Hi Chrissi,
I tend to agree with Gothique. My situation was different from yours, because my country doesn't even allow a legal name change without approval from the GID clinic, which meant I basically had to live fulltime for a year hiding my legal name as good as possible.
When I read your post I thought: Do you pass as male? Seriously! I started work in a call centre as male, but found myself needing to live in accordance with my identity presenting more and more girly and at a certain point I started answering company calls with my female name. To my surprise no customers seemed to recognize me as transgendered and during one of my coaching sessions I told my coworker, that I would be answering as a woman while he supervised me, because that's who I am. He absolutely had no problem with that.
I then contacted my boss and basicly told her that I'd been doing female calls for a couple of months without anybody complaining and she basicly told me I was a brave woman and I could correct my name in the company database with her permission. I still hadn't got the permit from the GID clinic at that point.
Later I went out looking for a job as a nurses stand-in and I wondered if I should apply as a woman. I decided to do so, told them I was transgendered and pretty well settled in my female role and I expected to do stand-ins as a woman. I also decided that my ->-bleeped-<- was nothing to be ashamed of, but rather something, which gave me a unique perspective on life outside mainstream expectations; that my being transgendered, having faced discrimination and being seen as unusual by the normative society gave me an insight and understanding in the feelings of the ill people I was going to attend to. I also told the interviewer that I believed my gender incongruency to be a mountain I succesfully conquered and that I believed that the higher the mountains a person conquered in her life the broader her horizon would be and the more mature and mentally robust she was. The interviewer was one big smile
First of all she told me she'd never have known if I hadn't told her - not even when I pointed at my summary - and of course she hired me at the spot.
I was recently transferred to a women's only class at nursing school (in fact there is not even one man in my whole year, which is however unusual) and due to some unfortunate administratve procedures at school I was listed under my old name even though I have finally got it legally changed. Although nobody knew me in this class I found out during Christmas party, that one of my class mates had a boyfriend who worked with me during transition at the call centre and they probably had a hint of my transgender status from the original listing of my name even though it was changed in the list before they met me. Despite that I feel very welcome among my peers.
Another reason for me not being stealth is that I had to be really open and determined in my expression as a woman before my close family finally began to accept me. Yet another is that our SSN are gendered and that can only be changed post SRS.
For these reasons I'm not stealth, however I am - as gothique experienced too - very well respected for being who I am. I would have prefered to have done the interview for the call center as a woman and simply explained, that I was transgendered at that time. It would have spared me the trouble of telling all my collegues to change their perception of me later and it would have spared my class mates from the knowledge of my past. Would it make a difference in the long run? Probably not, since I have found myself not wanting to hide my past completely, because I believe being transgendered doesn't make me a second class woman, but rather a woman with an extraordinary experience and a broader perspective on life.
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Tippe
