Transgendered woman claims she was ridiculed by Pearson worker

TORONTO — A transgendered woman claims she was ridiculed by a Toronto Pearson representative upon returning to the city on a flight from Florida.

Enza Anderson says when she entered the Canada Customs hall at Terminal 3 shortly before 3:30 pm on April 28, a greeter wearing a Toronto Pearson uniform pointed her out and exclaimed to her colleagues: “That’s a guy!”

“They were all staring and gawking,” Anderson told Global News.

She didn’t confront the worker because she had just finished a long trip from Fort Myers with stopovers in Atlanta and Cincinnati.

“I didn’t feel I needed to tell her how she is supposed to behave,” says Anderson. “I just wanted to go home.”

Anderson, a customer service representative at a bank, remains shocked by the welcome she received.

“I felt very angry, I felt very uncomfortable,” she says. “It’s not the attention I wanted. I don’t want to be looked at as a freak. I want to walk in a crowd and not be pointed at.”

Anderson said the Pearson greeter’s reaction was something she never expected to receive in a major Canadian city.

“The upsetting part is coming back and experiencing that after spending a whole week in the U.S. where everyone was so gracious and so kind,” she says. “Canada is my country and it’s nice to come home but it’s not nice to come home to this.”

Anderson says the Pearson greeters working in the terminal are the first point of contact for passengers arriving on international flights.

“You work at an airport where lots of different people come through. When you’re an ambassador – you’re there to welcome the world to Toronto – you have to be very open-minded.”

Anderson placed a distant third in the 2000 Toronto mayoral race, registered as a candidate for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance party in 2002 and ran for a council seat in both the 2003 and 2010 elections.

Trish Krale, senior communications advisor for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA), says the greeters in the Customs hall are contracted by the GTAA. She declined to say who is responsible for hiring and training the workers.

Krale disputes Anderson’s statement that there was more than one individual working in the room but says she can’t be sure who is responsible without seeing a photo “as there are many different uniforms worn by airport employees.”

Krale told Global News that Anderson should file a complaint on the GTAA website “which will allow us to take the proper steps to look into the incident and determine any action that needs to be taken.”

Anderson says she intends to make a formal complaint.

Jordan Zaitzow, Trans Health Connection Coordinator at the Sherbourne Health Centre in Toronto, says it’s common for transgendered people to be publicly mocked.

“It seems absurd but I hear that all the time — the day-to-day encounters getting called out and the fear of getting called out,” he says.

Zaitzow says Pearson should take advantage of the many resources available in the city to educate its workers. Anderson, who says she’s never had issues with customs officers or airline employees, agrees the airport’s ambassadors need sensitivity training.

“I would love to go in and say, ‘Look, this is a transsexual and you have to realize this is a human being as well.'”

This story has been updated to include additional comments from the GTAA spokesperson.