"Ever since we founded Rome"
For two months in 2018, I ran social media for a Cleveland-based lifestyle magazine that I check on every so often in the hopes that it’s folded for good. So far it has not: Like a cockroach, it is unkillable. Unlike a cockroach, it has no personality or charm. It was the worst job I’ve ever had in my life: I spent most of my time at work applying to other jobs, generating material for zines, and considering the merits of filing a lawsuit against the magazine’s CEO for transphobic harassment that would have given the ACLU a vehicle to get anti-discrimination precedent on the books in Ohio (where it is still legal to fire someone or deny them housing, for example, for being trans).
Every day, I went outside to smoke a cigarette and look at those trees and contemplate whether it would be worth getting in a car accident without health insurance so I’d have a good excuse for calling off work. Every day I revised this Glassdoor review in anticipation of the day I’d be able to post it.
Do you enjoy working in a totally silent room where all the walls are painted white and people would rather pick up the phone than walk twenty feet to have a face-to-face conversation? I did not. There is a high staff turnover rate and I would urge you to take all the negative reviews on this page seriously. The culture here is oppressive, and the reviews are no exaggeration.
The CEO is a micro-manager of the worst kind; she wants to be included on every step of any given project so that she can give feedback, and then completely fails to follow up or provide help of any kind. She will expect you to know how to do things based on expectations that she does not communicate, and then she will chastise you for not being able to read minds. She will also threaten to cut your salary every time you do something she doesn’t like. She does not trust any of her employees, regardless of tenure, to do their jobs without constant oversight, but the oversight that she provides is then a massive obstacle to achieving literally anything. She also has no sense of the time or effort involved in doing any of the other jobs in the office, imposes impossible deadlines, and lies to clients about sales numbers. She will ask you to lie to clients, as well. If this company goes bankrupt, it will be her doing. If you’re wondering how bad it can be, the answer is, without exception, worse than you are imagining.
There is no organization here. The CEO will ask you to do tasks at basically random; on any given day you might be answering phone calls, looking at resumes, talking to clients, doing design work, or covering for whatever employee has most recently quit. It is impossible to work remotely, and there are no documents or established procedures for doing literally anything. Get used to formatting Excel spreadsheets, and then get used to being criticized for not doing it according to a template you don’t have, according to guidelines the CEO did not tell you beforehand. Also get used to receiving emails, often strident ones, far outside business hours — ranging from 8AM to 10PM.
No benefits either; if you negotiate it into your contract, the company will reimburse you for health insurance on a quarterly basis, but that’s it. If you need regular time off for medical accommodations, the CEO will threaten to cut your salary as a result. I worked here for a fairly brief amount of time and two employees quit in that period (not counting myself). The CEO made multiple staff members cry while I worked here, refused to take literally any personal responsibility, and made it impossible to do a good job.
If this isn’t enough to scare you off, more power to you. You’ll almost definitely get the job, because this workplace loses employees on a regular basis. Just sure your contract doesn’t include a mandatory notice period before you quit, because otherwise I guarantee you will regret it.
The worst day I had at that job wasn’t when I asked the CEO to stop addressing groups that included me with “hi ladies,” and she replied: “It happens - no need for the reminder. […] Some patience and understanding Rowan…” It wasn’t when she repeatedly misgendered me in front of my coworkers, dressed me down for not meeting standards she hadn’t told me about, or told me that I’d need to take a pay cut if I wanted to take an hour off work each week to go to therapy at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, and it wasn’t when she personally sat down and “adjusted” all the sales numbers in our pitch deck. Without question, the worst day I had at that job was in September, when the CEO switched all the TVs in the office to Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding his sexual assault of Christine Blasey Ford. She turned up the volume on all of them and said, “This is going to be a real watershed moment, just you watch. You know, I have two sons. They’re going to learn from this.”
Your sons are going to learn to be rapists, I thought.
We, as a culture, have been talking about rape in a new way, which mostly means more often and more loudly, since 2016, when a rapist with four decades’ worth of sexual assault allegations against him was elected president. We have still not reckoned with that same rapist’s persistent sexual obsession with his own daughter. To the best of my awareness, the article linked there is the only one in existence that addresses the issue directly. I think about this all the time, the way that these things hide in plain sight because we just don’t want to talk about them. If you walk down a street, my therapist once told me, in every fifth house there is a child who has been, or is being, sexually abused. Count them off: one, two, three, four, look away so you can pretend it’s not happening. Don’t say anything because then you’ll have to do something. I sketched out a brief timeline once, because I couldn’t stop wondering: Ivanka Trump would have been seven or eight years old when her father raped her mother in the master bedroom of their home. Now you know this, too.
And now we are here, in the aftermath of so many people saying this is going to be a real watershed moment and then doing nothing while waiting for change to materialize like the ghost of Christmas yet to come. The Democratic primary ended on Wednesday, when Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) suspended his presidential campaign, though he plans to remain on the ballot in states that have yet to hold their primaries in order to gather delegates and gain leverage to influence the party’s platform. This is not a surprise — Sanders’ campaign began to falter a few months ago, though before then I had some doubts about the viability of a candidate who has demonstrated an inability to win primary elections — but it is nevertheless a loss. A lot of people I know are, very reasonably, very sad about the end of the most progressive campaign run by a viable Democratic candidate in decades, if not ever, who is also the first Jewish candidate to win a presidential primary. Now, of course, we are left with a choice between rapists.
That isn’t fair. Politics are not fair, and at this point I think they don’t exist to be fair but rather to strive towards justice, slowly and constantly, working at a glacial pace towards a moving target. I don’t want to vote for a rapist — I cannot afford not to. Personhood is defined by the state, and my personhood is in a very tenuous place at the moment, thanks to the active efforts of conservative groups who took up the banner of transphobia as a consolation prize for losing the fight against marriage equality: specifically the Family Research Council, whose white paper “Understanding and Responding to the Transgender Movement” has become a template for the White House’s strategy to systematically strip trans people of our rights and ability to exist visibly and legally. I have been on Twitter less recently because it is quite hard for me to watch people talk about politics as if this is an afterthought when it is all I think about, all the time. When will it become illegal for me to access the medication that saved my life? When will it become illegal to have my ID reflect the name I use in every aspect of my life, the gender marker I had to get a doctor’s approval to change? When will the State Department refuse to renew my passport, making it impossible for me to leave the country if it comes to that? We all know what happens next. And I want to live. Not being able to go by the name that is mine, to live in the body that is mine, having these things systematically stripped from me, is death. Some people, I think, don’t understand or believe that; to others, it just doesn’t matter. “I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy.” But there are people who think the same thing about me, I’m sure.
One of the things I did in therapy at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center (which is offering remote services now), once I had a job that I could step away from for an hour a week without worrying about being fired, was take a class that purported to teach survivors how to talk about our experiences in a productive way. What I learned was that I have a handful of broken glass, fragmented memories and sharp edges of emotion, that reflects light differently depending on how I tilt it. At this angle, it’s a story about how trauma is a self-perpetuating cycle. At this one, it’s a data point on a graph indicating that 51 percent of trans men experience sexual assault in our lifetimes. I used to think it was a story about the choices I made and their consequences. Now I’m less sure that it’s a story at all rather than a constant companion, a shadow in the corner of my eye that I cannot unsee. I’m still surprised when I find out that someone I know is not aware of what that’s like. It isn’t the same as the way many cis men, for example, only take out their keys on the doorstep, or unlock their cars from the other side of the parking lot. It isn’t that simple. It never is. Did you know, by the way, that there is no one legal consensus as to what constitutes rape? There is no one definition of what goes where, or how, or who puts it there. Whether or not you can legally say you’ve been raped can depend on what side of the state line you’re on. It never gets to be easy.
In 2016, a lot of people thought that if enough survivors spoke up, if we just got angry enough and invented all the right hashtags and made ethical choices about the media we chose to consume, the world was going to change. It didn’t, or if it did, it wasn’t in the way we hoped it would, and now we are here. Every time, we have another chance to get it right, or at least to do a little better than we did last time. (Every time, we screw it up a little anyway.) Being a survivor is a full-time job. It is work, every single day for the rest of your fucking life, and the only reward is that you get to keep doing it — and some days, eventually, aren’t as bad as others, and you get better at it, and when it’s been long enough that it doesn’t feel quite so much like work, you get to look back and realize that, while you weren’t paying attention, you came a long way. Years passed, and you changed, and you didn’t have to feel as bad as you once did forever.
Believing in change, in a tomorrow that is better than yesterday, in a world that is better than the one we inherited, works the same way. The long arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, but only inasmuch as we work to drag it there. There is no shortcut, no quick fix. There is only the work, sometimes miserable, sometimes joyful, almost always too much, and its only reward is that you get to keep on doing it. It’s right to mourn, when you need to; it’s right to be angry, disappointed, pessimistic, to become cynical. It is dishonest to argue otherwise. But it is also dishonest to say that you cannot be cynical while still choosing the kind of hope that refuses to lie down and die. It is never easy. But it is always, I think, always, always worthwhile.
—R.