Changing McDonald’s Dangerous Status Quo on Transgender Violence

by Weldon Kennedy · 2011-04-29 11:28:00 UTC
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More than 140,000 Change.org members have petitioned McDonald’s to dismiss the employees who encouraged two women as they violently attacked a transgender woman in a Baltimore location. But pressuring for punishment for these individuals doesn’t address the deeper issue at hand: McDonald’s needs to establish better policies for the inclusion of transgender people at all levels of their operation.

So today, to help keep up the pressure on the petition effort and also ask McDonald’s to address the underlying issue, we’re asking everyone to send a creative Follow Friday tweet to McDonald's encouraging them to adopt policies that will help prevent another incident like the one in Baltimore in the future.

Please take a second to send this tweet:

#FF @McDonalds but only to see if they adopt policies to protect transgender employees & customers http://chn.ge/fPkkhm via @change

Hopefully they’ll get the message that we all know this attack wasn’t an isolated event, and that we’ll be watching to hold them to account if they don’t address the issue.

The solutions here are fairly simple, and after this incident it should be clear to McDonald’s that their current policies are deficient. To solve the problem they should do things like add gender identity and gender expression to their non-discrimination policies, re-label single-user restrooms so that they are gender neutral, and require training for employees that covers transgender issues.

Simple stuff really, but it won’t happen unless we encourage them to do it, so I hope you’ll join me and tweet for change.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Demand that the employees on duty at McDonald's be held responsible in the beating of a trans woman
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