Mental Health, Capitalism, Workplace, Trans-worry
So those of you that know me or have known me for a long while probably know I've been on HRT for a good long while.
Even before HRT.. long hair, wearing it down and not in generic tech dude pony tail and some not masculine signalling colors often got people to Ma'am, refer to me with feminine pronouns etc.
So I've been on HRT for a bit over 6 years... with a clean shave (stupid dark facial hair under my nose) people regularly have no idea what I am... outside of work... while I kinda hate the Biblical Origins of my chosen name.. it works well, gender neutral (Which pleases me. Nobody fucking knows if Sam is short for Samuel or Samantha so.. HA) which pleases me.
Anyway where am I going with this.
I'm working on some series health related changes to my life... weight loss being a big one.
As I start to lose abdominal fat... it will be increasingly difficult to hide that fact that I have significant breast tissue and I'm not fucking binding... did not fucking start HRT 6 years go to start binding.
So yes... I work in Tech... but I'm not a programmer.. I'm not a developer.
I'm an Ops person... (Technically... I guess I'm an Operations Engineer specializing in private cloud infrastructural [datacenter operations, management and linux stuff] and starting to transition into a SRE role focused on our public cloud infrastructure over the next year)
As a whole... my experience has been that OPS is pretty fucking dude bro the dudening.
There is not a single woman in my company's entire Operations division (Cloud Ops and Product Ops... there are lots women in our dev teams and Product Management but not Operations)
So where is this going. I want to change my legal name and gender. I'm fucking terrified for what this will mean for my career prospects.
I don't know how to reconcile this shit.
Mental Health, Capitalism, Workplace, Trans-worry
My workplace has very high profile women, some of whom are transgender, in the ops space. There are cultural issues but there's no reason an ops team can't adapt.
Treat it like any other service issue...
TO: ops-team-x@companyname.website
SUBJ: [ACTION REQUIRED] Data issues with "Sam" API - Manual updates required
Attention X-ops team members,
For the last thirty years, the "gender" API for Sam Lastname has returned an incorrect value, which has propagated to many dependent fields. The API is being corrected, but you will need to manually remediate entries in downstream datastores, including but not limited to your brain, and downstream APIs, including but not limited to pronouns.
Sam is female. Her pronouns are "she" and "her". Please correct datastores as you find them; as with any data corruption issue, errors are expected to persist for some time but should be remediated as they are encountered.
Thank you for your help in remediating this error. A postmortem is not planned at this time. Additional questions can be directed to the API owner, sam-lastname@companyname.website.
--Samantha Lastname
... This approach has been used before in my workplace and has proven remarkably effective. It communicates the important parts (facts, required actions) and important social parts (no room for negotiation, still a professional ops person, didn't magically stop being an ops person in Sarcastic Irritable Ops Person Culture in the last twenty seconds), and is easy to understand. It reads like a joke while being wholly serious, and tends to defuse a lot of tension along the way. Rewrite it to match your company's outage remediation notification format.
