• she/her

41, queer trans furry trash, actual professional deer, perpetually tired // mostly 18+ but let’s say entirely 18+ to be safe


bsky
deergrace.bsky.social

My unit at work recently added a few new hires.

Last week, shortly after being added to the Teams group chat, one of them shared and endorsed a slide deck with some Trans 101 stuff, and I was horrified, because the content was bad. It was clearly based on outdated sources from about 2010 or so: “Trans*,” transwomen/transmen;” suggesting that cis people only use he or she pronouns while trans people might use any of (and only of!) he, she, they or ze; omitting or getting wrong some significant history; and also clearly written by a cis person being confident in how good an ally they are.


So - because I have had this experience at work before, being presented with shitty outdated LGBTQ2+ resource stuff in trainings, and also spent several years delivering a ton of DEI training myself - I immediately got my back up, and explained all the things wrong with the information from the deck. I further suggested to the credulous cis team members that hey, if they have questions, please come ask me, an actual trans person, rather than relying on this?

To which the new person who’d shared this (let’s call them Kelly) added, they’re nonbinary, actually, and also happy to be a resource, and use the deck or don’t, whatever, etc. So I was immediately dreading having to work with them, because it seemed quite possible from endorsing this shit they were a clueless pickme, or what have you.

So yesterday, Kelly and I are scheduled to meet for discussing them shadowing me for a Thing next week. I’m still dreading this, obviously, and prepared for it to become a passive-aggressive cold war.

And I was completely wrong.

Kelly is a delightful bubbly leftist queer, and we hit it off immediately, spending an hour and a half infodumping back and forth about the job and the training, our previous experiences as extremely visible representatives of marginalized communities, doing DEI work, mutually disclosing neurodivergence, etc. - we stopped only because I had a Thing to get to at 1:00, and noticed the time only when the fifteen-minute Outlook reminder popped up. It turned out they meant the only really valuable part of that slide deck was the first page talking about the distinction between gender identity and expression, and they were well aware of all the history and context. They were so, so glad to meet another visible trans queer here, who had all the same institutional and structural concerns about the work as they do, and I was too!

I also felt extremely shitty about the assumptions I’d made, because…well, I’m predisposed to have my back up, given my past experiences of “well-meaning” cis people promulgating complete horseshit Trans 101 stuff, and also not really having a ton of community, professionally. So the possibility didn’t even initially cross my mind that I might actually extremely vibe with Kelly. And that’s on me, and it’s not fair to blame that all on past trauma, notwithstanding that a lot of it is the result of past trauma.

I’m not sure if I have a point here. But I’m glad to have made a friend and angry at a world where feeling that perpetually embattled, as a trans person in this field, led me to suspect them to be a potential enemy.


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