Walking Question Mark Starts Career

Sadwin
2 min readOct 18, 2016

After a childhood of being too nervous to ask permission to leave the classroom, I honed the ability to regularly go six to seven hours without needing to use the bathroom. It may be the most useful skill a future trans person can develop in grade school. I’ll be working on extending that six or seven out to eight or nine in preparation for my first real job in less than two weeks.

I’ve trapped myself in a decidedly nonbinary predicament. My name is technically gender neutral, but leans strongly feminine in recent years. My resume lists me as an officer of my college’s Women in Computing club, which hypothetically could be a role that a man could play, but not typically.

Since coming home from college with shorter hair and a deeper voice, I’ve had a number of people read me as male, if only as a much younger male. Nonetheless, that encouragement has led me to present male anytime I go out.

On Facebook, I switched my pronouns from they to he the day before the in-person interview, at which someone mentioned having checked out my profile, which still has photos of me in femme mode as recently as May. I’ve made casual statuses about being trans and have had listed my pronouns as they for a pretty long time, but have not asked anyone to change pronouns in person even though it bothers me when someone calls me “she” to a stranger.

In short, I feel like I’m a 3D model of a human clipping halfway through the closed door to the closet, twitching violently.

I arrived at the interview in a men’s (okay, boy’s) suit. I’ll be coming to my first day of work in the suit again, with a Superman tee under my shirt, because it’s also Halloween, my favorite day of the year, so I couldn’t bear to not be in some kind of costume. HR will undoubtedly have an F on my file, but I have no idea what coworkers will see when they look at me.

Hence, I must learn how to go without a restroom for nine hours.

Personally, I have no problem with using the women’s restroom in theory. I have no use for urinals and zero desire to witness other men using them. Women’s restrooms have tiny trash cans in the stall for my sanitary needs. But I absolutely will not march on into a restroom full of women I don’t know while wearing a suit and tie.

Being trans is hard when you don’t like drawing attention to yourself by asking for accommodations.

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