I had been working in the LGBTQIA+ health space long enough to notice a pattern: whenever researchers discussed workplace experiences of LGBTQIA+ populations, trans women were either absent from the data, or present only as a footnote explaining why they had been excluded. "Hard-to-reach population." "Small sample." "Methodological limitations." What I read between the lines was something more uncomfortable: these were lives considered too inconvenient to study rigorously.

That is not a methodological problem. It is a theoretical and ethical one. So we went looking. We conducted in-depth interviews with trans women navigating the Portuguese labor market — and what we found was not what crisis narratives would predict. There was resilience, strategy, solidarity. And there was also exhaustion — the particular exhaustion of having to prove yourself at every step, in every role, to every colleague, repeatedly. One participant said something I have not forgotten: "You always have to prove yourself." She was not complaining. She was describing the structure of her working life with striking precision. That became the title.

This study came from something I lived before I studied it. When I arrived in Portugal to do my PhD, I spent months doing work far outside my field — the kind of work that any newly arrived immigrant without recognized credentials ends up doing while waiting for the institutional processes to catch up. I was a psychologist navigating a country that kept asking me to prove myself in ways that had little to do with competence and everything to do with where I was from.

I was surrounded by others in similar positions: overqualified, underpaid, and entirely dependent on one another for navigation, referrals, emotional support, and the practical knowledge that doesn't appear in any official guide. When I began thinking about who gets exposed to psychosocial risk at work and why, I kept coming back to that period. The title of the paper comes from something a participant said in an interview. It captures something the data confirmed consistently: what institutions fail to provide, people build for themselves.

Organizations display rainbow logos in June. HR departments introduce inclusion policies. DEI training is offered, certificates are issued, and reports are written. And yet — if you ask LGBTQIA+ employees whether any of this changes their actual working day, the answer is frequently: not much. The gap between institutional gesture and lived experience had been nagging at me for some time before I formalized it into a research question. I wanted to know whether the practices organizations claim to have correspond to what LGBTQIA+ employees actually perceive, feel, and live. What interested me most were the conditions under which the gap closes — what actually makes someone feel safe enough to be themselves at work. Those are the conditions worth understanding and building toward.