Yelp Celebrates Transgender Day of Visibility

Transgender people come from all walks of life: they are brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. They are your business owners, and they are your consumers. They are a diverse community representing all racial, ethnic, and faith backgrounds.

Transgender Day of Visibility is celebrated every year on March 31. It’s a time to honor transgender people around the world and the bravery it takes to live as authentic human beings. It’s also a time to educate, and raise awareness around the obstacles and discrimination trans people still face. This year at Yelp, we celebrated this day with the empowering message, #WontBeErased. We assembled information on the community and being an ally for our employees, and reflected on the progress we’ve made as a company.

Guided by the Human Rights Campaign’s 2018 Corporate Equality Index (HRC CEI), we created an infographic detailing trans issues around the U.S., and actionable steps employees can take to become allies. We distributed this infographic along with an inspirational Laverne Cox sticker we designed across all of our offices. Employees are now also able to access an internal resource we titled “Trans101” to learn more about gender-inclusive terminology, and all our resources available to trans employees.

For the first two weeks of April, we will feature slides in our cafes and buildings highlighting trans issues, community leaders, and book and movie recommendations. A key part in our campaign was normalizing the pronoun conversations by creating infographics modeling preferred pronoun usage and tutorials on how to change and share personal pronouns in our internal employee profiles. On March 31, we’re featuring an employee’s take on being trans in the workplace on our Instagram and celebrating live via events hosted by our LGBTQ+ employee resource group, OUTburst.

Transgender Day of Visibility might be officially celebrated on March 31, but the trans community and its members deserve support and recognition every single day. At Yelp, we work every day (and aim to improve every day) to ensure our trans community and allies walk into a supportive workplace.

• We’re a proud member of HRC’s Business Coalition for the Equality Act
• We design our workplace policies to match our values, and we’re proud to have received a perfect HRC CEI workplace score of 100 for the fifth year in a row
• We ally ourselves with causes we believe in: we filed an amicus brief with the HRC supporting the rights of transgender students in Adams v. School Board of St. John’s County Florida
• In our app, Yelp’s “Gender Neutral Bathrooms” and “Open to All” business attributes help people find and support trans and non-binary friendly businesses

We’re committed to continually educating ourselves and others on the progress so far, the work ahead, and ensuring space for all voices to be heard.

“Your lives matter. Your voices matter. Your stories matter.” – Laverne Cox