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.