Passing

I hate that word, it has a negative connotation, and blending or integrating might be better words to use. How well you can fit in society has a lot to do with how well you can survive and earn a living.

Since this is Labor Day here is a post about working…

At Work in Two Genders
Observations from accomplished trans women about power and leadership in the office
The Altantic
By Sacha Zimmerman
September 2, 2016

“I want to literally make people smarter by jamming things in their brains,” Vivienne Ming, a theoretical neurophysicist and entrepreneur in Berkeley, California, told me. “Of course, that involves discretionary brain surgery.” So most of the time, Ming focuses on what comes before the operations, closely studying the physical components of the brain  in an attempt to target the approaches most likely to find success. After all, said Ming, “the space of what could be true is so enormous,” but what’s actually true is precise.
[…]
At work, women leaders experience more sexual harassment, lower pay, and less respect than their male peers. But what about transgender women at the tops of their fields? What is their experience of gender discrimination at work? What I found among the various accomplished trans women I spoke to was that, for them, leadership and professionalism aren’t functions of gender; they are a matter of making sure that one’s inner life and public life are in harmony.

Looking at Vivienne Ming you wouldn’t know that she is trans and that makes a lot of difference in getting a job and being able to survive, I know a lot of trans woman who are as smart as Ming but just looking at them you can tell they are trans and they have a very hard time getting and holding a job.

The article goes on to talk about another trans woman Michaela Mendelsohn,

“Authenticity resonates,” said Michaela Mendelsohn, the CEO of Los Angeles’s Pollo West Corp., one of the largest franchisees for the fast-food empire El Pollo Loco. “Finding my voice as a woman gave me new strength, and now I get more respect than I did as Michael,” Mendelsohn said. It’s not about being a man or a woman; it’s about “integrating as one whole person.”

“I never felt comfortable doing business as a male,” said Mendelsohn, who told me her life as a man—she transitioned in her 50s—was “hyper-masculine.” “There was always a feeling of being out of place,” she said—being a successful “businessman took a concerted effort at all times.” But when she finally “got a handle on my gender issues,” Mendelsohn said, “for the first time in my life, my body and mind were working together.” It used to be that going into work, she said, “every day I had a gigantic hill to climb, and for the first time, that hill leveled out.”

She also can integrate into society. For those that can’t life is hard, very hard.

One of the things that we get to see first hand is gender discrimination, the lyrics for the “Big Yellow Taxi” says it best…

 No no no
Don't it always seem to go,
That you don't know what you've got
Til its gone

When we lose or gain male privilege it becomes very noticeable.

Being authentic and a better leader, of course, does not insulate trans women from sexism. But the women I talked to said they experience sexism differently—as a contrast with life as a man.

“Almost overnight, they stopped asking me math questions,” said Ming. During her transition, she was working as a scientist, and her colleagues thought highly of her skills. She had even developed a unique, complex algorithm as a grad student—an algorithm she used to create an artificial intelligence that learned to hear, which she then put into a neuro-prosthetic cochlear implant. (She’s not kidding when she says she wants to jam things into people’s brains.) But after her transition, nobody asked her about math anymore. This was a striking moment for a person who had grown up with the “arbitrary privilege” of being male: “Nobody told me I couldn’t do math or be a scientist,” she said.
[…]
But the benefits of being an Asian male had worked in her favor for the majority of her career so far. “I had a level of male privilege—unquestionably,” See told me.

Mendelsohn used the same language: “I got where I got with male privilege, and I recognize that.” It was an insight she learned quickly. “The first time I walked into a boardroom as Michaela, I was invisible.” Previously, Mendelsohn had had a “macho, physical way” of getting her point across. “I used to speak authoritatively and command respect,” she said. At first, going from “one box to another, in some ways, was worse,” she said. Mendelsohn did ultimately find her way as a woman and earned back that respect—although sometimes she still finds herself reaching for that tough guy: “I can’t back down,” she said. “I’m lucky guys don’t want to hit a woman!”

This is so unique, not many people get to experience life from both sides and the differences is amazing. For me I tend to blend in until I am close enough or I start talking that I am identified as trans. Last week when I went on the LGBT bus trip one of the guys thought we were two lesbians until he overheard us talking.

One time when I was a guest lecturer one of the students wrote,

When it was announced that we would have a guest speaker for our next class I originally thought nothing of it. I’ve had a good experience with guest speakers in the TCPCG [Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates] program so far and I was excited to hear what the guest lecturer would say. When I walked into class on Wednesday I remember seeing the back of a tall woman standing in front of our class, thinking she was our guest, and proceeded to sit down and open up my computer. About 5 minutes later the guest came forward and she said that we were going to start the lecture. Once the guest lecturer starting talking and I began to look at her a bit more in detail, I realized something very interesting - our guest speaker was a transexual.

So I do get to see the results of gender bias but I can’t really tell if it is gender bias or the fact that they identified me as trans and it is trans bias that they are reacting to.

But one thing is obvious, there is bias.