It’s been a minute, huh?

What I’ve Been Doing

I’ve been pretty busy, and I haven’t really had the opportunity to work on my personal site. I’ve been finishing up a pretty complicated project for a client so that I can transfer maintenance over to them, which is easier said than done. I’m also finishing up my last semester of college, which means working on a big research project that I can’t talk about yet, but I’m super excited to share with you when I can.

I also finally set up my email! I had it listed on the site for a while now, but I wasn’t quite ready to start using it. I’m super happy that I have a nice professional(ish) email that doesn’t have my deadname in it now.

Updating Your Name / Gender @ College

With the start of the new semester came a BUNCH of different headaches with getting my name and gender updated. Understandably, the university has to have your legal name on record for a number of documents. Thankfully, my university has a lot of flexibility in your displayed/preferred/public name, so you’d THINK it wouldn’t be a hassle to update everything.

First, because I am transitioning towards the end of my college career, I can’t change the username tied to my existing account, which has my deadname’s initial’s in it. I figured out a half-fix to this, creating an email alias that is similar to my official username but with corrected initials. This works for most school systems. However, almost every 3rd-party app we use is tied to our official school email, rather than the account, so I’ve found myself having to email professors and admin multiple times saying “I’ll need you to whitelist this email instead for me to log in,” which is annoying.

The next annoyance was getting my name change to actually push to all connected systems within the university. I was confused as to why random things like our job connection app and email were still showing my deadname, and eventually gave up and called the IT desk. Turns out, the changes don’t push to all systems until IT tries to access your student account. This creates the super fun situation of basically having to call IT and say, “Hey, random person that might be transphobic, I’m trans, can you please enter the account that shows all my personal information, including my deadname and address, so that I can hope that no one else finds out some of this info?” So that was fun.

Applying While Trans

This segues pretty well into how I found out that my name changes didn’t get pushed to all university systems.

I was trying to get a jump on applying for post-graduation jobs, and had sent out a few applications before I realized there was an issue. Despite the fact that my resume had the right name, and the application sent through the job connection portal was using the new email alias, the application still had my deadname at the top of the form. I tried to change it, but the application was already sent.

This creates the fun thought experiment of, ‘am I not getting calls back because the names didn’t match and they assumed it was an error, or because that outed me, or am I just not good enough?’ And while this whole thing had some things unique to my situation, I feel like it speaks to a much larger issue trans people face while applying for jobs.

Since Trump’s Justice Department reversed an Obama-era interpretation of the Civil Rights Act that prohibited discrimination in the workplace on the basis of gender identity, trans people have been understandably antsy about being out during the application process for a new job. This is especially true if they’re early in their transition and don’t feel like they ‘pass’, or haven’t gone through the legal name change or gender marker change processes.

I’m undoubtedly inexperienced on this front, since I’ve only had one Zoom interview since coming out, am still very masc-presenting, and have not undergone any of the legal name change or gender marker change process. I have, however, talked to a lot of my trans friends and other trans people about their experiences, and there are a lot of issues we all face.

  • Assumption of pronouns/title/gender
  • Invasive personal questions
  • Misgendering
  • Previous work/experience under a different name
  • Presentation

What I’m Doing Moving Forward

I am very proud of my trans identity, and I can only see myself becoming more proud as my transition progresses. I also have the privilege of working in an industry that is more trans-inclusive than most. Because of this, I’ve decided to be very open with being trans during my job search. While I’m still deciding whether or not to put my pronouns on my resume, I plan on coming out within the first exchange of messages or interview. While this will probably cause me to miss out on a decent number of job opportunities, I’d rather work at a place that I know is okay with me being trans than one where I have to either go back in the closet, or stress out about not passing well enough and getting outed.

I want to stress that everyone’s choice in how to navigate their job search is valid, and I don’t want to give the impression that this is the perfect way to go about it. This is just my choice, for my situation.

So that’s it for now. I might be posting again soon about a dumb project idea I had, but we’ll see if I can find the time. Take care, be safe, and be you! ❤️