It's definitely time for me to start thinking about when and how I'm going to transition at work. Outside of work I'm now living as myself pretty much full time and am pretty much fully out. And the further along I get in that process, the more difficult it
becomes to keep hearing my old name at work, not to mention having to
sign it on paperwork. On top of that, the number of co-workers who already know is steadily increasing: there are five whom I know for sure know, plus who knows if some may have heard rumours or guessed.
I recently got gendered correctly by a customer. I do powder coating, which is a method of painting metal products. My company does a lot of work for a lot of different clients. Yesterday, because he likes to jump the gun, my boss had called a client to tell them their order was done and ready for pickup without first checking in with my department. In reality one of the pieces had some flaws and needed to be re-painted. So the customer walks in to the shop with one of the shippers while I'm there sanding down the bad area on this piece, and I hear him say: "Oh, what's she doing? Is she still working on it?" At which point I look up and explain the situation and apologize, saying it'd probably be ready in about an hour.
It was a perfectly normal, mundane workplace interaction, but it felt so nice to get a brief reprieve from the constant misgendering. I was smiling about it for a while afterwards.
Yup, pretty soon I need to have a chat with the management about how exactly we're going to go about this. My strong preference is to keep everything low key and not make a big deal of it. Once that's done I'll have basically finished the social part of my transition. Hmm... I guess next I'll start focusing on the whole legal name change thing. There's always a next step, isn't there?
