Keep the change
Thursday Aug 09, 2007
One element of workplace gender transition planning which can vary widely from case to case is determining exactly who should be told about what is going on. There is no one correct answer that will work for all situations, as the transitioning employee and their support team need to consider things like the extent of social interaction the employee has with others in the immediate work area, the size of the local work force, frequency of interaction with coworkers in other locations, usage patterns for restroom facilities and so on. I suppose this is just one example of the importance of workplace change management skills, a subject whose breadth and relevance can best be demonstrated by the roughly 760 million search results from Google.
In my particular situation, the local facility consists of a few buildings populated with a few hundred employees, many of whom work from home and only come in to the office rarely. During the planning phase, my transition team decided to limit the notification about my transition to those employees who work in the same building and on the same floor as me, plus all of my director's reports in other locations and a handful of people I tend to interact with who weren't included in either of the main two groups. Notably, this meant that none of the people in other buildings at my work location got the news firsthand. Considering how uncommon this particular sort of news tends to be, I expected that word would get around, and when interest in the subject died off, I assumed that the workplace portion of my transition was completed.
Not so.
It seems that a number of local employees have only just found out, and since they never received the official notification, they are understandably curious about what happened. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, while I still haven't seen or heard of a single negative reaction, it came as a bit of an emotional blow to discover that the subject of my transition could still be new for people I work with. There is a sense of relief that comes with putting that in the past, even in the most accepting of workplaces, and having that particular body exhumed can be a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, the fact that so many people didn't know and I still didn't get any surprised reactions or curious questions suggests that my gender history isn't obvious to strangers, which is a comforting thought. For all of my blogging (here and elsewhere) and social activism, it is nice to think that I can just "blend in" at times and not focus on the path I have traveled to get here.
So was it a mistake not telling more people? I don't think anybody can answer that question. Telling too few people can lead to excessive speculation and rumors, but telling too many can make the event seem more significant than it really ought to be. All I know is that the process has been quite smooth so far, so given the chance to change the way things were handled, I think I'd keep them as they are.
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