Travelers Insurance is a Transphobic Company
Travelers Insurance terminated my employment based on entirely false reasons, claiming I did not file a medical leave claim with MetLife, which is entirely untrue. The claim was filed. This follows a period of many months where my attempts to get gender confirming surgery were continually delayed — delays that were held against me, despite them being out of my control and devastating to my mental health.
When I first started at the company, they eagerly had me update their so-called “Sustainability” website, which includes information about various corporate initiatives, to include more language in support of trans employees with specific verbiage about supporting trans employees pursuing surgery if medically necessary — which it is for me.
My manager repeatedly referred to a trans relative’s private medical history as a basis for arguing I would only need 2–3 weeks off following major surgery, arguing that she “seemed fine” after that. Not only is “seeming fine” an inadequate basis for deciding to return to work, the procedure I’m pursuing is moderately more invasive (a peritoneal, rather than inversion, vaginoplasty.)
As the delays piled up, this manager looked for more and more ways to fault me over even minor things — turning something in well before the deadline but a day or two later than he expected me to finish them was grounds for reprimand. After a few delays, I was made the sole developer on a small project for which I had scant documentation and unclear requirements, only to be faulted for not having an easy time, even though other developers at the company expressed that I was being setup for failure.
The toxic workplace was not sufficient to drive me away, so they concocted false reasons to force me out of the company, tacking on wrongful termination to their egregious treatment of me.
My entire time at Travelers, all I wanted was reasonable consideration of needs as a trans person and to do my job well — which I consistently did when not burdened by surgery delays and employer hostility, to the point of being once considered a shoe-in for a Lead Engineer role, with it spoken as a given that I would have it in a few months.
Instead, I was punished and forced out of the company for having trouble resolving a genuine and long-standing medical need in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century. This is because Travelers Insurance is a deeply transphobic company that only pretends to care about diversity to look sufficiently enlightened in the eyes of consumers.
