It must be nice to have the privilege to not need to worry about the political opinions of your coworkers.
I take it most people don't see your existence, as you are, as a political problem?
I take it most people don't see your existence, as you are, as a political problem?
I want to point out that this is a perfect example of how absolutely mind numbing and toxic it is to interact with a lot of these "woke" types. OP made an benign comment ("I want to work at work, not worry about the political opinions of my coworkers.") and its taken in the maximally worst way possible. There's no nuance, and no room for debate or discussion, where you immediately assume that the people you interact with want you dead or worse (your "existence").
Now, I'm thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley, in a much smaller town than most posters here. But I think this kind of thinking is toxic wherever you work. If you push out anyone who might challenge the structure (formal or informal) of your company without taking a good look at who that structure is serving, you're going to reject a lot of good people. And you're going to reinforce any existing biases already in the company.
Now, I don't know if this is because the people in my workplace are especially tolerant, if they were afraid of confrontation, or if they lacked a lens through which to interpret the visitor, but something sounds really weird to me about your workplace. Are the people in your region so vocally political as a matter of course? Are you in the bible belt? What does it mean to acknowledge the existence of a trans person?
America is different. We do both.
For the trans people I know, "acknowledge the existence of" them basically means to treat them according to their self-understanding as communicated to you. Usually that means using the name and pronouns that they identify with and not asking invasive questions. The idea is, roughly, that you are acknowledging that they - the person in front of you, a real physical body presented according to their self-understanding - exist. Dead naming or using a gender assigned at birth would imply that you are making their identity subject to your own model of the world, they're an abstract notion to you. Or, worse, that you are addressing a person that doesn't, in their conception, exist. It's imprecise language, perhaps, and not every person experiences it the same way.
> If a trans person walked into my office their existence would be a political problem
Maybe my problem with this is a semantic one, since I’m a student of language, but describing it in this way is legitimately insane to me. Insane in the sense that I don’t think the word “existence” is being used in a way that means what is meant by e.g. OP in this case.
I can't say that I know how every person means the things they say, but "my existence is political" is a relatively common statement, and I have never understood it to strictly mean that "I am alive subject to political whims." Every time I've encountered it the person saying it described how the mere act of being somewhere was enough to get people unhappy with them or to make someone else feel threatened. That regardless of what they did they were treated like a threat.
This is in fact not a common statement, and is only found in select coastal cities with high populations of people who have elite educations. More than half of the country has no idea what you’re talking about.
If you "are not political" in a space it is because you do not challenge it, either because you agree with the existing culture or norms or have decided that it is not worth the cost of doing anything about it. If someone else does challenge those norms or that culture, they become political, but if that comes from something that is fundamental to their identity their choices are to either suppress that part of themselves to fit in or to stick out, "be political", and experience whatever reactions to that challenge.
My claim, here, is that creating workplaces that "are not political" is a way of enforcing the authority of people who already have it, and encouraging people not to challenge what they may see as unethical or inequitable practices in a business or other organization. It is a form of authoritarianism, soft-sold under the guise of civility.
Companies are publicly committing to a priori support of one or the other of the conflicting views rather than do the more difficult work of helping someone get past this, in the US, but in other parts of the world it seems possible for culture to exert itself and heal the misperception over time.
Now, I'm thousands of inches away from Silicon Valley, in a much larger town than most posters here. But I think this kind of thinking is toxic wherever you work. If you push out anyone who might challenge the structure (formal or informal) of your company without taking a good look at who that structure is serving, you're going to reject a lot of good people. And you're going to reinforce any existing biases already in the company.
It sure isn't what I do. It sure isn't what my wife or her friends do.
Each of us has a lot of woke white colleagues who are super concerned about everyone's political opinions, though. Super concerned that we know they have good ones, super concerned that everyone thinks the same as they do.
A black woman at our institution took it upon herself to send a letter to her very white department explaining that their obsession with the hidden racism of "brown bag seminars" wasn't helping any actual black people.
It hasn't made our woke white colleagues any less exhausting, but I appreciated her speaking out.