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).
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.
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 17, 2007
"Transgender" is the new "gay".
Major social justice movements travel along a common path, and since sexual orientation is so much further ahead, the spotlight has begun to shift to those of us who fall under the "T" in the alphabet soup of human sexuality. (The longest relevant acronym I can remember right now is GLBTQIQA+SOFFA, which is so long I can't even get Firefox to display it all as a single acronym.
) This is not to say that sexual orientation is no longer a matter of public interest, as evidenced by the long-running fight for marriage equality. Rather, we trans folk are gradually working our way into the cumulative awareness of the public, moving into a position held by the GLB crowd a few decades ago. That is a mixed blessing, but before I explain why, indulge me while I dip into my personal take on the history of transgender awareness. (Caveat emptor, as I am neither a sociologist nor a cultural historian.)
The path to social justice begins with a joke. Seriously! As a culture (or perhaps, more broadly, as a species), we tend to be amused by the unfamiliar. As long as it is believed to be harmless, that which is different is funny, and transgressing gender norms is no exception. I suspect that visual gags and punchlines based on cross-gender behavior or appearance are at least as old as theater itself, and quite possibly as old as the telling of jokes. In relatively recent history, the age-old comedic standby can be found in cinema, radio and television, from their earliest offerings through to the present. Interestingly, these jokes don't tend to be derisive at all. They aim for good-natured chuckles about truly improbable events (e.g. Shaggy drinking a potion and sprouting feminine features in a "Scooby Doo" movie or a man in a car commercial transforming his male friend into an attractive woman to decorate his new ride) rather than ridiculing any real group. (Some people assume that I will find such jokes offensive, but I am typically laughing right along with the crowd. After all, if you can't laugh at yourself, maybe you aren't that funny who can you laugh at?)
The second stage is when mockery and vilification kick in. As the entertainment industry picked up on the fact that there really are transgender people, some of the jokes took an ugly turn. Certain television shows presented trans folk in a very unflattering light, and the spectacles that resulted were so potent that they helped shape our cultural view of the subject for well over a decade. Transgender characters also began to appear in works of fiction, but usually as a way to introduce plot twists (e.g. "The Crying Game"). Various television shows began to use transgender characters for shock value, and in most cases they were portrayed as crime victims, mentally deranged criminals or evil deceivers out to prey on unwitting "normal folk".
Awareness of transgender people continued to spread, and non-trans people wanted to learn more. Thus began the education stage, which is where we are today. Television shows with news or educational programming started running special segments about being transgender and human interest programs started interviewing trans individuals. Early efforts often ended up being negative - either through lingering discomfort or naive ignorance - but progress was rapid. Educational segments addressing transgender issues have become quite common over the last few years, and two particularly good shows about transgender youth aired within the last month ("Born in the Wrong Body" on MSNBC and "Understanding Transgender Children" on ABC's 20/20). We also have more high-profile trans individuals going public, such as the previously mentioned Christine Daniels at the LA Times and Alexis Arquette showing up on Entertainment Tonight.
So why is all of this attention a double-edged sword? The positive side is fairly self-evident: we fear what we don't understand and reject what we fear, so educating the public about being transgender will improve acceptance. That, in turn, will reduce violent crime and unemployment and lead to better housing and educational opportunities, increased access to basic medical care... all of the usual goals for a disenfranchised minority group.
The negative side is less obvious. The thing is, there are plenty of transgender people living in their identified gender who don't stand out as being transgender. Not all trans people have that luxury, and some don't even want it, but there are a lot of trans men and women out in the world who look, sound, act and live just like non-trans men and women. In fact, odds are that you have at least seen - perhaps even known - a trans person without realizing it. Hardly surprising, since most transgender people just want to be seen as who they are and live thoroughly normal lives. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to live a "normal life" if people know that your anatomical birth gender doesn't match the way you live. Some of the trans people who choose to physically transition and end up not looking obviously transgender do not, under any circumstances, want people to know what they have been through. We refer to it as "living stealth", and it is not about "fooling" people, but rather fixing a birth defect and then putting it behind you so you can move on. The catch is, as the public becomes more aware of trans people, it becomes more difficult for trans people to choose stealth. Every time a special on transgender people airs on television or shows up in a newspaper, there is a chance that some happy, stealthy trans person somewhere will be unwillingly "outed" to friends who did not know - and have absolutely no need to know - about their past.
Does that mean that educating the public is a bad thing? Definitely not! Equal rights secured by genuine understanding and acceptance are fundamentally preferable to rights secured through anonymity, in my opinion. The latter can be lost far too easily, whereas the former is virtually irrevocable. At the same time, however, trans people who choose to live stealth have every right to do so; they have just as much right to privacy about their medical past as any other person. So if you know somebody who you think might be transgender and start to feel curious, don't ask. They will tell you if they want you to know.
Wednesday May 16, 2007
Apologies for going so long between posts. I had one written up and ready to preview when my darling browser decided to crash, and I, of course, had neglected to save my work in progress. Oops.
As a bit of food for thought while I struggle to recreate my treatise, consider this: there are plenty of FtM transsexuals in the world, but most transsexuals that show up in the media are MtF. In fact, even the gender-based visual gags in entertainment media (television, movies, etc) usually involve male-to-female transformations rather than the other direction. Why do you suppose that is?
Personally, I think it is because our society is much more tolerant of female masculinity than of male femininity. A girl who acts boyish is just a tomboy, or maybe a cut-throat business woman, but a boy who acts girlish? Major no-no. Perhaps it is a cultural power issue. At least subconsciously, people are more okay with seeing a female act somewhat masculine because that is a step up in the social hierarchy, whereas the other direction, well... who in their right mind would want to give up some of their social standing, right?
Of course, that kind of thinking has no valid bearing on why some transsexuals go through gender transition. We do it because we're tired of pretending to be what the world pushes us to be instead of who we really are. Transmen may end up higher in the social hierarchy than they were before transitioning, and transwomen may end up losing a lot of social power (an acquaintance jokingly asked, upon hearing about my transition, if I was ready for the 15% pay cut), but that is an effect, not a 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?
Thursday May 10, 2007
Labels are tricky things. Interpersonal communication would be virtually impossible - or at least dreadfully cumbersome - if we didn't have generalizations and categories and fuzzy approximations we could use to pack lots of meaning into a few words. Without labels, a simple statement like "I liked the forest green car, but its clutch was stiff" would become "I liked the fully enclosed automobile that was the color of the darker needles on healthy pine trees, but it was more difficult than I would prefer to move the pedal connected to the mechanism for changing gears." If that sounds absurdly exaggerated, give some thought to all of the words you use in your personal vocabulary. We all know what a pencil is, but a quick perusal of the stationary aisle at the grocery store reveals a wide range of objects that are all "pencils". There are traditional wood pencils, oversized wood pencils for young children, art pencils in different colors, mechanical pencils with erasers and without erasers and a whole range of sizes and grips... Yet I can still use the word "pencil", because we all know that - regardless of size or color or mechanism or features - a pencil is a writing tool that uses graphite rather than ink. That is the magic of labels.
Of course, any fan of Harry Potter (or "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", if you prefer) can tell you that magic has its dark side. The dark side of labels is that they are so useful and so ubiquitous that we tend to forget that we are using them. Even worse, we forget that they are intrinsically rough approximations rather than highly specific descriptions. But the darkest aspect of labels is that they can mean different things to different people, and when we forget that basic truth, communication breakdowns ensue.
For instance, it may seem quite significant for me to have acknowledged that I am transgender, but what does that really mean? Unless you are already knowledgeable about the subject, there is a good chance that it means different things to you than it means to me. In the parlance used most commonly in GLBT circles, "transgender" simply means "expressing or identifying with gender in a manner that does not conventionally match your anatomical birth gender." It is an umbrella term that covers a dizzying array of groups, including drag kings and queens, cross-dressers, genderqueer individuals, people who are asexual (as an identity rather than an orientation) and many more. It also includes transsexuals, and that is where I fit under the umbrella. I was born with a male reproductive system but I identify as female, which makes me a MtF (Male-to-Female) transsexual.
The "transsexual" label probably carries even more connotations in our society than "transgender" (which is one reason I tend to use the latter), so I'll wrap up this entry with some basics about what it means to be transsexual.
- Being transsexual is about who you are, not who you find attractive. Gender identity and sexual orientation are completely different traits, so telling you that I am a transsexual woman doesn't tell you anything about whether I am attracted to men or women.
- Being transsexual doesn't necessarily mean that I am going to transition, which is the process of making physical and/or social changes that allow me to live more authentically as who I am rather than pretending to be someone that I am not.
- Transition is not all about "the operation". Some people who transition have it, some don't. More importantly, surgery is not a magical defining moment where someone suddenly becomes a man or a woman. Just like non-transsexuals, we are born as who we are, and while it is understandable that people tend to focus on the external cover in this case, it is still the pages of the book that matter most.
- Being transsexual is not a choice. Nobody knows for sure what causes it (though there is evidence which suggests that some of the gender-differentiated structures in transsexuals' brains match our identities rather than our anatomies), but nobody chooses it. Anyone who thinks differently should look up statistics on suicide rates amongst transsexuals. Or, for that matter, statistics on how often we are murdered or assaulted. Most of the transsexuals that I know, at least, would much rather have been born with the right body than have to deal with being trans. Like everyone else, we're doing the best we can with the hand we were dealt... we just ended up with particularly difficult cards.
Wednesday May 09, 2007
When I posted my initial entry, I was a bit concerned about how many people would read it. Mind you, I'm really not that interesting for the most part (just ask my friends), but this is the sort of information that can end up plastered all over the Internet if the right (or wrong) person stumbles across it. As strange as this may sound coming from a blogger, Internet infamy isn't exactly my idea of a good time. Fortunately, my fears - as usual - have turned out to be unfounded. (I'm like an ostrich with a wicked fear of shadows, constantly burying my head in naive optimism until I realize there was nothing to be afraid of after all.) While I don't have concrete data available, it looks like my first post was viewed around 237 times. If you subtract the 17 times I loaded it myself during editing and the 200 hits that were probably automated web crawlers (think Google, not Spider Man), it looks like I had about 20 readers. Yay!
Kidding aside, it is worth noting the real implications of this blog. Most of my legal documentation reflects my new name and proper gender, and I appear to be seen fairly consistently as female by strangers (to my constant amazement and delight), so I could have gone through the rest of my life only sharing information about my past with a select handful of individuals. Now, countless web caching sites have stored copies of my post, and searching for my name will easily reveal my transgender status. That is a sobering thought when you consider that some companies are now searching the web for information on potential new employees before extending job offers. As one friend pointed out, however, I wouldn't want to work for a company that would reject me for being transgender anyway, so perhaps my irrevocable "outness" is a blessing in disguise. As long as society continues to move toward accepting diversity and away from discrimination and prejudice, I ought to be okay. (There I go burying my head again!)
(In a mildly ironic twist, it is quite likely that many of the aforementioned web caches are stored on and/or managed by Sun products, some of which are no doubt running software to which I contributed. Et tu, Kelly?)
Tuesday May 08, 2007
Welcome! This is my first (and, so far, only) post in my first (and, so far, only) blog at Sun. I am admittedly a bit behind on joining the employee blog movement. I used to think that the details of my work - though interesting and rewarding to me - would make for rather dull reading when captured in a blog. Actually, I haven't changed my mind about that. I have, however, come to the realization that there are much more interesting and potentially useful subjects about which I am quite qualified to write. Specifically, as a woman who recently came out at work as being in the process of gender transition, I can share my thoughts and experiences about life and work at Sun in the context of being both transgender and - more generally - one of Sun's many GLBT employees.
The decision to start this blog was not made easily, nor without a significant degree of trepidation. As recently as November of 2006, only a select handful of my closest and most trusted co-workers were aware of the changes I had begun to make a few years earlier (December, 2003). Since then, I have effectively come out to virtually everyone in my work location as well as my director's reports in other regions, which adds up to a few hundred co-workers "in the know". Blogging about my experience might sound easy after that, but the number of people who could conceivably read my posts is vastly greater than the number of people who already know, which is daunting to say the least.
So why start blogging now? There are a host of reasons, but two primary influences deserve mention. First, as a "member at large" of the board for Sun's GLBT employee resource group (GLAF), I have been thinking a lot recently about potential forms of outreach, both to current and future Sun employees and to the broader community of Sun's customers, partners, investors and peers. People in any of those groups might have an interest in what it is like to be a GLBT employee at Sun - after all, we walk among you - so an externally visible blog seems like a natural fit.
The second influence was Christine Daniels, a writer at the Los Angeles Times. Christine recently announced her own transition in her sports column in the paper, which is an act of courage and inspiration far greater - and far broader in scope - than this blog could ever be in my wildest, most fearful imagining. Reading her announcement reminded me that those of us fortunate enough to have gainful employment with companies that accept and respect diversity really ought to be doing what we can to pave the road wider and further for those who come after us, just as those who came before blazed the trail that we ourselves have followed.
I cannot promise that this blog will be entertaining, enlightening or even frequently updated, but I will do my best, and we'll see what happens.
(As a closing note - added after this post was written - you can find Christine Daniels' blog at the LA Times here.)
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I think the corporate acceptance goes back to Scot...
Just wanted to say I found your blog this morning....