The reality of being a queer woman in the trades with Megan Kinch

You haven’t always written professionally about the trades, despite relying on that work to sustain your writing career. What changed?

For a long time, I didn’t write about the trades or at all. The trades were my day job that allowed me to write other shit and work on other social justice stuff that I wanted to do.

And I had a baby, a toddler, and I was so exhausted. I actually went years without writing anything because I couldn't — because I was dead, I was swamped, I was exhausted.

So, I sort of wrote this piece called “Working with your hands” for Briarpatch about how I can't write.

How did you finally settle on writing about the experiences of queer and trans folks in the trades?

I'm really inspired by Anthony Bourdain and what he did for the food industry, and I want to do that for construction. I want to build bridges to explain construction and the construction world’s problems to other people, because construction is such a huge part of the city. And there's just a real lack of knowledge, especially from people outside of ethnic communities that historically worked and continue to work in construction.

There are so many really serious problems in the trades, especially with equity. Basically, anyone who's not a straight white dude is fucked. Even the straight white dude is dealing with serious problems, too, like safety and instability.

Sometimes, I’m on the Jobs for Queers board on Facebook and people are like,  “Have you thought about the trades? It’s a great opportunity” — but it's not a great opportunity for queers. It's very hard to get in, you're always going to be treated like shit, you're not gonna make as much money. There are even numbers in the Action Journey article for how much less money you’ll make as a queer and/or trans tradesperson.

I don't write that many stories. But the ones I do are all based on a deep hanging out [anthropology-speak for localized long-term field research] and stuff that I really know and spend too much time researching.

The kind of journalism I’m doing is not economically viable. It’s truly like a labour of love, and that's partly why I have to support myself as an electrician. But also, supporting myself as an electrician gives me more freedom to write stuff that I want to write and not write stuff that I don't want to. I have more ability to speak truth to power because I don't have to make money from, for example, the NGO industrial complex.

As a queer woman in the trades, what is it about your industry that you’d like to change?

I really cannot stand this pollyannaish, over-positivity about trades, especially around women in trades. It's like, “Things are getting better! Here's this woman; she's a second-term apprentice. Here’s a photo of her. She's so excited about the trades.”

But they're still one per cent of the workforce. And then they’re “celebrating how far we've come,” but we don't have bathrooms.

Nobody's talking about the shitty reality: Women leave apprenticeships at 50 per cent higher rates than men; they don't finish the apprenticeship, or get their apprenticeship and then quit because the working conditions are often intolerable.

Or because of daycare. Part of the reason there are so few women in construction is because women, especially in working class families, get the burden of childcare placed almost entirely upon them. There's no subsidized daycare that opens at the hours that tradespeople need. It’s just not available. We usually start working at 6:30 in the morning. Nobody ever talks about that.

All these women in trades spaces are just so celebratory and positive and that just does not match the experience of women in trades.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.