Interview with Antonia Gilligan
HRC: I’m here today with Antonia Gilligan. For her whole life, Antonia knew that she was meant to be a woman, even though she was born a man. In 1990, Antonia was working as a toxic substance monitor in a laboratory when she began to transition from male to female under the guidance of her doctors. Antonia was soon relieved of all management responsibilities at her job and she was ultimately forced to quit. Antonia, tell us about your job at the laboratory.
Antonia: The job consisted of being a laboratory director for an environmental consulting firm in Manhattan. The job consisted of supervising people doing transmission electron microscopy for asbestos, polarized light microscopy and also particle counting — or, I should say, fiber counting using base contrast microscopy. There were approximately, at any given time, five to six people in the laboratory. Additionally, I established a water quality laboratory, for the inorganic and non-organic materials in water, and started working on indoor air concerns.
HRC: How did you first tell your employers about your transition?
Antonia: One of the things that attracted me to the job was that it had medical benefits. So even though the job’s initial compensation was far less than I’d historically had, it had something I desperately needed. It also allowed me, basically, to ensure that I could still care for my children and take care of my own unique medical needs. I told them after my first employee review — after my first raise — I wanted to document some level of superior performance. And then they took the news and said, “We’ll get back to you.” Two weeks later they got back to me — and asked me to leave the firm. And at that point I replied that I couldn’t, because of the medical benefits, so it wasn’t an option. I did submit to them letters from my physicians with a release, so if they wanted to talk they had complete — you know. So basically, the president of the firm said, “I’m just worried, number one, about you hurting me and my company.” And I tried to point out to him that being a New York City contractor — which is really the thing that provides me some legal coverage — was the fact that you couldn’t discriminate against gender. And it was ambiguous as to what that meant; we tried to use that as much as possible. After the reassignment, there was a fair amount of verbal haranguing from the owner of the firm — repeatedly ignoring things like a name change three years after the fact, things of this nature. Finally, it was just clear that I wasn’t going to be advanced to any area where I would be publicly in view of clients. And after bringing in half a million bucks’ worth of business, the only bonus I got was $1,000. And again, it was very clear that they were not going to let me have direct access with clients — no matter how successful I was in the lab. At that time I had become very interested in the conjunction of human toxicology and embryo development, and that’s what gave rise to me starting up my own company.
HRC: What made you ultimately decide to leave the job for good?
Antonia: It was first just … you know, water doesn’t remove the stone instantly. It’s a constant wearing-away process. Even new people would come up to me and feel completely at ease to ask the most intimate of questions. It was very difficult to get management to discourage such things as referring to me as “it.” That would be routinely done in the workplace. The president of the firm just always had a problem with it, and I was pretty much pigeonholed. I was restricted from overtime, for example. Very often they needed someone to work at other locations, but since they didn’t want me “out of the lab,” it basically meant that the money that I could be using for my own economic needs, which included supporting three kids, who are still the three centers of my life … it’s not just about the verbal haranguing. It’s about money. [laughs] And I don’t know how to describe it in any other manner. It’s about the money.