Month: May 2018

It is all still worthwhile

I’ve been sharing some stories that I realise are fairly negative in their scope. There are a couple reasons, the first of which is that this journey has not been particularly easy or fun so far. The other is that there are more definitive negative events then there really are positive ones.

Little wins tend to be very small but no less satisfying. I found a great pair of jeans that fit me well and look good. Win! They’re pretty obviously women’s jeans too. I’ve been wearing them in public and haven’t been stoned in the public square. It might not seem like much but its each battle that makes up the war, and I’m finally starting to see some battles won.

Hormone therapy can be slow and peoples opinion and behavior changes even slower, but I will try and write about the good with the bad. Though probably not much over the next couple weeks as I’m going on vacation. Talk to you all then!

It’s the little things: Man hands

My firm has offices spread across the country so we use video chatting services to communicate quite often. So as I was walking by our administrator the other day I stuck my hand in front of the camera. I know it’s not a particularly funny joke but it’s my way of saying hi.

“Oh those are just (my) big man hands in the way.” says the woman in my office.

One of the worst parts of coming out is that you expose yourself to being hurt. The little things are what hurt. My hands aren’t even that big, they don’t really bother me. In that moment though it was all consuming.

Like most people I just want to be treated with respect. Which means even a basic amount of dignity and social pleasantries being extended. You don’t point out someones obvious pimple, you don’t stare at the mole, you don’t stare at the only minority in the room, you don’t make fun of a Trans person’s less appreciated characteristics.

It might make you feel like you’re guarding yourself and have to step on egg shells. I’d feel bad if I hadn’t had to walk on egg shells and guard myself at all times for every moment of my life.

Most people know they should be nice to the people around them, they’re just not used to being around Trans people. It only takes some time to think or to ask the question to treat us like you would treat anyone else. It costs you nothing.

On a side note I know I’ve been talking about a lot of negative experiences lately, I will try and start writing some positive posts.

Baring your Soul: Feeling for the first time

I’ve talked a lot already about how weirdly dehumanising this whole transition thing is. I want to take a second now and talk about one of the very humanising experiences I’ve had through this.

Which is that transition has helped me feel, for the very first time.

In order to cope with the weight of being in the closet and other elements of my younger life I clammed up. I’ve talked about this before but that void that only expressed anger was my life for 22 years.

What I’m starting to discover now is that I am beginning to feel, rather regularly, different emotions. I’m beginning to have that complete feeling. This all became noticeable to me yesterday. The event in question? I had a friend piss me off. They had done something, I made fun of them and they reacted pretty harshly back. Nothing particularly revolutionary what was revolutionary was that I felt hurt.

Now, feeling hurt is something I have not allowed myself very often. The only person really capable of it is my wife. To have opened up that a close friend could actually hurt and upset me. As crazy as it sounds is new to me. It was a weird milestone of success.

What got me thinking about this all though is that I’ve noticed that when I get angry I can feel something other then just pure rage. A plethora of emotions begin to rise and compete. It’s not pleasant but it’s still novel enough that it makes me happy.

Transition is a weird time and its full of a lot of ups and downs, and one of the things that’s keeping me engaged is that I can feel those ups and downs for the first time.

In the event of emergency…

It’s been a bit of a hectic week. Last Thursday I had the joy of going through a carbon monoxide event at work. That’s unsettling enough as it is. However what it has highlighted is our utter lack of preparedness for any situation, as well as a pretty large gap in my bosses reasoning.

During the vent they were pretty useless and couldn’t even bring themselves up to being emotional supportive let alone actually supportive. Generally concerning themselves with the business and not us, the ones who had been exposed to poison gas.

I should also state that no one knew what the alarm sounded like, so we were breathing that stuff in for quite awhile trying to figure out what was going on.

This all transpires, come in Friday my coworker and I discuss the event, talk about some things we want changed. Some realizations that we should take this seriously and decide to learn from this.

So I talk to our bosses about this. Almost immediately things go off the rails. The basic argument they have presented is that since you can’t plan for every possible disaster there’s no point in planning for any disaster and as such people will use common sense and that’s going to be the plan.

Now I’m not going to pretend to be unique in that I’m the first person to have uncaring bosses, if anything, they are generally caring. After being shook up by what had happened the day before and the guilt and shame I had felt over the event (I had been to lunch when the alarm started, leaving my coworker in the building alone for almost an hour) then I’m presented with these two very sudden idiots that can’t seem to rub two brain cells together. They refuse to even acknowledge that it was all preventable (the CO spewing furnace had known issues and should have already been fixed, the alarm should have been tested regularly, the list goes on) and resolve to change nothing.

In my professional career I’ve experienced those moments when you just feel like a piece of meat. When you just feel reduced to a cog in a machine. Each time is always unique and in sometimes subtle ways. At the end of the day it shakes your confidence.

Folks, care about each others safety. If you lose your reputation for that then you’ve got very little left.

P.S. One of the partners bought us lunch yesterday. I guess that’s some sort of admission of feeling guilty.

Disrespect as a management tool

I’m going to broaden my audience a bit today and talk about something that affects anyone in any work place. it’s when a manager/owner tries to minimize the efforts of an employee through a lack of appreciation or by disrespecting that employee.

It’s a pretty toxic thing, unfortunately it comes from a very honest place. Which makes it rather insidious. As a manager you think to yourself, I don’t want employee x doing that task, I have employee y for that. Employee x should be focusing on their actual job. See, pretty obvious stuff.

The way of actually dealing with this is to address why employee x is doing something outside of their responsibilities in the first place. The answer isn’t always that they’re trying to get out of their actual job.

A lot of mistakes when you’re managing people comes from an inability to understand the entire situation. Everyone manages based on what they know, a good manager understands that they can never know everything but is constantly working to understand and improve their awareness. A bad manager will never realise that they are working with incomplete information. Most people fall somewhere in between those.

The difficulty is that if your manager was perceptive and understood their role, you wouldn’t need to read this. If your manager has fit the bill for what I’m saying they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong and its incredibly hard to change that opinion.

This puts a caring employee n a pickle. The obvious answer is to stop helping and wait for the problems that you’ve been highlighting to break down to the point that even the most pig headed manager notices. This is pretty tough to do when you have an aversion to watching disasters unfold, like a reasonable person does.

This is a dangerous proposition as you are likely to be involved with any collateral (no matter how minor it might be) because of your proximity to it. The best option before you is to try to understand why your manager is taking the position they are/ The other possibility is that what you’re saving isn’t that big a priority. It doesn’t ultimately matter, or that there’s a bigger plan then you’re aware of.

This brings me to the central point, communication is key. Communication leads to understanding. Understanding is everything,. If you’re frustrated reach out, maybe not to your direct manager, and likely not to their manager. Find someone else who might be privy to more information and seek to understand. Or if you are comfortable with it talk to your manager about the issue and express why you’re tackling it.

At the end of the day everyone situation and structure at work are different, but you do need to come to some understanding. If you constantly feel belittled and disrespected for the effort you put in eventually you’ll end up blowing up.