I came out to my crew leader today when we had a dull moment alone. He responded positively. I'd forgotten how the experience is simultaneously exhilarating, terrifying, stressful, and empowering. It should come as no surprise that I was extremely nervous, but I've been thinking I needed to do this for the last couple of weeks and it's really been on the tip of my tongue. There just never seemed to be an appropriate moment until this afternoon.
I lead in with a large dose of awkwardness and long pauses. He could see that I was stressing out, so he handed me a cigarette and gestured that we should step out of the truck. It went something like this.
J - "Do you remember how I was seeing a therapist?"
K - "When you were talking about being crazy all the time?"
J - "Yeah... I don't think I'm crazy, but the book says I am. She diagnosed me with gender identity disorder."
K - "So you're like a girl trapped in a guy's body?"
J - "Sure... Uh..."
K - "So are you gonna switch over?"
J - "I think I'm like half way done already. The only reason I've got all this [gestures to stubble] is because I'm doing four or five hours of electrolysis in the morning. The first session was ten hours. It was ->-bleeped-<-ing brutal. Remember how I went to court last Friday?"
K - "Yeah."
J - "I was getting my name changed.
K - "Really? ->-bleeped-<-, I had no idea. I guess I have had a lot of guys around the yard asking me, 'Who's the new chick?'"
J - [laughter]
K - "So what's your name?"
J - "... I feel kinda weird right now. Ask me later."
K - "So what are you doing in that month off you finally managed to force through?"
J - "Take a wild guess."
K - "You better tell [Shop Supervisor] before you leave. I mean do what you want, but it'd be better than blindsiding him in January. He'll ->-bleeped-<-ing freak out."
J - "I think I'll just go to HR instead."
K - "Gonna have to anyway, right?"
J - "Yeah."
Somewhere in there, we had a laugh about how he kept reflexively calling me sir and I kept grumbling at him for it. A great deal of things made a lot more sense to everybody by the time it was all said and done.
...and that's about how it went. He's your typical redneck Texan, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but he's been a lot nicer to me in the last few months than I'm used to. I think he may have been responding to me on some biological level that he was unaware of, because I was pretty happy with how he's been treating me and it seemed appropriate in spite of the fact that he said he didn't have a clue. He went on to tell me about his lesbian friend that he's always seeing movies with, which seemed like a hilarious iteration of "I have black friends" and after that, everything was perfectly normal for the rest of the day.
Nothing but a thing.
