Every weekend around 3 p.m., I left my morning shift at a restaurant in Manhattan took the subway to a restaurant in Brooklyn, where I worked evenings. My back ached, and sweat pooled under my arms from the heat trapped in my coat. I tried to relax, anticipating the tension and pain that I dreaded taking root in my body the moment I arrived for my evening shift. My blood pressure rose, and the dry heat from the oven cracked the skin of my nostrils and made my nose bleed. Pimples bloomed across my face from the cortisol coursing through my veins. At night, I had nightmares about forgetting key ingredients in the tiramisu and woke up tangled in sheets, my arms and legs heavy with fatigue. My body was protesting—I knew this.

I’m a 23-year-old trans person of color, and, until recently, I had two restaurant jobs and another cooking gig on the side. Cooking has been an important part of my daily life since I was a toddler at my mother’s hip. My relationship to food and its preparation has changed radically since I began working in the restaurant industry at 19. Today, I’m still immersed, and maybe a little obsessed.

There was the prep cook's sleazy commentary on the fit of my new jeans and my manager's wandering hands reaching to the back of my thighs as he leaned in for a hug from his barstool.

From my first day on the job as a line cook in Brooklyn, I felt self-conscious about the ways that I broke social codes. I didn’t spend half my paycheck at the bar, brag about lack of sleep, or come to work wasted. I declined the occasional offer of a bump of coke in the bathrooms. As a non-binary femme person, I was almost always the odd one out in the back of house. No one asked for my pronouns nor respected them once I’ve made clear that I go by “they” and “them.” It’s difficult enough to get through a shift while being constantly misgendered, but there was a minefield of other triggers to navigate. There was the prep cook's sleazy commentary on the fit of my new jeans and my manager's wandering hands reaching to the back of my thighs as he leaned in for a hug from his barstool. The attention was always given as praise; rejecting it labeled me as “overly sensitive” or “bitchy”—two judgements I’d been dodging through every male-dominated workplace I ever endured.

The last gender-non-conforming person to work in this restaurant was fired shortly after the same manager had sex with them in a supply closet. Most of my cis male coworkers relay this incident as a funny piece of gossip, but, for me, it’s a disturbing reminder of my own vulnerability within the hierarchy of power that’s so deeply rooted in this industry.

I learned that the only way to handle harassment at this job was to take a masculine-centered approach. As someone who is sometimes read as female and sometimes as male, on top of being racialized, I am an expert code-switcher. Hiding any emotion under a facade of cool, I’d invite someone outside with a cigarette as an excuse, and I explain nonchalantly as possible why it’s inappropriate and harmful to ask questions about my genitals, make jokes about rape, or promote racist stereotypes. (This approach only worked one-on-one; in front of an audience, masculine egos would tend to flare with embarrassment and give way to defensiveness, denial, and retaliation.)

In my first months on the job, I formed a natural alliance with the few other queer-identified employees who work in front-of-house, and we kept an eye out for one another. But it became difficult to hold each other up when our attempts to affect change waned under the weight of continuous disappointments. A typical shift at my restaurant job started with prep. Each cook in the kitchen was responsible for ensuring that their station is well stocked with ingredients, hot foods are cooked or brought to temperature, and any utensils are readily available for a fast-paced service. We would often inherit the disorderly chaos left behind by our morning staff, and we were always expected to pick up the slack where they left it. Without a break in service between brunch and dinner, I would find myself—week after week—cleaning up after other people well into the dinner rush.