Nukkad Tea Cafe: Combating the Taboo of Transgender Employees

Priyank Patel started his cafe, Nukkad Tea Cafe, to provide employment and agency to people from equity-deserving groups and to create a communal space where employees and customers could share a journey of social justice. To promote diversity, Patel hired people from a range of equity-deserving groups, including transgender people. Sadly, despite Patel’s best efforts, his employees still had to deal with prejudice from some customers. In 2021, Patel was struggling especially with the challenges that transgender employees were facing, such as low morale, a rate of pay that resulted in a lower income than begging, and different treatment from customers. Because of the discrimination that transgender employees experienced, they were not inclined to stay with the café for long, which left Patel dealing with a high churn rate among staff. Patel felt caught between his moral commitment to diversity and his business need to functionally maintain the restaurant in the face of negative public opinion and employee turnover.