(WWJ) Going into the pandemic in March 2020, "Sara" already understood that her gender didn't align with the sex she was assigned at birth. She knew she wasn't a man.
Even before the first case of COVID-19 showed up in Wuhan, China, Sara (who asked us not to use her real name) already came out to her wife, saying she knew that she wasn't a cisgender male and that continuing with this identity wasn't working.
But transitioning in the public eye just wasn't going to happen while holding a position in a male-dominated work environment and communicating with conservative parents.
Little did Sara know that these issues would slowly melt away, and her transition journey would begin, as the pandemic struck her neck of the woods in Wayne County -- shutting down her workplace.
"I was like, 'I have to seize this moment,'" she said.
And so she did.
In June, while working from home for the third month and talking with her transgender friends, the 33-year-old said that's when it hit her that the virus wasn't subsiding.
Sara said she recognized there would never be another time that her job would tell her to work from home for two years, and she realized she could have a whole year to transition out of the public eye.
"It was everything I could have asked for," she said.
In June, Sara re-came out to her wife, saying she wanted to begin the transition. The two of them put together the details, and by the end of August, Sara started transitioning medically and socially.
An abundance of time spent in the isolation of her home allowed Sara the necessary time for her transition. She said the first couple months are "tricky" for a transgender woman. There are certain skills to learn, and self-confidence to gain in order to present yourself, she explained, while the hormone treatments start taking hold.
“It is a second puberty; especially for those of us who transition later in our lives,” said Sara. “It doesn't happen overnight.”
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And the anonymity provided by the pandemic made the coming-out process a bit easier, Sara said.
"When you don't have to do it in person it's a lot easier to just schedule that tweet and walk away, and know that it'll go up and it's out of your power and out there.”
Once November came around, Sara began presenting as a woman full-time out in public -- and it was quite natural.
“It didn't take too long for my mom's genes to kick in on my side,” she laughed.
At the end of December, she came out at her job, where she works as a systems integration engineer. And it wasn't a grand announcement; but rather, a happenstance of being put into a new work group with mostly new people who didn't know Sara pre-transition.
“One day old me ceased to exist, and the next day new me showed up," Sara said.
Sara said people just knew her for her, and not as "the trans person." She credits the pandemic for this since coworkers just knew each other as avatars and voices on web calls.
On top of all that, Sara said there was an “enormous” amount of camaraderie.
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During one meeting with a supervisor, Sara said she was the only one to show up, but instead of leaving the call, the supervisor started venting to Sara and the two talked about the challenges that both cisgender and transgender women face. Sara said this is oftentimes the communication women in the office have with each other, so it was "very validating" for her to be involved.
However, one thing Sara said that struck her after she transitioned was the blatant presence of misogyny.
“It's a very male dominated industry, and one of the things I noticed pretty quickly is that I get talked over a lot more in meetings,” she said. “And I have recent college grads trying to tell me -- a subject matter expert -- how my job works.”
And Sara credits her queerness for the expertise and skill she holds in her "very soft, skill-oriented" kind of engineering.
“One of the skills that I worked on subconsciously throughout my teen years and into my 20s, especially when dealing with my parents, was putting on ‘the mask,'" She said. "It’s just listening to people say shit that you disagree with….or even actively hurt you, and just smiling and nodding.”
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Sara said the soft skill of keeping people “on her side” was a kind of safety mechanism that ended up putting her where she is in her job within the company.
“Conflict avoidance is a big part of my job, and it's a big part of the reality of being queer.”
Now, Sara recognizes that many people want to know the exact time she knew she was transgender.
But she said it's hard to put a number to it.
“There is this need in society for us to have always been trans. And for a lot of us, that does play out that way. But not everyone feels that way.”
Since Sara grew up in the 90s, she said the transgender vocabulary wasn't there, so she didn't have a word to tie to how she was feeling about herself and her identity.
However, Sara said she does remember having issues with her gender around the age of 6, and having gender dysphoria when puberty started. But communicating this is when issues arose.
“When I tried to communicate these things to my friends, none of us had the language and the understanding, so people just told me that I was weird, and that I was broken,” she said. “So you’re like, ‘Well, everyone's telling me that I'm wrong and that I'm weird, so I'm just going to stop talking about this for 30 years.’”
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In an effort to try and pinpoint when she knew she was transgender, Sara said there were moments in her past that make "significantly" more sense now.
Sara mentioned an experience at 3 years old when her father got angry at her when she started emulating her mother breastfeeding her younger brother.
“I was three; I had no concept of gender, or gender roles. I was emulating what the primary parent figure in my life was doing,” said Sara. “But in the sense of knowing that I ended up trans, a lot of cis people might put that into a pocket and be like, ‘There you go... That's a sign.’”
Around the age of 13, Sara said she built prosthetic set of breasts out of K’NEX, which is a rod and connecter building system for kids.
“Some people might be like, ‘Wow, that's so gross and perverted,’ but I didn't want to see them, I wanted to feel the weight of them,” she said. “I thought most men were like that. I thought everyone had thoughts of what it was like to be on the other side.”
She said that’s one of those moments where in retrospect makes so much more sense and how she considers her journey to being trans.
As far as the current generation of transgender youth, Sara said she's proud that they have the access to the language and understanding that she didn't have.
Although Sara said she recognizes that she had it pretty easy, because of her limited dysphoria and just assuming its "strong undercurrent" throughout her life as normal, she still would not wish what she went through on anyone.
But she recognizes that no matter how easy your transition is, there is still the issue of people not accepting you for how you identify.
“It's very hard to know how many people hate you for no reason. Like, they've never met you and they'll never even run into you -- yet they have such a huge visceral hate," she said. "And people assume trans people are strong, but that's because they only talk to those of us who haven't killed ourselves yet.”
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In the end, Sara says the pandemic is the reason why there has been a so-called "explosion" of transgender people in the last couple of years.
"I think the pandemic provided a huge, huge opportunity for us to be ourselves and for everyone -- not just queer people -- to explore what they wanted out of life and what mattered most.”
If you're looking for support, click HERE. If you're looking to join a transgender support group in the Metro Detroit area, click HERE. If you're looking for more information for your teenager who is struggling with their identity, or want more information, click HERE.
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