Being Me

My company hosts an annual Women in Tech Experience, a multi-day event with talks, teaching, and other learning opportunities from all regions of the company. As part of that experience, I was asked to do a lightning talk on my experience where people helped with my dreams. Now, obviously, I did not talk about this in the context of career dreams, but much more personally and from the lens of an environment of inclusion. Now that the event is past, I wanted to share the text of my speech, with the names of the guilty redacted. 😊 I was born a little less than a year before the Stonewall Riots, a watershed moment in the development of LGBTQ+ rights. But that was just the beginning of what is still a significant battle for equality almost 52 years later. As I speak here today, across 33 States there are more than 100 pieces of legislation aimed at curtailing trans rights or suppressing our very existence. I live in a world where my right to personal dignity, to be treated with respect, t...

  I chose a strong term, violence, for a very good reason...

Every year, on March 31st, we celebrate the lives and achievements of trans people around the world. It's a day for those of us who are visible to tell our stories and, more importantly, to be visible for those who cannot be.

Trans health care is a difficult at the best of times, many Doctors are unaware of the general standards of care ( WPATH ) and how to apply them and so quite often just avoid addressing it. So when it comes to healthcare, trans people often turn to clinics known to be trans supportive.

  Yesterday I made the third significant step in my transition and now I wait.

I was very deeply honoured and, I will admit, not a little frightened to be asked to share my story for #IWD2021. This was a work event, and so I can't share the video replay on here, but I can share the text of what I had to say today.

There’s been some recent news around the rebranding of the Mr. Potato Head line to drop the “Mr.” as a part of the overall branding strategy. The characters of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head would still exist, and be sold, but the overall branding is being changed to be more inclusive. All in all, a pretty innocuous change, I think, but not to the world of social media. I hesitated to post this, I'll be very honest, but I cannot begin to change my corner of the world without making some, who are closer to me, a little uncomfortable. So, yes, some who read this may well read themselves into the post, but before you get defensive, please ask yourself why you are feeling that way. The reason it’s on my mind at all, despite being well past the age of actually caring about a toy potato, is the casual transphobia that arose as a result of the news. Whether it was meme jokes showing a confused Mr. Potato Head unable to pee at a urinal or a collection of posts and comments along the line of “He...