Dude looks like a lady.

Last night, I wrote a fairly concise coming out email to my boss. I'm on my way to Camp Trans with my friends today, and I figured the extra vacation time would give my boss space to process everything. I found it almost too easy to write the email and send it. Now I know why - it's much harder to open up Gmail and see what she said. Keeping with the spirit of this blog, here's my email:

"R,

This email will eventually have a point, but please bear with me. I'm enjoying work - even though we all do similar things every day, it's nice to work at an office where the people are fun and easy to deal with. I think everything is progressing even more as of late. Unless I go insane or become physically incapable to do the job, I'll be around as long as I can/y'all will let me. Hooray. In that same vein, if anything goes horribly wrong while I'm gone - I'll have my phone to check messages, although it'll likely be off most of the time to save batteries.

Anyway. To get to the point - I'm not in therapy because of my mom. I'm trans. Specifically a trans dude/guy/man/whaaatever. Have been for a long time - free therapy is just a convenient bonus. I'm out to all of my friends, but obviously not at work, and not to my family. So hey, now I am. While I didn't want this letter/email to be a long time in the works, all areas of my life have fallen into the right place. And now (cue ominous movie music), it's time.

I decided to send this right as I was leaving on vacation, to give you time to process it and decide how you'd like to deal with the new information in the office. I'm not super great at having these kinds of conversations face-to-face, either. I'm not really worried that anything bad will happen (hopefully), but it seemed like a good way to handle it. I'm totally fine with you telling anyone related to [work] if you'd like to. I'm also okay with talking to people if need be. I'm going to be sending similar letters/emails to my family after I come back from vacation. So there's no real issue there after Septemberish, and it's not as if my dad really stops by the office and asks about any new pronouns or anything.

Once that's taken care of, I'm going to start hormones. Also, the reason I was absolutely ecstatic about my dad randomly giving me tons of money is that I'm going to use it to pay for top surgery. This will all hopefully be happening as soon as possible. I'm not 100% sure about the all ins and outs of name and gender changes yet (meaning, I know how to change a State ID but not how that compares to changing Payroll information). So until everything is taken care of, using my legal name for special legal things will just have to be an annoying reality. Kinda par for the course when dude (still) looks like a lady.

All of my friends call me Artie - short for Arthur, long for Art. All of these names are fine, but I prefer Artie. Male pronouns as well, please. Occasional slip-ups (from anyone in the office) will be taken in stride. As long as people are trying, I will be happy. I know this isn't a typical office issue, and I hope everyone will be respectful and mature about it. I guess if there's a major problem, I can work for [one of our suppliers] in Canada, land of liberal majesty and acceptance. But I'd prefer to avoid it if possible.

I'll be leaving around 10:30am tomorrow, so if you could send me a quick email (so I know you've read this), that would be great. If you're not in until later, like I said - my phone will be available for messages. Also, my preferred personal email is arthurkosz@gmail.com.

-A"

My boss is way into Aerosmith, which explains the joke. Last I checked, she's cool with transpeople and may have some trans friends. I was able to word the email a little more liberally because of this - with my less knowledgeable family, I plan on getting into a lot of different detail. I've written a draft to my teenage brother like this, and once it's finalized, it'll be up here too.

Maybe I'll open Gmail once the lady friend gets here. It's funny how daunting this is, even though it's probably not going to be a big deal. I guess everything is harder when it's still unknown.

Well - I'm off to enjoy Hart, MI. Back to the vacation homeland, even though I'll be far away from my family's favored spot. Funny when things come full circle like that.