busybee fluffy rambles

10 years ago I was working for HBO’s VR research lab. It’s through here that I was a recipient of a joint Emmy award, but more importantly, it’s also where I finally felt comfortable coming out as trans in real life, thanks in no small part to my amazing coworkers at the time (special shout-outs in particular to Tanner and Claire; I doubt either of you are reading this but gosh did I love working with and knowing you both).

In particular, I was attending GDC 2016, and looking around and seeing all of the people of gender and realizing that the games industry was finally a much more inclusive place than when I first started in it. So many people around me expressing themselves and feeling comfortable and not being discriminated against for it. There were a handful of gross transphobes on the GDC social app, but it was easy enough to report their behavior, and gratifying to learn that they’d been evicted from the conference for it.

I felt sad for what I’d missed out on, for being stuck in my closet for so long and having never felt the support I needed to feel comfortable with publicly transitioning.

I’d worked briefly at a small games company in 1999 where the transphobia was overt, and later at Ubisoft in 2004 where it was still present enough that I didn’t feel comfortable being open about stuff to anyone (aside from one coworker who I’d met online first). Some of my gender-related stuff did leak out at Ubisoft but it was easier to just sweep it under the rug than to commit. And after Ubisoft was my first stint at Amazon, where gender variance was tolerated as a “quirk” but not really actively embraced, and then in 2007 I got recruited to Sony by a friend who I thought was savvy but turned out to very much not be, and who treated my transness as an extremely online thing.

I’d also been medically transitioning for years at this point (with a brief stint of HRT in 2004, and starting it For Realsies in 2011, and had an orchiectomy in 2014), and this had helped, but I was still basically living as a man in my daily life, and hating every moment of it.

So here I was at GDC, surrounded by people who were living their best lives and generally just Being, and I posted to the emerging trans chat on the GDC app, something like, “if I don’t come out at work by the end of the week I’m going to kill myself” in a sorta-joking way but which wasn’t really a joke. And people reached out to me to make sure I was okay, and I assured them that I was.

And then I texted my coworker Tanner. I forget exactly what I said, but it was something like, “Hey, do you think folks at HBO would be accepting if someone came out as trans? Asking for a friend (the friend is me).”

And we got to talking and it became very clear to me that coming out would be good for me and that I’d be accepted, and I changed my Slack username from “[firstname] [lastname]” to “[first initial] [lastname]” and that caused a bunch of other people to wonder what was up, and I realized I felt safe talking to them about it too, and this led to me officially coming out at work, 10 days later, which went pretty well, all things considered.

I remember it specifically being π day because this is also when I posted a Song Fight! forum thread about it, which also went (mostly) quite well. I’d been out as trans in the early days of Song Fight! but met a bunch of resistance (and occasional outright transphobia) from some folks (most of whom have since become much more accepting and are now amazing allies) and it became easier to just… roll with it and pretend not to care when people used the wrong pronouns for me, or insisted on referring to me by my deadname. I’d try to sneak in little nudges like asking that in our “Theme Song Fight” things to not use gendered pronouns when referring to me (which was usually ignored), but having the momentum of good feelings from the conversation with Tanner and the new motivation to Be Myself filled me with determination.

I haven’t done a good job of tracking most of my “transiversaries.” I have no idea when I started HRT (although it looks like it was sometime in September 2011), I always forget to celebrate my other milestones (aside from vaguely remembering that my bottom surgery happened to be almost exactly three years after my orchi, and I guess the 10th anniversary of that happens sometime in January of next year)², but this one? This one feels meaningful enough to at least acknowledge.

It is also somewhat fitting that today I am finally switching to injectable estradiol, after much difficulty with previous methods of delivery.

Anyway. Maybe I’ll make quiche for dinner.

Anyway, happy π day.