Money.CNN.com – By Marc Gunther, Fortune senior writer
From General Motors to Google, more companies are agreeing to protect transgender people from discrimination. Fortune’s Marc Gunther reports.
When David Rosen became Donna Rose, the people in charge of the human resources department at her company didn’t know what to think. Nor did her colleagues.
David was a former wrestler, a husband and a dad. Donna was on her way to becoming a post-operative transsexual woman. This was 1999, and her employer, PCS Health Systems of Scottsdale, Arizona (now a unit of CVS Caremark (Charts, Fortune 500)), had never dealt with a transgender person.
Nothing awful happened. Rose kept her job as a technology manager. But she didn’t get asked out to lunch much, and she was left out of the office football pool. “It was obvious that they weren’t comfortable around me,” she says, “and I wasn’t comfortable with them not being comfortable around me.” Before long, she quit.