Jennifer Kramer

I’ve been meaning to write this post all summer, but in the last few months life’s really gotten away from me in some weird ways. It’s September now, and I’m watching the number of days tick away till my birthday. I’m turning 45 this year, a number which is simultaneously meaningless and momentus. When I started to think about transitioning I decided I wanted to do it when I was 42. We were watching the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie recently with the oldest kiddo and I mentioned that fact when we got to the bit with Deep Thought. It doesn’t make as much sense now, just a funny anecdote, but it felt important back then. It was me making my play for a shot at Life, the Universe and Everything. Have I gotten it? Hmm.

I wrote about my first year transitioning in April of last year. The year and a half since have really just slow but steady progress feeling more comfortable in my skin, a lot of loss and sadness, work, and the joy (terror) of being trans in America (on Earth). So let’s jump in, shall we?

Life as Me

It’s a nice coincidence that I just happened to take a selfie in the same dress around the time of the last blog post update and now. The comparison isn’t perfect: The angles aren’t exact, my hair’s different and all that jazz, but there’s some change there, if you look close. I’m that girl on the right now, all the time, which is wild. Of course I still feel like nothing has changed in the last year and a half because that’s how brains work.

I’ve gotten better at being me with a year and a half of practice. I can do a red lip in like a minute now, but I still usually skip eyeliner and mascara because there’s always something else that needs doing, and I don’t think my face looks good without glasses, and I don’t understand all the eyeshadow and primer and setting spray and other products needed for a good look, and help I fell in a dysphoria hole.

So I do a red lip and throw on my just-for-style glasses and get on with it. Here’s a before and after from this morning, on the left is me with no time to get ready, on the right is if I actually get to put myself together.

I’m a housewife right now, having left my last job a month ago. I’ve achieved a bucket list goal, and it’s great, but kind of overwhelming. I know how to do a hopefully passable job at being a mom, wife, and engineering manager at the same time, but it feels like if I’m just a wife and mother the bar is higher. I’ve started bringing cold tea and lemonade to my kids when I pick them up from school, which maybe is a start.

I’m learning more about myself and my traumas and issues. One of my friends said that transition is like pulling up the carpet it an old house. Yes, that horrible carpet is gone, but now you get to figure out all the other things that are underneath. Maybe there are original pine floors, but maybe there’s plywood and awful 70’s linoleum. My plywood and linoleum are largely centered around not feeling like I was safe and understood and belonged as a kid, a fun mix of being neurodivergent, an adopted single child, and trans. I make families so I can take care of them and so someone loves needs me. That’s not healthy and I need to stop it. I need to be able to just be a girl who’s worthy of love, and who also happens to be fun and interesting and caring, too. Learning about yourself is a bear, but it’s growth, and growth is good. Hulk smash trauma!

I’ve made some new friends since I came out, and many of my older friendships have gotten deeper now that I can be more honest about who I am. I’ve met some people in the local trans community, and more on social media. I’ve made new friends at work. I’m amazed at just how awesome and unique and interesting they all are, and that brings me so much joy. I’m trying to learn how to be a better friend, and how I can be there for people and let them be there for me. It’s a process.

I’m terrible at taking selfies with people, but here are some pictures of me and some of my amazing friends!

I’m letting go more of the things that I used to think defined me, but things that didn’t bring me joy. I’ve been able to donate / offload a couple of chunks of my retro computer collection to the Macintosh Librarian, which makes me very happy. Kate runs an amazing YouTube channel and I know that she’ll take very good care of these relics of a bygone era. Old Jennifer had a really hard time letting things go, new Jennifer is trying to learn to accept that a cycle is important. You get things, you enjoy them, and then you can say goodbye. I’m trying to teach that to my 8 year old, too, but the lesson isn’t sticking.

As far as physical changes from the last year and a half, some stuff’s different. Here’s another gratuitous selfie comparison, me in a pencil skirt in May 2021 and me in a pencil skirt in August 2022. Some of this is poise and fit and confidence, some of it is something else. You can decide for yourself how much, or if you’re trans you can ping me and I can give you the low down. Let’s just say that since starting Progesterone I’ve gained 10 pounds and it didn’t go to my tummy.

Looking at these pictures I am amazed at that girl on the left. How much confidence she had, how much she just kept plugging away. It may be a fundamental life truth, that after the fact we’re amazed at what we were capable of. I don’t think I really believed that I’d get to where I am, and lots of days I still feel awful, but today is a good brain day, and today I’m happy with the progress I’ve made.

Life in Grief

Irma and I both lost close, close friends early this year. Mentors, compatriots, supporters. Both to cancer, both in hospice, and less than two months apart. I lost Chad Neff, the guy I met when I first started working in the internet business all those years ago. Chad was an artist, a cowboy, a park ranger, and a fount of stories and humor that I was fortunate enough to experience in my youth. We drove all over San Marcos in his Toyota van connecting people to the internet. The Neffs welcomed me into their family and treated me like one of their own, and I’ll be forever grateful for that. After I moved to Austin and got busier with work and kids I didn’t see Chad as often, but our text message chats were a regular reminder of my weird, wonderful friend. I only got to see Chad once after I transitioned and before he went into hospice. COVID sucks and we didn’t know how fast he was going to decline. Spend time with the people you care about. You don’t have forever.

I was honored to get to give a eulogy for Chad at his memorial. It was the first time I’d gotten up in front of a crowd of mostly strangers and talked, and after it was over and I sat back down in the pew Arthur loudly whispered, “Great speech, mum!” So I guess I did ok.

Life at Work

I spent the last year and a half as an Engineering Manager and then Director of Engineering at a company called Swiftly, working on software to help make public transit better. It was really strange, being a manager at a place that hadn’t really had them before, but also coming into a startup that was starting to mature but hadn’t done so yet. I discovered that I’m prone to taking too much responsibility and I want to sacrifice to do what feels like the best thing for other people, but in the long term that’s unsustainable without really strong support. I think I did some good, encouraged people to grow, and helped make the engineering culture, organization, and technology better.

I was able to make some really great friends at Swiftly, and before I left I got to meet a bunch of them in person in San Francisco. I generally knew I was leaving at that point, so it was very bitter sweet, but I got to check off a lot of things off my ‘life as a woman’ bucket list. Stuff like giving a fellow co-worker who was having a breakdown a hug, being on the opposite side and having a friend watch out for me as I emotionally collapsed, closing the hotel bar down at midnight doing shots with a bunch of other girls, and navigating the city with a girl friend, watching out for each other, but also being myself in a big city and getting a yelled outfit compliment from a girl in a passing car. I’m so grateful I got to experience it.

Work-wise, I learned a ton about leading teams and making change happen in malleable organizations. I also learned about what to watch out for, including spotting traps that will drain the life from people with good intent, how the best intent can lead to dysfunctional situations, and how people are just fallible and are often helpless to do anything about it. I don’t know if I’ll want to do a startup of 100 people again, at least without good relationships with executive leadership, but I’m glad I did it.

When I left HP I didn’t miss it, and I don’t miss Swiftly, but I miss Vox Media, at least the buzzy, exciting days in Product back in 2016 or so. I think there’s something about being part of an organization that tells its own story well, that carefully curates its culture and tries to make people feel like they’re part of something wonderful that’s catnip to me. Being on the other side of that, where you’re the person at the top responsible for ensuring that culture gets crafted could be good, I suppose. Logically that’s where I would end up in my career, at some small startup that was just trying to figure culture out, but it must look different from the other side, mustn’t it? The film looks different to the director than to the caterer or the prop wrangler. In any case, that’s a problem for another time.

Life at Home

The last year and a half at home has been largely about having two kids in school during a pandemic. We’re managing the best we can. I do a lot of the traditional mom duties in our house, and have for a long time. I need to feel needed, and a house with two elementary age kids in it definitely needs someone to cook and clean and do laundry and get the kids to school.

I know it’s problematic, from a patriarchal view. I’m doing what I saw my mom and hundreds of TV and movie moms do in order to keep the house running and keep her family happy and healthy. I’m trying to work on asking for help more, but a small, scared, very sensitive to rejection part of me is terrified that if my family didn’t need me I wouldn’t have a place in it.

I didn’t care for the latest Dr. Strange movie. I didn’t like Wanda Maximoff’s heel turn, and how they used her desire to have a family to do it. She does terrible things because she wants a family to love and to care for. She uses means that the establishment consider abnormal to get it. I couldn’t enjoy that movie. It felt like a condemnation.

The kids keep getting bigger, and it’s interesting to see how the nature and nurture aspects of upbringing reveal themselves below the surface. Irma and I’s kids are very much like us. You can pull out a trait or a gift or a quirk from us or somewhere up our family lines, and there it is. It’s amazing and weird and hilarious when they laugh at the same thing we do, or quote the same lines we used to. The older one is binge-watching shows that Irma and I watched, and now we have even more shared touchstones. It’s lovely. They’re also starting to edge towards teenagerdom, and memories of the feelings from those awful angst ridden years are surfacing. I feel every flustered, embarrassed, sobbing stomp up the stairs in my bones.

The gift I’ve gotten as a parent is to be able to be the kind of parent I needed when I was a kid. I am certainly far, far from perfect, but I am trying. When I get to tell my kids something I wish someone had told me when I was their age it’s the most gratifying thing in the world.

Irma and I continue to figure out life. We both had a lot of stress this year, way more than felt fair, but we supported each other, and we have hopes for easier days ahead. We hadn’t had a babysitter since the start of the pandemic, and we both worked, which meant we had very little time together without the kids. We finally found someone a few months ago, and it’s been nice to get some time for just the two of us again.

Lots of couples where a spouse transitions don’t make it. Trans people sometimes marry people they think will fix them, or marry the people who turn out to not be accepting, or their spouse just isn’t attracted to the gender identity the trans person end up at. It’s a hard thing, rewriting your relationship story while still having all the memories and traumas and issues from before. I’m so grateful that Irma and I found each other all those years ago, and that we’re doing our best to adjust to this new normal. I’m a lucky girl.

On the fun side of things, this spring we got to go to New York for the second year in a row, which was fun. I love exploring with the family and I’m glad we can keep doing it. We’ve gotten into Only Murders in the Building so it was neat to go see the Belnord which plays the Arconia in exteriors.

A Little Q & A

I asked for questions for this post and got a few, so here are some things you may be wondering.

“Are there any differences in how people treat you as a woman now?”

Yes! Women are kinder and more open or genuine, I think. They strike up conversations and it’s easy and feels natural. Sisterhood is definitely a thing. Men are often more confused or dismissive, especially when I do things like ask for a pair of needle nosed pliers at a car dealership. With a few men I feel like I’m being talked down to a lot more, or dismissed. They’ll tell me things they probably shouldn’t admit outloud, or assume they know everything and I don’t know anything any just talk at me about things I already know. In some ways it’s a relief, to not feel like I have to show that I’m smart, too, but I’m old enough and experienced enough that I don’t feel like I need to do that, and if I was younger I’m sure it would infuriate me.

People have tried to be extra nice to me in ways that start to feel insincere, which is awkward, though that may be a bit of overly performative allyship. I got an ‘I’d tap that’ comment from someone I knew professionally. I’m not young, I’m white, my style and presentation are overly femme, and I’m 5′ 10″ in flats, so I benefit greatly from the patriarchy and get a lot of respectful (presumably) “Ma’am”‘s from people.

“What I want to know is what is the most different than you thought it’d be.”

Tilly, you’re going to get a dumb answer, but an honest one.

Before I transitioned I thought having boobs for real would be amazing and I’d be constantly obsessed with them. All the magical female gender transition tropes have girls obsessed by their new cleavage, but when it actually happens, they’re just like… there. I assume it’s just like it is for other women, we may hate our boobs or love our boobs but they’re just a body part and part of life and they’re fun sometimes in the right hands and society puts a lot of value on them, but as long as they look ok, most of the time I don’t think about them. They kinda get in the way if you’re a side sleeper, I’m still envious of girls with bigger ones, but they aren’t my whole world. I will say that looking in the mirror and seeing them when I wash my hands, they are a nice reminder that I’m probably doing this transition thing ok.

“I’d love to know the unexpected and beautiful ways your life has changed! Not the big things but the tiny joys you didn’t imagine.”

I love seeing older men and knowing I won’t have to ever be that.

I love the small, spontaneous chats with other girls, like when the waitress at our local haunt showed me some cherry earrings she’d gotten that reminded her of me.

I love being able to give people compliments, and getting a ‘I love your dress’ from someone.

I love not having to pretend to be someone I’m not. There’s so much freedom in not trying to be this successful, confident, fake person you’ve cobbled together from movies and TV shows and books.

I love being sad and just feeling it, and understanding wanting to just feel it.

I love being able to let go of things that aren’t right and not being crippled by fear that I’ve made a mistake, but instead knowing that I can grieve a bit if I need to and it’s ok.

I love it when I look in the mirror and see the beautiful girl that was hiding inside for all those years.

I love not having to know everything or be perfect.

“I’d love to know more about how you found support and this glowing confidence! Did you seek any support from a mental health professional? ESP now that it seems to be less taboo.”

The confidence is it’s own mysterious force. The pain of dysphoria and living in the closet drags you forward and then you have momentum and the euphoria of new things pushing you to keep going and then your life just kinda is what it is. At least for me. I spent years and years collecting a toybox of things I loved and knew about and desperately wanted and now I get to play in it and share it with people.

As far as mental health professionals, I have a therapist who I started seeing a few months before I started hormone therapy. It’s mostly just talk therapy, but she has had a lot of other trans patients so especially in the beginning it was very comforting to have someone who could say, ‘oh yea, a lot of my patients talk about that,’ when I was dealing with new things. There’s a lot of gatekeeping in trans healthcare, so having a long term relationship with a therapist who can write me letters for surgery recommendations if I need them is really useful. I have a psychiatrist but that was for ADHD, we don’t really talk about transness.

“What are some ways people have been particularly supportive and here do you feel like people could be more supportive of you?”

I love it when people give me feedback or respond to me on social media. It can feel like I’m vogue-ing into the void sometimes, but having a group of people who encourage me and respond positively helps keep the fears away. Every once in a while someone will pop up and tell me I’m an inspiration, or they love my style choices, or something like that, and I treasure those moments. I also share when I’m feeling down sometimes, and the messages of support then may not make everything better, but they mean a ton.

I love seeing people share articles about trans rights issues, especially when it isn’t Trans Day of Visibility or Pride month. There aren’t enough of us, our allies are critical, and the fact that you took the time to read up on something or decide to share it with your likely mostly cis audience means a lot.

“Gender is part of your identity, but you are also so many other things as well. What impact if any has coming out had on other aspects of yourself?”

I’d say it has made things easier. I’ve been able to shed some baggage and some trappings of a life that I was leading because I felt I had to, but one that wasn’t real. I think I’m kinder to the rest of me now.

How should we think about there suddenly being this giant rise in trans people and our kids doing things they’ll potentially regret.

First, the statistics on gender dysphoria are pretty clear. Untreated gender dysphoria and a trans person whose gender identity is invalidated or mocked by their family will have significantly higher incidences of mental health issues and suicide than a trans person in a family where someone accepts them and validates their gender identity. Not accepting trans people or making it harder to transition or be accepted as who they are is patriarchal violence. (The only people that benefits from the enforcement of rigid, binary gender structures are the people in power in a patriarchal system. I’ll talk more about that later.)

Kids will experiment, it’s what they do, they put on identities and personas as they grow up. When a child comes to you and says that they’re actually a girl and would like to wear dresses and be called a feminine name, or says they’re a boy and never wants to wear dresses again and wants you to use a masculine name, or doesn’t feel like either and wants to use they/them pronouns, the chances are very, very, very high that that child understands themselves on a deep level and is trying to share that with you. If they do it consistently, it is almost a certainty that they have some gender issues, and the best thing you can do is support them.

The reason we have a rise in trans identification in America isn’t because it’s a fad or in vogue, it’s that the representation is finally there to the point where people are not terrified to step out of the patriarchal birth-assigned gender binary line. Everyone shares the chart of left handedness once we stopped punishing it, and it’s exactly the same. Trans people have always been here, some of us have always known ourselves, but we were terrified to speak out, either because we tried and were shoved back into the closet by someone we entrusted our secret to who wasn’t prepared or worthy of it, or because all the representation we saw was mockery.

The incidents of trans people who detransition, especially those who do so due to something other than societal or family pressure, is less than 3% and possibly less than 1% according to studies. The rate of regret from trans people who’ve had gender affirming surgeries is less than 1%, a rate lower than pretty much any other type of surgical procedure.

Transness and gender identity is a journey. The best thing you can do for someone who is on it is accept them as exactly what they say are, and assume that this is exactly who they have been their entire life unless they give you specific insight otherwise. I’ve always been a girl, the world just didn’t see me as one. If at some point in the future through learning about myself I discover that I’m non-binary, then I will have always been non-binary, I was just on a journey to discover that before then.

If you are a parent or teacher or friend of a trans person, accept and celebrate that person’s identity as much as you can without being awkward or creepy. That shy non-binary kid probably doesn’t want to stand up in front of everyone at parent-teacher night and tell a crowd about their pronouns. They just want you to use the right name and the right pronouns and see them as not a boy or a girl and not make a big deal out of it. On the other hand, the trans woman who’s constantly posting online about transness and trans joy would probably be happy to come talk to a class about gender identity and what it’s like to transition.

I posted my transition announcement on Twitter on July 24th, 2020, which means I’ve been out for 9 months. A lot of things have happened since my coming out post in October, and my feelings about transition and life before have changed a bit, so now seems like a good time to post an update and share how I’m doing.

There are two audiences for this post. First, the folks who know me, care about me, and want to know how my first 9 months have gone. Second, other trans women who may be thinking about transitioning or are earlier in it than I am. My answers are a little different for both, so I’m breaking this into two parts. Feel free to read one, the other, or both.

For the world: I’m Fine

I’m fine, I’m fine! Transitioning is a thing that, most days, feels like something in the past. I can’t remember the last time I had to present as a boy and can’t imagine a scenario where I would ever need to again. I haven’t been misgendered on the phone or on a drive-thru speaker in months. All the people in my life seem to be trying to get my name and pronouns right, and the moments of being accidentally mis-gendered seem to be dropping.

All of my daily identity documents have been corrected except my Passport, which I have all the stuff to update but just haven’t made time. Yesterday a very nice lady in the neighborhood came over and helped us file paperwork to get the deed for our house changed over, and our mortgage company finally updated their files. The health insurance portal helpfully reminds me about maternity options. Unless they’ve gone looking, the folks at my new job (more on that in a moment) have never even seen my deadname.

Most days I just… exist as myself. I get up, throw something on (a dress or skirt and top if I don’t have workout, workout clothes if I do), get the kids ready for school, and drop them off. Maybe I workout with Haley, in which case then I put on real clothes after. Hopefully I moisturize, do as good a job of a lip as I can, try to find some bangles to match my outfit, and then sit down for work. Maybe Irma and I get lunch, then more work. Irma or I pick up the kids, and I figure out dinner. We do whatever it is that families do in a pandemic until bedtime. I read the kids a story and let them nod off a bit. Then it’s time with Irma and hopefully sleep. Oh, and some days I do laundry. Rinse, repeat. I’m a suburban housewife and mom, and thousands of moms in my neighborhood have the same day I do.

Sometimes I put on music, which I can dance to now. It was weird and awkward before, and I’m still terrible, but at least I think I get it now. I wish my voice was better and I could sing more songs, but I feel more free. I know I don’t move quite right. Like this comic says, I’m too big and too broad. Too many years with the wrong endocrine system. I’m grateful for what I have, though, which is a body that’s finally mine, and a life full of people who love me.

Change has happened really slowly and most days feels imperceptible until I look at old pictures. Then all of a sudden 3 months ago seems like forever and I have a hard time recognizing myself.

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Here’s an example, the first picture was taken last September when my friend Maddy inspired me to wear a different dress every day for a month. The girl on the left has been out for 2 months and is still very much getting her feet under her. She hasn’t figured out makeup or that an Apple Watch isn’t really her style. Me lately, on the right, is more comfortable in her skin, has gotten over her giant fear of makeup, and has 7 months more estrogen in her.

You might think that trans women wouldn’t be transphobic, but we’re all a bit transphobic, and those of us who were in the closet for decades can have heaps of it, deeply internalized.

I’ve hated makeup for as long as I can remember. I had the excuse of having ADHD and being sensitive to textures and smells, but what it may have been, really is something else. The garishly painted face of a macho guy in drag in a college party movie, perhaps, or a painful memory I’ve buried so deep I don’t even know it’s shape.

I knew it was something I would have to get over. Something that would make me happier and my life easier once I could do it. So many of my trans friends had mastered it, or so I felt, and here I was, paralyzed. Internalized transphobia made me incredibly fearful of judgement. I couldn’t actually try makeup until the house was empty, which during a pandemic isn’t very often.

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This was my first attempt, back on January 12th. I took 57 selfies. The color is Pioneer in Maybelline Super Stay Matte Ink, which is the only product I’ve tried, though now my everyday color is Savant.

Last fall, after many months of lusting after them, I started picking up bangles from Splendette. Most bangles and bracelets won’t fit over my hands, but Splendette has a Duchess size that fits perfectly. I’m a vintagey girl, bangles are a vintagey look, and having something I could collect was wonderful. I’ve spent more on them than I care to admit, but being able to accessorize has been really fun, and helps me feel more put together. They have matching necklaces, which I wear regularly, and earrings, which I haven’t quite gotten to.

Splendette has a Facebook group, which is a really welcoming, inclusive place. I’ve been able to post my selfies and get wonderful, affirming feedback on them. I’ve made friends I wouldn’t have otherwise, and have been able to be an out and visible vintage-enjoying trans woman, of which there aren’t many.

I’m also in the Pinup Couture Facebook group, which is similarly inclusive. I posted my pink, blue, and white Transgender Day of Visibility outfit there and ended up with over 800 reactions and 65 comments. That was pretty lovely, but made me realize that the volume of feedback isn’t nearly as important to me as the nature of it. A single comment from another trans or queer woman is worth more than all the other likes put together.

This was the first Transgender Day of Visibility where I was out, and it was great posting on social media and liking other trans people’s posts. I probably should have taken the day off of work. It was hard to switch back and forth and try to get things done.

Trans day of visibility was the day I came out at my job, or rather, my new job. Vox was wonderful and supportive and I’m not sure if I would have transitioned if I hadn’t been there, but I’d been there for nearly 6 years, and it was starting to feel like I needed something new. I’d gotten both of my corporate jobs by nepotism, or as we say in the tech industry, through my network. I’d never applied at a place I didn’t know anyone. I hadn’t gone through an interview loop to show that I was a person worth bringing in. I wasn’t sure if I could do it, to be honest, or as a trans woman, if anyone would even want to talk to me. If you have someone on your team who doesn’t want a trans woman managing them, it’s easy to come up with reasons why I wouldn’t be a good hire. Heck, most of the time I don’t think I would be a good hire.

I decided to only apply at places where I could learn about something interesting and/or do something good. My short list of areas was fashion, transit/transport, women’s health, or public service. The second job I applied for was at Swiftly, a company that generates fixed route arrival and departure predictions (buses, trains, ferries) and insights for transit agencies. Their core mission is to help cities move better, and their work improves people’s lives on a daily basis. I wrote a cover letter in a flash, sent in my resume and crossed my fingers. They called me back, I had some good interviews, felt I really connected with their Head of Engineering, made and presented a slide deck, and even though I was sure up to the very end they wouldn’t, they gave me an offer. It’s a company of 80 people, and it’s been great being in a place where I can make things better and have a bigger, hopefully positive, influence.

Getting out of the Vox bubble I’m also realizing I’m sometimes the first trans person that people have ever knowingly interacted with, which brings me to the downer part of this update.

I’m an out trans woman in the world, and my style is middle-aged-soccer-mom femme, which is possibly the least uncomfortable trans woman presentation for cis folks to deal with. If I pass (which is a whole other topic) people I interact with may have no idea I’m trans. I generally blend and am non-threatening. If I were Black or Hispanic or Asian, or my style more androgynous, aggressive or otherwise not societally conforming, I’m sure the reaction would be different, and that things would be much, much harder. So since I have the privilege, I feel like I have to be visible.

Being visible is important, because it isn’t a great time to be trans. Not that it has ever been a good time to be trans, but last year’s massive anti-trans pushes in the UK have moved to the US and a deluge of anti-trans bills have been filed in legislatures across the country. Trans people are the GOP’s newest minority target of choice. There are bills here in Texas that would ban trans girls from playing on girls teams in school and bills that would make it legal for doctors to deny trans people any care (even critical, life-saving care) if they felt it was against their beliefs to be trans. There’s a bill proposing changing the definition of child abuse to include providing or enabling a minor to get the gender affirming care that is broadly accepted in the medical community. Imagine having a 12 year old trans child, not being able to get them care, not having the means to move out of state, and having your child take their own life. More than half of trans kids consider suicide, a number that drops by half if even just their pronouns are respected by the people around them. They are literally going to kill trans kids with these bills.

There have been regular hearings at the state house on them, with trans Texans and their allies across the state traveling to Austin in the midst of a pandemic and waiting for hours to testify. It feels like my responsibility to not look away, but it’s heartbreaking to read the testimony by those of us who are opposed, and incredibly emotionally painful to read people’s arguments in favor. People who would rather that trans people just not exist, and are happy to inflict great injury on us because they are afraid and have power.

This is a new thing for me, and I honestly am having a hard time handling it. Before last year I moved through society as a cis, white male, and in the last decade, one with a job that made things very comfortable. I experienced a level of undeserved societal privilege and comfort that is the exact thing Republicans are fighting to maintain. Now I’m part of a small minority that they’re trying to extinguish by brute legislative force. I don’t feel like I can ignore what’s going on, but it hurts so much to watch.

Someone I know was recently lamenting that trans Twitter, a normally joyful, geekish, occasionally catty place had turned mournful and distressed. What alternative is there when you see your siblings suffer at the hands of the government? What hope can we have, when we think about the fact that there will likely be a Republican-dominated US House in two years, and two years after that, who maybe the presidency? State bills could become national bills. They could outlaw trans healthcare completely. Trans people might have to flee the country for their own safety. Anything could happen.

So what can we do, but keep fighting, and be as visible as we can? The Governor of Arkansas vetoed their bill (which the legislature overrode, but it’s a start) after he met with some trans women, including the state’s only openly trans elected official. They don’t know us, so it’s easy to hate us. The most hopeful I’ve been, reading the testimony against these bills, is when I read about the lifelong Republicans and grandparents who are out there, taking their legislators to task for putting their trans children and grandchildren at risk.

It is, in the end, a race. Just like with the fight for gay rights before it the more trans people someone personally knows, the harder it is to support a bigoted position against us. When they know us it’s harder to see us as an abstract concept, and easier to see us as caring, feeling human beings who deserve the same protections and respect as they do. We are fortunate a majority of Americans don’t support anti-trans legislation, but we aren’t yet to the point where enough see it as the bigoted attack on a vulnerable, tiny minority that it is and are willing to speak out against it. To that end, I try to be visible, I try to not offend, and I try to exist.

I’m fortunate, because I’m not popular on Twitter or Instagram, I don’t get a torrent of hateful and bigoted reactions when I post a picture or story, but a lot of my friends are not as lucky. I don’t know how they keep going when so much hatred is spewed at them all the time. Like most trans women, all I get are the chasers.

So I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine…

For the Trans Girls: The 28 Day Monster

Hey girl, I hope you’re doing ok. I’m going to presume that you’re somewhere behind me on the timeline. To do a time check, I’m about 14 months into HRT. I was at 200mg/day of Spiro and 8mg a day of oral Estradiol for most of that time. I started 100mg Progesterone around last November, so I guess I’m about 6 months into that. I’ve tried both methods with P, and I felt the more effective one gave me worse cramps, so I’ve stopped. You should probably experiment and track.

A month ago I switched to injections, so now I stab myself every Sunday and push .25ml of Estradiol Valerate into one of my thighs. I think that injections have smoothed out my swings a lot. I no longer feel out of sorts at the end of the day, and doing every 1 week instead of every 2 has meant that I haven’t generally felt like I’m having awful days before an injection, though Saturdays and Sunday mornings can sometimes be rough.

I do have awful days, though. 2 days out of every 28 to be exact (the ones 2 months ago was so bad that Irma told me to start logging them), and on those days I’m a freaking monster. Like, life would be better if I was isolated from all interactions with other people. I haven’t managed to track down other changes, but there are definitely periods of the month where my voice is just garbage for days on end, and I can’t get it together. I’m still figuring out my cycle, but one of my friends Jocelyn has a great post about hers on her blog. If you’re on HRT you might want to start tracking mood and period symptoms. I ran the numbers and the next time I’m going to be a disaster is Mother’s day and after that my mom’s birthday. At least now I can prepare. Maybe buy some chocolate.

We’ve been driving to Dallas every 6 weeks recently for full face electrolysis. 16-ish sessions of laser got most of the blonde hairs on my face, but not the dark ones, so it’s zapping and plucking if I want to get rid of them. At Electrology 3000 they inject Lidocane all over to numb your face (which is super, super-awful especially around the mouth and upper lip), but it still swells up a ton afterwards. You can’t shave for a few days before, which sucks for dysphoria, and then you look like you gained 20 lbs of water weight all in your face afterwards. I seem to bruise, as well, and those take a week and a half to two weeks to go away. It isn’t fun, and it’s expensive, but hopefully I’ll only have to do it a few more times and then I can start going to someone local. Hair grows in cycles, and you can only kill the hair that’s currently in a growth cycle. In summary, testosterone puberty is dumb and I hate it, but you knew that already.

When I’m not dealing with hair, one of the weirdest things I’ve run into is that a year in, I can’t really remember what the dysphoria was like. It was obviously awful, if I was willing to upend my entire life, and I’m still super happy to be living as myself, but the little nagging thought of ‘you know, it wasn’t that bad’ pops up more now. It’s a freaking liar, though, and I’m not going back to staring at the wall trying to shove my emotions down while I plod through life like a zombie.

Community is critical. I don’t know what I would do without my trans friends slack. I wish everyone could have it, and there was a way I could make that happen, but I don’t know how. I don’t think I have the emotional space to try and start or manage a community, but it is so, so helpful to find a non-toxic group of other trans women who can listen to your gripes and sadness and give you support when you’re down, and it’s just as important to be able to do the same in return.

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I’ve tried to take more part in outreach things like Transformation Tuesday, to try being visible for other people who may be considering transitioning. I can kinda handle seeing my old self when my cuter, new self is next to it. I think. Maybe? The side effect of seeing so many transition timelines is that if I ever see a guy and girl picture side by side I just automatically assume they’re trans and it’s a glow-up.

My deadname’s become something that my brain mostly skims off of and doesn’t touch. A friend of mine told me that’s a trauma response, that you don’t allow yourself to think about it. I haven’t been able to eradicate it from my day to day entirely. It is, tragically enough, wedged somewhere inside my therapists patient billing system. I see it after every time I see her. So it still surprises me, and that hits me, but it doesn’t usually take me down entirely. That person is a stranger, now. Or maybe that person is a trauma.

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We’ve started taking professional family pictures. Having something I can look at and not mentally avoid is really nice, and so worth the money. I know it’s hard in a pandemic, but if you can, find someone who knows how to make you look good and take some pictures that aren’t selfies.

It isn’t everyones goal, but if I can get a family photo where I just look like a girl and I’m not towering over everyone else or being obviously trans, that would be great. I’m hopefully getting closer. The first session ones, over there on the left, were from before I’d figured out makeup. Hopefully I’ll get better with makeup and style, estrogen will do more of its work, and we’ll figure out a way to pose so I don’t look like a giant.

But I mean, look at these bluebonnet pictures we took a month or so ago. It just kinda looks like a two moms who love each other and their kids, right? That’s amazing! It definitely doesn’t work out this way for everyone, and so many trans women have to rebuild their lives completely after transition, but you can do it, and life can be good.

Figuring out if I’m passing hasn’t gotten easier. It isn’t everyone’s goal, and shouldn’t be society’s expectation, but it’s really important to me. There’s some evidence I’m passing, obviously, because I call people on the phone and they say “yes ma’am” before I have a chance to introduce myself. When they ask me how I’m related to the deadname I’m trying to get them to change there’s a long pause after I say “I used to be that person.” People say “excuse me ma’am” when I’m standing in their way in the grocery store’s floral department, deep in thought about whether I need to bring a little plant friend home. But again, my style is super femme. The only pants I wear are workout leggings. People who know I’m trans can’t tell me if I’m passing, because they already have too much information. It’s like Schrödinger’s Gender Presentation, you never really know if you’re passing unless you know for sure that you aren’t. It’s a huge pain to be so uncertain about something so fundamental.

Oh right, so I have plants now. And a bird feeder outside my window. I’m allowing myself some nice, simple things. They don’t feel like elements of an identity I’m trying to fake anymore, they just feel like nice things that make me happy.

So that’s it. 14 months on hormones, 9 months out, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. It is still the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but also the best thing I ever did for myself. If this sounds intriguing and you haven’t started, you should try it. You’ll know pretty quick if it isn’t for you. If you’re early in the process, keep your chin up, girl, it gets easier. If you’re ahead of me, thank you. Thank you for blazing the trail and showing the way. I’ll try and do you proud.

Thanks for reading my 9 month update. As a parting gift, here’s a picture of me, my orchid, and my weirdly, hilariously horny cactus.

In the last few years a new tool appeared in the gender dysphoria toolbox. Trans women early in their transition, or ones just discovering that, ‘oh hey, I might be a girl’, can use technology to get a glimpse at their other selves. First there were Snapchat’s Gender Swap filters and a little later, FaceApp. FaceApp, aside from being a possibly Russian spy vector, has dozens of machine learning models for changing your face to a more generically feminine one, adding longer hair, trying on makeup, aging you, de-aging you, etc.

You can, from the comfort and safety of your own phone, imagine what life would be like if you didn’t go through the wrong puberty. If your cheeks were a little bit fuller, your skin a little smoother, and your lashes a little longer. It can be kind of frightening. I remember Irma showing me a Snapchat gender swap filter a few years ago when she was playing with them with the kids, and while the words that came out of my mouth were “I’d take that”, inside it was like a wound.

Sometimes trans women share these FaceApped pictures, or post only the FaceApped selfies to social media. The world is cruel and unforgiving and our self-images are painful, tender things. In the trans circles I’m in, sharing a FaceApped picture often results in someone giving the loving encouragement of “You’ll look better than that.” Let the hormones do their work for a few years. You’ll be you, but you’ll be better than that machine learning model can imagine. There will be light in those eyes.

For me, after transition started I didn’t want to look at those pictures anymore. A few months into hormones I no longer saw a guy in the mirror. I saw a girl who needed more time on HRT. FaceApp wasn’t going to tell me anything useful, it would just make me feel bad about not having started sooner, or it would do its machine learning analysis on my selfie, decide I was still a boy, and present me with boy options, which wasn’t good for my mental health.

The Past is Already There, it Just Isn’t Evenly Distributed Yet

In the last few weeks some trans friends of mine have started FaceApping their old photos, to see what they might have looked like back then. I have no idea who started it. I may have seen it first in Magdalene Visaggio’s thread FaceApping the presidents to look modern, but June Joplin went with it, and then Mae Dean posted one of her old pictures, and soon enough I was downloading FaceApp after swearing for years I wouldn’t.

Trans women, like many foster kids, don’t have pictures of themselves when they were younger, really. If you do a team building exercise and ask everyone to share a picture of themselves when they were a kid, or a teenager, well… just please don’t. There’s a hole there, a gap in memory, a category of artifacts which don’t exist.

My friends were posting pictures of themselves, pictures of them when they were 20, or 9, or 15, and they all looked… right. It was them, but younger, and less weary. Them as young girls and young women, caught in the moment, wild and free. 20 year old girls ready to take on the world, enjoying their dumb crap, being goofy. Teenage girls awkwardly posing for yearbook photos.

Suddenly these hard to look at pictures became approachable. They become ours. Memory starts to unwind a bit. You get a glimpse of a past that might have happened, of happiness that might have been yours.

So here are some of mine.

A Past and Future Jennifer

Here’s early 20’s cyberpunk Jennifer. She’s really into WIRED Magazine, as you can tell. She’s living in San Marcos, having finally moved away from her parents. She lives in a bright teal and pink house with big windows, which she loves for the natural light. Being on her own is really freeing, but she’s still absolutely a mess who doesn’t know how to get what she wants from her life.

When I saw this photo, it was like another timeline snapped into focus. That is, obviously, me. Even Google Photos face detection algorithms think it’s me. But it isn’t. I was her back then, but I wasn’t.

Pretty soon Jennifer got an opportunity to go to Japan with her girlfriend, Irma. Her birth mom was stationed in Japan when she was pregnant with her, and she lived there with her parents when she was little, so going back is a big deal. They stay in a Ryokan in a little mountain town and have amazingly delicious food.

This photo makes me really happy. The thought of being myself and being young and exploring the world is delightful, and somehow isn’t as sad as you might think. I am happy for this Jennifer, and excited for her adventures.

Here’s Jennifer with her parents, who’ve come to visit her colorful little house in San Marcos. Some how Jennifer got the tall genes from her birth parents.

When I did this photo is was like someone had dug their thumb into a tender spot I didn’t realize I had. I just hurts to look at. When you do a gender swap in FaceApp on a photo it does something subtle to the smile. I look at this picture, and that girl looks happy to me. Her parents are happy to be standing next to her. She’s a mess, but she’s trying.

Here’s Jennifer standing outside the Christian elementary school she went to for 6th grade. She didn’t have a great time there. She tested into an advanced math class, and then got moved to a lower one after a month. She bought a typewriter at a rummage sale, thinking that she should be the kind of girl who should own a typewriter, but it was old and didn’t work well. Even at 24, she hasn’t had enough time to really grasp how weird it was to move schools so often. She also still hasn’t figured out that she has ADHD.

The next year Jennifer goes to Mexico to visit Irma’s family. Here she is, in full adventurer regalia, standing at the bottom of a waterfall. There will only be enough horses for everyone else to ride, so Jennifer volunteers to walk back up, even though she’s as athletic as you’d expect for someone who sits at a computer all day. At the top she ends up throwing up in the middle of the road because she’s exerted herself too much. But it’s a good trip, and she gets to meet a lot of lovely people.

Fast forward to 2004, and Jennifer is on a train in the Netherlands, possibly haunted by the specter of a different life. She’s traveling with Irma again, but this time there’s an engagement ring nestled in her bag, and she’s going to ask Irma to marry her when they get to Paris. She’s nervous, but not as nervous as she was when she stood next to Irma’s dad’s pickup truck in the parking lot at his job and asked for his permission to propose.

This photo is the pretty surreal. I’ll kinda leave it at that.

Fortunately, when Jennifer proposed in Paris, Irma said yes. Here’s Jennifer in Oxford, at the Turf Tavern, having the first drink of her life at 27. That’s what being raised evangelical will do. She still doesn’t drink much, and she still doesn’t like the taste of beer, but she isn’t worried that she’s going to be the kind of drunk who goes too far and tells people her deepest secrets, like that thing about being a girl.

A year of planning later, and it’s time for Jennifer and Irma’s wedding. (In this alternate universe gay marriage was legal in Texas in 2005, just go with it.) Her birth mom, Mary, her brother Don, and her sister Lisa come down for it. Here they all are at the reception location the day before the wedding during setup. Jennifer’s tall genes must have come from her birth father, who exists somewhere out of time and space.

Several years later, and Jennifer’s birth mom, Mary comes down to visit. She has cancer, and this is the last time she’ll visit Jennifer at home. She stays with her for a while. In the alternate universe, Jennifer and her birth mom get to have mother/daughter time, and have lots of deep, meaningful conversations about life and children and growing up and the choices we make and the pain we hold.

Looking at this photo makes me cry. I guess it’s pretty obvious why.

An Epilogue

FaceApp has given me some scenes of a life that alternate reality Jennifer might have had. A glimpse into another universe. But this isn’t a universe that I live in. They’re fake memories, but memories which make me hope and smile more than the real ones. Somehow, to me, they feel more true.

I haven’t FaceApped any photos of myself with Irma or our kids. Those artifacts of memory belong to them, too, and changing them for myself this way, without acknowledging the change, feels wrong. We still have photos of our family on the fridge from before I transitioned. I was fine with it for a long time, but a few days ago I strategically put magnets over my face. Having photos around of myself is fine, I think, but I look at the refrigerator every day, multiple times a day, and it’s just too much, especially on the days I don’t feel good. But if I ridded my house of photos of me with my family, then what would I have? What artifacts of memory would exist for everyone else, or me? It’s so sad to think about.

I’m not going to print out these FaceApped pictures and put them up. At least I don’t think I will. I’ve had the train photo up in a window on my computer for a few days, and I think it’s something I need to close. She’s there, happy, living her life, and me getting a glimpse of that is enough.

Half way through the interview loop I realized that things had changed. Sometime in my 20 years of web development, I’d become the seasoned hand. The voice of experience. The old guy.

The startup whose conference room I was sitting in was young. Established, but still maturing. Three of their junior developers sat across the table from me. We’d run out of questions early. What do you ask someone who’s been developing for the web since before Netscape 1.0, and who’s about to leave a great gig at a top technology company? The only question that seemed relevant was the obvious one, asked after the formalities had run their course: “So, why do you want to come here?”

Time for a Change

Let’s wind the clock back to April, when I was a Tech Lead on the Big Data team at HP Helion, their enterprise cloud product. Before I joined HP I’d never considered myself a big company person. I figured that there were people who went to school and got CS degrees and did corporate development, and there were the rest of us who scraped up knowledge where we could and built the web. But at the end of 2010, thanks to some friends I’d made building said web, I found myself at HP, doing DevOps work on their Cloud offering. Over the next four and a half years I had the opportunity to learn Python, build a PaaS from scratch, file patents, speak at conferences, and finally, build and lead a team shipping a major tentpole feature on a major product. I even got to create a weekly engineering newsletter. It was a great run, and I was very lucky to have it.

Four and a half years is a long time, though, and the industry landscape has changed significantly. The Nest thermostat, Raspberry Pi, Minecraft, AR/VR resurgence, mobile as a serious platform, IoT, AI. All of them have exploded since I joined HP. While working on the cloud was interesting, you can only build ‘give me some servers with some software on them’ so many times. So this spring, after shipping Helion Development Platform 1.0 and handing off my team, I started looking for the next thing.

My criteria for the next gig were:

1. Somewhere I could learn something totally new (not a cloud hosting service or product).
2. An exciting industry or a space experiencing a big transformation.
3. A smart team and smart founders.
4. An office in south/central Austin so I could see people face to face.
5. A flexible work-from-home policy since the kids are small.
6. A progressive company with a social conscience.
7. Make enough to pay the mortgage and keep the kids in school, but not so much that I’d feel obligated to work every waking moment.

Unfortunately, aside from sending feelers out to my network, I didn’t have a good idea of where to find this gig. Most of the folks I’d worked with at HP had moved on to similar cloud projects, or were working on service mechanics. After four and a half years of working primarily for people outside of Austin (and having kids, which makes meetups hard), I’d lost touch with what was going on here in town. So how would I find the companies looking for talent in Austin who’d be interested in me? I didn’t know, and to make things more complicated, I had a really short time window. The project I was leading was about to start a serious development cycle, and I felt like my departure wouldn’t have as big a negative impact if I could give them notice before the planning really started. HP had been good to me, and I wanted to do the classy thing. In the end, my job hunt window was about three weeks.

Finding HIRED

One of my buddies is a Director of Engineering at a growing bay area software firm, which means he’s always on the lookout for talent. Whenever I started talking about the next thing, he would say, “You should check out HIRED.”  HIRED is a curated tech placement matchmaking service, and I hadn’t payed them too much attention until this year, because they hadn’t been in Austin. But now they were, and by funny coincidence, they’d just sponsored the PyLadies Austin meetup that my wife helps organize. So at the beginning of April, I signed up.

The first step at HIRED is filling out a profile. They can import from LinkedIn, which is what I did. After a little text tweaking, you’re set for their staff to review you. The next day I had a phone chat with Amanda, their talent advocate here in Austin. You can think of Amanda as a tech yenta. She knows what companies in town are looking for, and she talks to candidates to figure out what they’re looking for, and she tries to make good matches.

After my chat with Amanda (which was short, because I’d lost my voice the day before), my profile was set to go into the weekly batch.  HIRED releases their resumes on Monday mornings to the companies using them. Those companies get to look through the candidates, and pick who they want to send an interview request to.

By Monday afternoon I had three interview requests, two from Austin startups, and one from a distributed company headquartered in the bay area. None of them were companies I’d heard of before, and one of them was doing really interesting product development for humanitarian purposes. So far, exactly what I was hoping for.

Monday afternoon, after the most pro-active companies had checked the new candidates and sent their interview requests, Amanda looked through the system and sent me a half dozen ‘Would you be interested in…?’ emails. Of these companies, I’d heard of three before and had either had initial conversations with them or knew it wasn’t the right fit. The other two seemed promising, so I had Amanda contact them on my behalf.

I had initial phone conversations with the companies, some of which went really well, a few of which weren’t a great fit. After an interview you can rate it, and if it didn’t go well, HIRED can let them know you aren’t interested. It makes saying, ‘Thanks, but we’re not right for each other,’ really painless. Some front-runners were emerging. I started making pro and con lists. The most promising companies in town wanted to do face to face interviews, so we started figuring out times. I was speaking at ApacheCon, which ended up pushing them all to Friday.

Friday came and I ended up with two face to face interviews, both for Senior Rails Developer positions, both for companies doing an interesting blend of software platform and physical product. Which is how I found myself sitting across a conference room table from a trio of junior developers, amazed at how the time had flown since I was the junior kid sitting across the table.

A Wild Media Company Appears!

So where did I end up? I had three HIRED companies on my short list, but eventually, it came back to some advice I’d gotten from the friend who referred me to HIRED. “Figure out what you really want to do.” It’s easy to take that with a grain of salt, but if you’re serious about it, and figure out that one thing that you would drop everything for, suddenly everything can become clear. I want to work on the intersection of machines and stories. I think interacting with a software bot or agent is going to be a super-prevalent paradigm in the next few years. I did a whole presentation about it at SXSW 2013, and another one this year.

One of the feelers I’d sent out before I joined HIRED was to Trei Brundrett and Skip Baney of Vox Media. I’d worked with Skip at Polycot in the mid 2000’s, and Trei had referred some of our best clients to us. We had lunch during ApacheCon, started talking about narrative software, and Trei said, “Hey, you should come join us and make cool stories.” So now I’m at Vox Media, making VR experiences and hacking on a bunch of stuff I wouldn’t have been able to at a company that’s more diverse in people and expertise than anywhere else I was looking.

The experience of using HIRED was great, though, and I’d recommend it to anyone (and have). Amanda was awesome. If you’re in a position where you’ve either gotten out of touch with your local tech community, or you’ve moved to a new city and you don’t have a feel for the local market, I’d definitely give them a shot. All total I talked to 7 companies, had 3 on my short list, and did one serious interview loop. Everyone I talked to was great, and while they were all doing cool work, the opportunity at Vox was just too good to pass up.

In Conclusion

Your profile stays up on HIRED for 2 weeks, but you get the bulk of your requests in the first week. I had a mix of contacts, some from hiring managers, some from CTOs, and some from CEOs. Some of the conversations with CTOs and CEOs were so good, and the companies were doing such interesting work, I’ve referred other people to them. For the hiring companies that use the service to it’s full potential it’s a great way to get past the recruiter/hiring manager firewall. If you’re thinking about making a move, I heartily recommend them.