I've been through some rough times lately. In part I have been considering changing jobs, but I've been feeling trapped about how that would all work, especially since I'm still not in shape to work "regular" hours (ever changing meds interactions can do nasty things to sleep patterns). My current job tolerates that, and tolerates my androgynous dressing. But if I change jobs, which identity do I enter the new job with, and is it "too early" for me to be making those changes, especially as I do not consider myself transsexual ?
One thing I discovered about myself in my bouts of feeling anxious and hopeless, is that when I think over the longer term, I have some kind of in-built expectation that I will go further in transition. Oh, not necessarily SRS at all, but that "some day" I will change my name, and "some day" I may come out and work in femme clothes. Well, I'm no common fool, and the last time I had one of those expectations that "some day" I'll do something, it was HRT, which I had not expected to "try" until (say) retirement, and then one day it whacked me in the head, and didn't let go of me until I gave in.
But names... I'm in a bit of a quandry that I need to work through:
- if I am going to change my name, I want the new name to be something meaningful to me, a personal inspiration or statement of essence.
- as long as I am androgynous and a smuck at female appearance, and not publicly "transitioning" at work, I am not entirely comfortable taking a fully female name. "Sandra" goes to the men's room???
- If I am going to change my name, I don't want it to be trivial for people to google my old name or my new name and figure out that I am somewhere in transition. I think it would be difficult for me to adopt the "move away, no forwarding address, everyone you meet afterwards only knows you as female" strategy. Emotionally difficult: I don't have many strong ties to friends, and some of them in particular are people I'd rather not lose, and I have an extended family that may not be "close" but some of them are neat people I'd rather not discard. And the people I grew up with: I might not have seen them since grade school, but there are bonds there.
- My professional reputation is not small, and I've been building it up for decades. It is in a way my "brand name": some of the people whom I worked with decades years ago would be fully willing to recommend me for positions based upon what I did then and their knowledge that I have increased my good work since. In my level of work, positions are often "created" for a person rather than being pre-defined and posted for all applicants. I'm up over 3/4 million google hits. People see the name and expect the competence -- just like a brand name. And if I change that name, and try to keep the link between the names quiet, then I lose that brand-name advantage.
How do people manage, taking their "accumulated goodwill" with them in to their new life, without the names being easily connected? Do people willingly throw decades of good-will away to maintain their trans privacy, or do they find some other method?
For example, one passing thought: I could open a company in my male name so that the company would bring along the good-will, but "senior analyst" could be Sandra. A non-trivial problem with that: people I know recognize my response style after 2-3 messages at most (I adopted a pseudonym for a while.)
I don't want much, I just want it all