Today marks the 13th annual Transgender Day of Visibility.

Dedicated to the accomplishments of our transgender friends and family, this is a day where we celebrate the living.

Here in the Forest Service, we have a vibrant and growing community of talented trans employees. Each person serving as both a role model and as a regular person in their own right, doing regular things and living super ordinary lives, our people represent some of the very best of America.

They provide invaluable services to visitors in offices from Florida to the northern woods of Michigan, and then across the grasslands and forests all the way to the Pacific Northwest.

They work out in the field, collecting data and looking for owls and other endangered species up in mountains of California. We have folks who work with volunteers and lead naturalist hikes in the beautiful forests of Arizona. And we have trans employees working diligently behind the scenes, providing much needed and essential support to all of our employees from offices at the national level in both Albuquerque and Washington, D.C.

We have geneticists, social scientists, public affairs folks, people who manage timber sales and transgender co-workers working for the greatest good in offices all over the country, in every discipline and in every region in the Forest Service system.

And that kind of visibility is very much worth celebrating.

Because for a lot of people, and for a lot of our transgender employees. there were no positive role models while growing up. There wasn’t really anybody who looked like us, at least that we could see, and even after making our own way through life a lot of us were left feeling isolated and alone.

We didn’t necessarily know that there were other people just like us, and that a transgender person could be both successful and happy while pursuing a career with the federal government and with the Forest Service.

So, the visibility is great.

But there are a few areas where we still have some work yet to be done.

It’s harder for transgender people get hired for new jobs. We don’t get promoted nearly as often, and when we do get hired we make, on average, 32% less than our equally qualified, non-transgender counterparts.

We don’t have any openly transgender district rangers. There are zero out trans forest supervisors, and to my knowledge we haven’t yet had any transgender regional directors for our employees to cite as role models.

The key word there is “yet.”

Because one day we will have transgender people who will tell their stories about what it was like to be one the first members of Forest Service senior leadership.

We will have kids who will have role models to look up to, and people who look like them in all levels of our organization.

So, there’s plenty of opportunity ahead, and there’s a lot of our Forest Service history that still has yet to be written.

But, for now, we celebrate the people in the present.

Our awesome transgender coworkers. And the fact that when we stand tall together, we never again will be alone.