work

Reflecting on 8 years of being professionally trans

Today’s my work anniversary. I’ve been at my current company now for 8 years which is also how long I’ve been out as trans at work. So here’s a bit of reflection on my professional life so far.

When I started in 2016, I was still closeted at work. I was dressing femme on evenings and weekends but I hadn’t gotten the courage to come out in a workplace setting before so I decided to interview as presumed cis in order to try to get the job. I probably just came off as very gay.

As I was being introduced as he/him on my first day it felt increasingly uncomfortable with each intro so the moment I had some time at my desk, I emailed my supervisor and 2 immediate peers and told them that I was nonbinary and used they/them (at the time). I was terrified, but was immediately met with affirming responses and attempts to use my pronouns correctly from there on. My supervisor became one of my biggest supporters, even though she had no previous experience with trans folks. That was exactly how a professional workplace should react. She had some slight hesitation as I started to dress femme but quickly corrected course and affirmed and advised my new professional wardrobe.

However, in the background, I found out later that she was also protecting me from tokenization. She had approached HR to see how to best support me and they didn’t have any resources but they did immediately want to use me to teach them what to do. She told me this much later after I had decided (on my own) to step into a volunteer DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) leadership position. I’m also thankful for her actions to keep me from being tokenized.

In 2018, the company hired their first DEI professional. She was an excellent leader and pretty quickly opened up invitations for staff to create additional Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) rather than a single catch-all Diversity Council. At her encouragement, I co-founded an LGBTQ ERG which blossomed into a lovely community of support, community, and advocacy for better internal policies. We had a great 2 years where we were affirmed and supported by her and her team. We hired consultants and taught some very well attended Trans 101 courses.

At the beginning of 2019, I moved to the team that I had originally come to the company hoping to join. An amazing team where everyone was already well trained on how to support and affirm trans people as research participants and I didn’t have to do any education or self-advocacy. I continued to lead the ERG and 2019 was a great year at work.

However, in 2020, things started to take a turn for the worse, and I don’t just mean the pandemic. The company hired a DEI Vice President who quickly turned the department into a “my way or the highway” mentality. He started making more and more stringent requirements of the ERGs, essentially trying to turn us into social clubs and take away any ability to advocate.

As an example, we had been working for over a year to develop a Trans 201 level workshop to do what the 101 course recipients had requested which was follow up on how to apply this knowledge to their internal and external work. We had contracted with Gender Justice League and were poised to launch in-person when the pandemic hit. After a few months, we pivoted to planning a virtual workshop and had a date scheduled. Suddenly the DEI team came in and shut down our work, cancelling the workshop without so much as a warning or explanation. When asked why, they said “we are no longer doing didactic classroom trainings” and refused to listen to how this workshop did not fit that model. They also refused to discuss how to move forward with the Trans Inclusion training that was so desperately needed.

When I continued to push on it, I was met with rather extreme anger and accusations from the staff member. I requested a third party mediator several times but was instead called into a meeting with the VP and HR where he threatened my job and told me that if I ever interacted that way with his staff again, he would have me fired. It became clear to me at that moment that the only way to preserve my job and sanity was to step back from doing the DEI work I loved so much. I immediately stepped down as ERG leader with great sadness.

I continued to engage in the ERG as a member for awhile and when I heard that the company had once again denied our request to build gender-neutral restrooms, I stepped up to attempt to intervene. We had been requesting these restrooms since our founding in 2018 and by 2022 it was becoming untenable to continue waiting. So I gathered a team of trans and cis staff and requested a meeting with the President of the company and was denied multiple times. He continued to push me to go through the VP who had threatened my job and was the barrier to not getting the restrooms prioritized.

When it was clear that we couldn’t meet directly with the President, I instead authored an open letter and started passing it around internally for signatures. As soon as the VP got wind of it, he again called me into a meeting and threatened and bullied me again. Shortly thereafter however, they announced the gender neutral bathroom project which he then claimed he had been working on the whole time (apparently without telling the entire accessibility committee). That for me was the final straw.

At this point I engage only in my direct teams’ work. I keep my head down and try to survive. I don’t feel like I can thrive at work because it is clear that the culture of the company is hostile towards trans activism. And without activism, we can never move forward towards a culture of inclusion. They also issued a very racist, both-sideism statement on Israel and Palestine that further shut down my participation. While it is a well paying job and many of the teams are individually great allies, I don’t feel like I can really recommend the company anymore which is very disappointing.

Names in transition

I feel like I’m in such a weird place of flux and transition with my name right now. It has been a long time, so long that I can’t even remember when I last felt a strong connection with my birth name. I’m not averse to it and it doesn’t feel like a “dead name” that brings up bad memories or feelings. I just feel apathetic to it. As in it’s something you can use to identify me but the name isn’t the same as who I am.

When I got married last year I changed my last name to something that my partner and I created together based on our matriarchal heritages. And that feels meaningful in a special way. I also decided to take the opportunity while I was doing all the paperwork to change my legal middle name to the name I have thought for years would be a good fit for me. Something mostly gender neutral but feminine leaning.

The last few weeks I’ve switched to using the chosen name as my primary name in most of my social circles and my friends and partners have been amazing about picking it up consistently and quickly. But I’m still using my first name at work. And it’s creating this odd dissonance for my brain.

I told my boss about it and she is very supportive and really loves my new name. But I haven’t rolled it out to my team yet because it feels so complicated to educate everyone and change it on all the various documents and systems. Not to mention feeling like a burden for being confusing. My strategy was going to be to wait until I got a new position because I was interviewing this month for a job within the company I found out I didn’t get. So now I’m not sure if I should keep waiting and hope I switch jobs soon or if I should just go ahead and tell my team and do the work of educating and updating now.

Being in transition is such an odd experience.

How clothing revealed my gender

I started estrogen yesterday! Besides feeling a little fuzzy, no changes yet but I’m really enjoying the symbology of my rebirth being on the first day of Spring.

As I’m beginning a kind of transition that people seem to be taking more seriously, I am thinking about some of the ways that “I knew” I was transfeminine. And one of the biggest ones as an adult was clothing.

I have never been that comfortable in masculine clothing. I mean I’m perfectly fine wearing jeans and a t-shirt for doing dirty work or walking the dogs. But the more formal I had to dress, the more uncomfortable and out of place I felt. It felt like I was putting on clothing that didn’t belong to me and didn’t fit my body.

For years I experimented with options to see what felt comfortable. As a kid I didn’t really think about it too much because when I was allowed to choose, I wore the jeans and t-shirt uniform. Or something practical like cargo pants when I went hiking so I could store my camera lenses. I never felt like anything looked good on me so I went for utility instead. And it was hard to disentangle my discomfort with more formal clothing from the discomfort around the situations I had to wear them in such as fundamentalist churches and cult conferences. Although I did know that wearing ties made me feel like I was being strangled, and not just in the physical sense.

Once I started having office jobs where I had to wear collared shirts, I bounced around between styles for awhile trying to find something that worked. I eventually found I felt best wearing purple so I settled on a lot of that for awhile during my “preppy” phase. But it still didn’t feel natural. I also got really bored with how few options there were for masculine clothing without accessories so I found myself collecting more and more different outfits and shades of drab pants in order to mix things up as much as socially acceptable. Everyone already thought I was gay so I was afraid of getting too adventurous about bright colors at that point.

As I got farther away from fundamentalism and more involved in LGBTQ rights as what I called a “gender nonconforming ally” at that point, I lost some of that fear of being perceived as gay. I was in a straight monogamous marriage with a woman at that point so I guess I felt that people would stop questioning me. Though as I adopted more inclusive language like calling my spouse with her gender neutral name “partner,” it didn’t do much to allay the rumors at work.

I did eventually start wearing more and more bold colors. I got brightly colored pants and fun patterned shirts that ended up being read as pretty gay. And that was the closest I came to feeling comfortable in masculine clothing. I also enjoyed the increased compliments on my appearance I got as people started reading me as more gay. Part of that was definitely the quality of the outfits I was putting together but some of it was probably due to working in women dominated fields and dressing in ways that made it more socially acceptable to comment on clothing.

Then, as I got more involved in polyamorous community and started dating other queer people, I began to realize that there was more to my identity than I was allowing myself to consider. And as I began to see myself as genderqueer, I experimented with more androgynous outfits at work. The problem is that for someone whose body is read as male to look androgynous, it is hard to dress formal. So much of what we perceive as androgyny is white, thin, AFAB (assigned female at birth) people dressing dapper or masculine of center. So on days I wanted to dress androgynous I had to dress down. And whether it was because of that or because of the change in gender expression, I realized I was getting less compliments at work and it felt like people were less likely to talk to me in general the less I fit the binary.

So I stopped pushing the boundaries as much at work. But once I escaped my marriage with a person who was ostensibly fine with queer people around her but not with any expressions of queerness or transness in her spouse, I started dressing more femme at home. It took me a long time to find things that fit me and looked good on my body (and that I could afford) but I slowly began building a wardrobe of clothing that felt much more gender affirming. And the more I wore dresses and cowl neck sweaters and tight pants, the more comfortable I felt.

In the moments when I was dressing femme it felt like I had shed the exoskeleton that was too tight and constricting my body. It felt freeing not just in an emotional sense but in a very tangible physical release as well. And that’s when I knew I was making the right choice and that I could never go back.

Because of a terrible new boss, I had to switch jobs right around the time that it was getting pretty hard to keep dressing masculine. And based on the advice of some other trans women, I interviewed in clothing that was as masculine as I could stand at that point. Which pretty much meant my gayest outfits. It took 6 months but I finally found a job and on my last day at the old job I wore a dress to say goodbye.

On the first day of my new job I outed myself to my new team as nonbinary and was amazed at how quickly they started using my pronouns. But I kept dressing as masculine as I could tolerate while I settled in. After 7 weeks I finally got the courage to talk to my supervisor about clothing and started dressing in the more androgynous outfits again while I worked on building up a wardrobe of professional femme clothing. There was some initial shock as they realized just how trans I was but it quickly faded into normal for them and now I only get compliments at work.

So the moral of the story is, if you never feel comfortable in the options you are “allowed” to wear, there might be something under that you need to explore. I am in love with femme clothing and I am so glad I have a place where I am affirmed in that expression at home and at work.