Thursday Oct 04, 2007
One of my favorite transgender jokes is that I ought to be able to lose weight easily by avoiding foods containing trans fats (a concept that works much better in theory than in practice). In fact, humor abounds when it comes "trans" prefixed words in English. I always smile when I see businesses proclaiming themselves to be "transmission specialists."
Transparency, however, is a pretty serious subject in the context of working for Sun.
Corporate transparency is all about being open and honest. It means telling people the truth about what you are doing, whether those people are shareholders, employees, partners or customers. Failure to do that has led to some impressive and broadly harmful corporate implosions over the last several years.
Transparency is also a part of the big picture of Social Responsibility, which covers a wide array of subjects including eco-responsibility, corporate governance, employee and supplier diversity, public policy and giving back to the community (which, at Sun, means everybody). It's all about doing the right thing. Consistently.
Sun really walks the walk on Social Responsibility. Not only is it in everything we do - from our business policies to our products - it is also in our objectives and our self-evaluation. Sun actually sets objectives for Social Responsibility, measures its success against those objectives and keeps raising the bar to drive constant improvement. You can see our most recent results in Sun's 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, which documents our objectives, our successes and our plans for the future.
So why am I blogging about this? Well, as an employee of the company, I think this is pretty cool stuff. It is the sort of thing that makes me proud to work at Sun. But the subject is also relevant because it applies so much to my situation. I transitioned on the job here at Sun, and they have "done the right thing" every step of the way. Further, they are happy to let others know about it... as demonstrated by the fact that there is a link to this blog in that report, under the Transparency subject of the Corporate Governance section.
So if you're reading this blog for the first time, and you got here from the CSR link, welcome. 
(And if you want to see further evidence that Sun is proud about doing the right thing, there is an article about my workplace transition in the October edition of OutNow magazine, which you can find here (PDF).
Friday Jul 13, 2007
While I have not actually fallen off of the face of the planet, as one might naturally suspect given the recent lack of posts, I have certainly been hanging on by my fingertips lately. Everything going on in my life is positive (a relationship, planning groups and steering committees for various GLBT organizations and events, and, of course, getting ready for San Diego Pride), but when combined with doing the work that Sun pays me to do, it hasn't left much time for blogging. (Sun does encourage its employees to blog regularly, but my technical work still comes first.) For those faithful few who have been checking for updates, I thank you for your tenacity and apologize for the delay. I wish I could promise that it won't happen again, but instead I'll promise to do my best to prevent it.
In other news, I was recently contacted by an individual writing about GLBT employee activism within the workplace - improving corporate policies and such - and was asked to share a bit about my experience at Sun. I don't know if my comments will be used, since other more experienced individuals covered the subject much better than I could, but it is a possibility. There may even be a reference to this blog, and perhaps quotes from it. Exciting stuff, albeit a bit intimidating as well. Once I finished writing up my thoughts about the subject, I realized that what I had written covers a subject that I have yet to address here. Rather than writing it all up again, I will shamelessly copy and paste some if it below. (As background, note that GLAF is our employee resource group for LGBT employees within Sun.)
I first accepted my place in the "L" and "T" portions of the rainbow in late 2003. In 2006, when the physical aspects of my gender transition were becoming apparent, I realized that I needed to either find a new job or start preparing for an on-the-job transition at Sun. Many people who transition start a new life for themselves rather than facing the challenges of being an out trans person, but I knew that Sun already included gender identity in its diversity policy (a recent GLAF achievement) and that other individuals had transitioned while working at Sun, so I decided to hope for the best. Great jobs are far too rare to throw away lightly.
After a search for corporate gender transition guidelines proved fruitless, I contacted GLAF for help. One of the board members was able to find an HR employee with former experience in the area, and after months of planning and preparation, my transition was announced to my co-workers and I switched to living "full time" as my identified gender. While the experience has been overwhelmingly positive and successful, I suspect that I did a lot of "reinventing the wheel" that wasn't necessary, so I decided to see how I could help.
The first two things I looked for when I started planning for my transition at Sun were documentation telling me what I needed to do and people who had personal experience with the process. Since I found neither, providing them for future transitioners at Sun became my goal. I joined the board of GLAF as a member at large, and have been working on creating a document with guidelines, procedures and background information that HR, management and transitioning employees can use in the future. I also decided to make myself highly visible as a trans Sun employee - a decision with some significant implications - so that any other employees facing a gender transition at Sun can easily find me. In addition to occasional emails about the subject to our GLAF member alias, I started a blog on Sun's externally visible employee blog site, both to educate the public at large and to make myself available to co-workers looking for contacts.
While my involvement in GLAF is still relatively new, I am already quite amazed - and delighted - by Sun's position on issues of GLBT diversity in the workplace. Every reaction when I have suggested an improvement or proposed taking action myself has been quite positive, typically along the lines of "hey, that's a great idea that we hadn't thought of... let's do it!" I knew going into this that Sun had committed itself to promoting diversity, but I never expected that I would find such eagerness not only to be accepting, but also to proactively engage and support the community.
Wednesday Jun 06, 2007
Following up on my previous entry, Sun now shows up with HP, Microsoft and 38 other companies as an official supporter of the ENDA. Very cool.
Friday May 25, 2007
So far, my entries have focused heavily on the "Transgender" part of this blog's title, and haven't really addressed "@ Sun". Hopefully the mere fact that I am writing here speaks volumes about Sun's commitment to diversity. Implication alone does not do the situation justice, however, so it is time to provide some details.
Neither sexual orientation (who you like) nor gender identity (who you are) are currently covered by federal anti-discrimination laws. Borrowing data from the HRC (which addresses the subject here), it is currently legal to fire a person based on their orientation in 33 states, and based on their identity in 42 states. Think about that for a minute. In 66% of the states in this country, you can be dismissed on the spot - no matter how good an employee you are - just for loving the wrong person. Employers in 84% of the states can fire you just for not conforming to their idea of how men and women are supposed to behave. I live in a state where employment discrimination based on either trait is prohibited by state law, but there are huge areas of the country where that isn't the case.
Fortunately, an increasingly large number of businesses have realized that good employees are too valuable an asset to lose to discrimination. Spurred in large part by the HRC's Corporate Equality Index, US companies have been adding sexual orientation and gender identity to their internal non-discrimination policies at an unprecedented rate over the last several years. Sun, of course, is one of them. We have a diversity policy longer than Santa's "nice list", and employees are expected to be familiar with it. (Sadly, Santa's "naughty list" is quite a bit longer.)
Knowing that your employer recognizes and enforces your right to be yourself without getting fired for it is a wonderful thing, but Sun goes even further.
After years of effort from a great many individuals and organizations, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is wending its way through Congress right now with employment protections for all GLBT individuals. If it passes (and isn't vetoed by the President), the vast majority of employers in the USA will be prohibited from firing their employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity, giving most people the same opportunities that companies like Sun already provide. Not content with respecting the diversity of its existing employees, Sun has joined other corporations in officially supporting the passage of the ENDA.
How many people can say that their employers would support them in such a massive and important cause?
Thursday May 10, 2007
I will be offline for a few days starting tonight (I can already feel myself getting jittery from data withdrawal), so I'll post one more entry to make sure nobody notices that I'm gone. 
I mentioned in my previous post that gender identity and sexual orientation are different things, and in a very circuitous manner, that reminds me of one of the reasons I love working at Sun.
If gender identity and sexual orientation are different issues, it could be argued that the "T" in "GLBT" shouldn't be grouped with the other three letters. In fact, that argument has been made by various people at various times. I personally feel that there are good political and biological reasons for keeping them together, but there is a much more fundamental reason that defies dispute: common goals. We may be different in some ways, but our goals are the same, so we work together and help each other out. (If this is starting to sound like something we learn in kindergarten, well... it really is.)
If you are wondering what this has to do with Sun, consider our push for eco-responsible computing. Unlike some of our friends at Google, Sun employees all live on the Earth, and to paraphrase the Tick, it's where we keep all of our stuff. We share a common goal - with our customers and partners and rivals and every other fellow human - to take good care of the planet, so when we find a practical way to make our products "greener", we do it. And then we think about it some more, and find a way to make it not only ecologically responsible, but also financially beneficial. Which makes our customers and partners more successful. Which, in turn, makes us more successful. We help each other out, and everybody wins.
What's not to love about coming to work and helping to make quality products that help our customers do more, cost less to use, and are better for the planet?
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I think the corporate acceptance goes back to Scot...
Just wanted to say I found your blog this morning....