thanks. Thank you for being you. Your selflessness and courage helped me to start becoming who I am almost a year ago. I never thought the life I have now was going to be possible until I started following youtube channels like yours. It has now inspired me to give back to the LGBTQ community that has helped me so much and start putting myself out there."

and

"We need to see happiness and joy in "our" lives and one happy smiling face or 24 as you posted makes it seem possible for all of us to be happy and smiling with you. God bless and thanks."

Cisgender (the non-othering word to describe someone who is "not trans" that your spell check dictionary won't recognize) folk even get in on the love: 

"You've inspired me to just unabashedly be myself."

Those words are my heroin. I've read single word of the 5,250+ messages (mostly positive) I've received as a result of over 925,000 views (it would've been so much cooler to write that with a million views, sadly that's about 20 days away). I can't count the hours I've spent chasing that high that comes with brightening someone's outlook on life by giving them a few minutes of my time. I've been using "life is good, make it better" as my personal motto for years. Now I can live it and use social media helps amplify that effect.

I don't think it's insane for me to think that I can really make things better, or that it's the right thing to do even if it's not always the most pleasant experience. And I know that only talking about it isn't as effective as doing something, so I've started with making being the "T" in LGBT a little easier in the corporate world. As I build a platform, I'll look to cast a wider net. This is just the beginning.

Gender marker change letter

This is the wording of the letter my doctor used for my passport application to get my gender marker changed. I also subsequently used it to get it changed on a driver's license (that may or may not work in your state). 

One of the important words is "complete" - as that can mean whatever your doctor thinks (so not necessarily surgery if you won't or haven't had it).

As you can see, it's a really simple letter and pretty easy to obtain since it's really up to your doctor's discretion. I cannot stress the importance of getting your name and gender marker changed to avoid awkward moments and make transition easier from a legal standpoint! A new passport means proper work authorization too, which can also help you avoid HR/insurance hassles later.

Also note that I'd had my legal name change completed at this point. You don't have to, but I don't want people to think that you can change your name on your passport without the proper paperwork (because you can't).

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To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing on behalf of [Full female name], formerly known as [Full male name], [Date of birth]. I am the physician for Ms. [Last name] and known her for [X amount of time]. I have fully evaluated her and provided medical treatment for gender transition from male to female during this time. Ms. [Last name] transition from male to female is completed after appropriate treatment and she is fully recognized as female.

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States that the forgoing is true and correct.

[Doctor Signature]

Doctor name

Address

Phone
Medical license #
DEA ID #

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note: the letter was signed and notarized by a public notary, printed on watermarked office letterhead