Legally Faith :v_tg: :v_lb: on Nostr: I wrote some of this down a while back when I was still on tech.lgbt but it's been a ...
I wrote some of this down a while back when I was still on tech.lgbt but it's been a while and probably worth a rewrite.
The following is a bunch of tips for coming out professionally and online. As a bit of background, I'm a professional open-source software developer and I've been contributing to open-source for over a decade. My deadname was everywhere and my professional network is huge. When I came out a little over a year ago, I couldn't just get a new job as Faith and call it a day, at least not without changing careers. Coming out was... a process.E-mail address and handle
This is the first step. Before you do anything significant, you need to figure out what you want your new e-mail address and handle to be. Some people may be able to just keep using the old one but not me. In my case, my previous standard internet handle was my first initial followed by my surname. When I changed my name, I also changed my initials and now I wince every time I see that old handle. I used a similar naming scheme for my domain name and my primary e-mail was deadname@domain. It all had to change.
I say to figure that out first because that's something people will ask when you come out. It's a lot easier if you have that information ready up-front than if you come out and then roll out a new e-mail and then roll out a new handle some time later.
Note that I said "figure out", not "change". The moment you start changing things, people may start to notice. You can probably go ahead and buy a new domain or set up your new e-mail with appropriate aliases but be careful about actually changing public facing stuff until you're ready.The closet and coworkers
Many of us are friends with our coworkers. Probably not all of them but you may have one or two that you consider to be real friends. You may want to come out to them early. That's totally okay. In fact, having coworkers who are in the know and can support you can be really helpful.
However... news gets around. It's hard to keep secrets among people who work closely together. I wouldn't recommend going much beyond good friends unless you're ready for everyone to know. It can easily become one of those "worst kept secret things". For some people, that's actually how they want to come out and that's okay. Personally, I wanted my coming out to be a bit more organized.
Even with close friends, it can be hard for them to know how to handle your being in the closet. I had one coworker who's a really close friend who I was out to for about 6 months before I came out professionally. Poor thing... She tried so hard to avoid deadnaming and misgendering all while also not outing me. We'd be in a meeting together where most other people didn't know and she'd use they/them for me just to avoid he/him. At one point, I came out to someone just to make everything less awkward. 😂 (I knew they were safe and it was only a couple of months before I was planning to come out publicly.)
I've also been that person for a coworker. She came out in a much more haphazard way. Every meeting was this little nod/wink protocol with everyone trying to figure out if everyone else knew. If we were pretty sure everyone did, we'd switch to her femme name and she/her. If not, I'd typically play it safe and use the old name as little as possible.
Here's the thing to remember, though: If your friends really are supportive, they'll gladly put up with the awkwardness. Your transition is yours to direct and you shouldn't ever come out to someone who you don't feel comfortable with just to make someone else's life easier. But it can make for some good office comedy. 😅Coming out
I won't claim to know what your professional environment looks like or how to navigate it. That's for you to figure out. What I will do is pass on a piece of advice given to me when I came out: Keep it low-key. It's tempting to want to send a big, emotional e-mail and get that emotional validation you've been craving but that can back-fire badly. Instead, just being out and being able to be yourself at work will be enough. Trust me.
Also remember that it's not your job to explain what it means to be trans. You don't need to justify your existence. Just tell them about the change and leave it at that. If you want to provide a little bit of information, a link to website with good information is okay. In my coming out e-mail to my immediate coworkers, I included a link to transequality.org:
https://transequality.org/issues/resources/frequently-asked-questions-about-transgender-people
The point is that you do not want to set the precedent of being the person to answer all their trans questions. You may want to get involved in your company's DEI initiatives or LGBTQ+ groups, maybe even as a leader. What you don't want, though, is for every cis person you work with to think it's okay to pester you with all their dumb questions.
Also, context matters when coming out. I knew my company was fairly safe so my immediate coworkers got a long(ish) e-mail. When I came out to one professional group, I just asked for 5 min at the start of the weekly meeting to re-introduce myself. I told people the new name and pronouns and that was about it.
In primary open-source community, I came out with an MR to update the project's .mailmap with my new name and corporate e-mail address and re-joined the project's IRC channel with a new handle. That was enough that most people picked up on it pretty quickly and I got a bunch of congratulations on IRC. By the end of the week, everyone who was anyone knew.
Here's the thing... If I'd sent a big, emotional e-mail to the project mailing list, I guarantee I would have gotten hecklers. There's a time and a place for representation and that wasn't the time or place.Company IT and HR
This is one that is going to vary significantly from one company to the next so I'll keep it very general. It's also something a lot of trans people worry about, often needlessly.
Often, getting IT to update your name and accounts can usually be done whenever you want. Some organizations, especially government ones, want you to use your legal name for everything but most don't really care. Most IT people don't care about your life story. They'll just do whatever they need to do to close the ticket.
If you can, I would generally recommend updating your e-mail and accounts as soon as you come out to your coworkers. Having the right handle and e-mail address will go a long way towards reducing the deadnaming. It's way easier if coworkers who don't know you well just see your name in Outlook or Teams or whatever you use and use it than if you have to explain to everyone "Yes, my e-mail says Justin but I'm actually Amy".
What you may not be able to do right away is update anything with HR. At least in the US, the name HR has and uses has to be your legal name because it affects taxes and insurance and all that jazz.
Of course, it's easier if you update your legal name before you come out because then you can do it all at once. But there's no reason why you need to put off coming out until your legal name change or to change your legal name at all if you don't want to.Online accounts
Okay, so you've come out and filed the IT ticket to change your e-mail. Now you have to deal with the dozens of online accounts that are part of your professional presence. Be patient with yourself. It takes time but you will get through it.
If you're someone who makes lists, make a list and sort it by how often you use that account and/or how visible it is and do the biggest ones first. If you do open-source work like me, your GitHub is pretty important. If your deadname is still in some Bugzilla you last used 4 years ago, though... that one can wait.Website and e-mail
As I said earlier, this is one of the few things you can prep ahead of time. I would recommend doing so because, if you have a personal website and a domain name, that's a lot of stuff to update. As long as you don't send anyone the link, the chances of someone randomly stumbling across your new domain name aren't high.
Personally, I updated both of those the week before I came out. If nothing else, it gave me something to do to calm my nerves about the coming out itself.GitHub
Here's the good news: Modern web-based version control platforms like GitHub re-map all committer info through their own profiles system. Once you update your name on your profile, your new name will show up in commit histories, and everywhere else GitHub uses names.
The important thing here is to make sure that GitHub has all your e-mail addresses. It's tempting to remove your old e-mail address. Don't. You can change which one gets displayed publicly (if any) but you want to have all of them listed. That way GitHub can properly re-map your old e-mail addresses to your new name.
If you don't like your GitHub username, don't create a new account (unless you really want to). Instead, GitHub has a "rename account" feature that will let you change it and keep all your repos. It works quite well. Any links to repos or wikis under your old handle will automatically re-direct to the new one.
There's one caveat here which is that someone can then come along and create a new account with your old handle and create a repo in that account with the same name. That will cause the re-direct to break and to go their repo instead. The solution to this is to immediately create a new account under the old username that has nothing in it. Just write a quick bio line that directs the reader to your real account. That prevents someone else from creating that account and should ensure that the re-directs continue working.GitLab
The story here is similar to GitHub. Just update your profile with your new name and add your new e-mail address. If you want a new username, they also have an account rename feature.
However, and this is important, re-directs work differently on GitLab. Re-directs only continue to work as long as no account with your old username exists. If you create a new account with the old name, all re-directs will instantly break. Yes, this is annoying.BitBucket
I'm honestly not sure. I assume profiles are pretty similar to GitHub and GitLab but I don't know if it handles re-directs or how they work.Offline git tools
.mailmap is your friend. If you're not aware of it, .mailmap is a little file that gets checked into a git repo that provides a mapping from e-mail addresses to a single canonical name and e-mail address:
https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmailmap
It's respected by all modern Git tools these days. I know the command line tools respect it and I would hope that things like Visual Studio's git integration do as well.
I should note that .mailmap is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means that there is a permanent record of your transition in the repo. You may or may not be comfortable with that. On the other hand, it means that you will no longer see your deadname come up in the git history. As someone who has worked publicly for a long time and continues working in those same projects, .mailmap has been a godsend. My transition was going to be a matter of public record anyway so there's no sense in seeing Deadname all over everywhere.Discord
This one's pretty easy. Especially now that they have real usernames, all you need to do is update your display name and your username. You probably also want to update your e-mail address but it's not displayed publicly by default so that's okay.Slack
This one is super annoying. On most public slack servers, you can't actually update your e-mail address. When you look at your profile, your e-mail address is sitting there with a handy "edit" button right next to it. If you click the "edit" button, it will pop up a little window with a text field that you can't actually edit.
With a corporate Slack instance, there may be a way to update it but it likely requires getting IT involved.
I still haven't figured out an answer for the couple of public Slack servers I'm in. I'll probably just get myself a fresh invite one of these days so I can have the right e-mail address there.IRC
lmao, just get yourself a new nickLinkedIn and other socials
Just update your display name and e-mail address move on. It's typically pretty easy so I won't go into detail.
Again, if you do make some sort of announcement, I'd personally recommend keeping it low-key. For my coming out on Twitter, I just added a short note to a tweet about a blog post pointing out the new tag line. I wanted people to know that the name change wasn't a joke or something but didn't want to draw too much attention to it. Twitter is hell, after all. LinkedIn and my professional Mastodon were similar.Wrapping up
That's most of the things I can think of when it comes to rolling out a transition across the internet.
The most important thing to remember is that it's possible. Make a list if you need to and do it. It'll be okay. 💜 Yes, it takes time but it's really not that bad. You should probably plan to spend your first couple days after coming out talking to people and updating stuff. That's enough time to take care of the majority of it. Your nerves are going to be a wreck so you probably won't get much else done anyway.
Once you are out, take a little time for self care. Relax and enjoy it. Being self-aware and in the closet was horrible. Being out professionally is one of the best feelings in the world. 😁 Once you get over the fear and the rush, you'll be floating on a cloud for weeks.
The following is a bunch of tips for coming out professionally and online. As a bit of background, I'm a professional open-source software developer and I've been contributing to open-source for over a decade. My deadname was everywhere and my professional network is huge. When I came out a little over a year ago, I couldn't just get a new job as Faith and call it a day, at least not without changing careers. Coming out was... a process.E-mail address and handle
This is the first step. Before you do anything significant, you need to figure out what you want your new e-mail address and handle to be. Some people may be able to just keep using the old one but not me. In my case, my previous standard internet handle was my first initial followed by my surname. When I changed my name, I also changed my initials and now I wince every time I see that old handle. I used a similar naming scheme for my domain name and my primary e-mail was deadname@domain. It all had to change.
I say to figure that out first because that's something people will ask when you come out. It's a lot easier if you have that information ready up-front than if you come out and then roll out a new e-mail and then roll out a new handle some time later.
Note that I said "figure out", not "change". The moment you start changing things, people may start to notice. You can probably go ahead and buy a new domain or set up your new e-mail with appropriate aliases but be careful about actually changing public facing stuff until you're ready.The closet and coworkers
Many of us are friends with our coworkers. Probably not all of them but you may have one or two that you consider to be real friends. You may want to come out to them early. That's totally okay. In fact, having coworkers who are in the know and can support you can be really helpful.
However... news gets around. It's hard to keep secrets among people who work closely together. I wouldn't recommend going much beyond good friends unless you're ready for everyone to know. It can easily become one of those "worst kept secret things". For some people, that's actually how they want to come out and that's okay. Personally, I wanted my coming out to be a bit more organized.
Even with close friends, it can be hard for them to know how to handle your being in the closet. I had one coworker who's a really close friend who I was out to for about 6 months before I came out professionally. Poor thing... She tried so hard to avoid deadnaming and misgendering all while also not outing me. We'd be in a meeting together where most other people didn't know and she'd use they/them for me just to avoid he/him. At one point, I came out to someone just to make everything less awkward. 😂 (I knew they were safe and it was only a couple of months before I was planning to come out publicly.)
I've also been that person for a coworker. She came out in a much more haphazard way. Every meeting was this little nod/wink protocol with everyone trying to figure out if everyone else knew. If we were pretty sure everyone did, we'd switch to her femme name and she/her. If not, I'd typically play it safe and use the old name as little as possible.
Here's the thing to remember, though: If your friends really are supportive, they'll gladly put up with the awkwardness. Your transition is yours to direct and you shouldn't ever come out to someone who you don't feel comfortable with just to make someone else's life easier. But it can make for some good office comedy. 😅Coming out
I won't claim to know what your professional environment looks like or how to navigate it. That's for you to figure out. What I will do is pass on a piece of advice given to me when I came out: Keep it low-key. It's tempting to want to send a big, emotional e-mail and get that emotional validation you've been craving but that can back-fire badly. Instead, just being out and being able to be yourself at work will be enough. Trust me.
Also remember that it's not your job to explain what it means to be trans. You don't need to justify your existence. Just tell them about the change and leave it at that. If you want to provide a little bit of information, a link to website with good information is okay. In my coming out e-mail to my immediate coworkers, I included a link to transequality.org:
https://transequality.org/issues/resources/frequently-asked-questions-about-transgender-people
The point is that you do not want to set the precedent of being the person to answer all their trans questions. You may want to get involved in your company's DEI initiatives or LGBTQ+ groups, maybe even as a leader. What you don't want, though, is for every cis person you work with to think it's okay to pester you with all their dumb questions.
Also, context matters when coming out. I knew my company was fairly safe so my immediate coworkers got a long(ish) e-mail. When I came out to one professional group, I just asked for 5 min at the start of the weekly meeting to re-introduce myself. I told people the new name and pronouns and that was about it.
In primary open-source community, I came out with an MR to update the project's .mailmap with my new name and corporate e-mail address and re-joined the project's IRC channel with a new handle. That was enough that most people picked up on it pretty quickly and I got a bunch of congratulations on IRC. By the end of the week, everyone who was anyone knew.
Here's the thing... If I'd sent a big, emotional e-mail to the project mailing list, I guarantee I would have gotten hecklers. There's a time and a place for representation and that wasn't the time or place.Company IT and HR
This is one that is going to vary significantly from one company to the next so I'll keep it very general. It's also something a lot of trans people worry about, often needlessly.
Often, getting IT to update your name and accounts can usually be done whenever you want. Some organizations, especially government ones, want you to use your legal name for everything but most don't really care. Most IT people don't care about your life story. They'll just do whatever they need to do to close the ticket.
If you can, I would generally recommend updating your e-mail and accounts as soon as you come out to your coworkers. Having the right handle and e-mail address will go a long way towards reducing the deadnaming. It's way easier if coworkers who don't know you well just see your name in Outlook or Teams or whatever you use and use it than if you have to explain to everyone "Yes, my e-mail says Justin but I'm actually Amy".
What you may not be able to do right away is update anything with HR. At least in the US, the name HR has and uses has to be your legal name because it affects taxes and insurance and all that jazz.
Of course, it's easier if you update your legal name before you come out because then you can do it all at once. But there's no reason why you need to put off coming out until your legal name change or to change your legal name at all if you don't want to.Online accounts
Okay, so you've come out and filed the IT ticket to change your e-mail. Now you have to deal with the dozens of online accounts that are part of your professional presence. Be patient with yourself. It takes time but you will get through it.
If you're someone who makes lists, make a list and sort it by how often you use that account and/or how visible it is and do the biggest ones first. If you do open-source work like me, your GitHub is pretty important. If your deadname is still in some Bugzilla you last used 4 years ago, though... that one can wait.Website and e-mail
As I said earlier, this is one of the few things you can prep ahead of time. I would recommend doing so because, if you have a personal website and a domain name, that's a lot of stuff to update. As long as you don't send anyone the link, the chances of someone randomly stumbling across your new domain name aren't high.
Personally, I updated both of those the week before I came out. If nothing else, it gave me something to do to calm my nerves about the coming out itself.GitHub
Here's the good news: Modern web-based version control platforms like GitHub re-map all committer info through their own profiles system. Once you update your name on your profile, your new name will show up in commit histories, and everywhere else GitHub uses names.
The important thing here is to make sure that GitHub has all your e-mail addresses. It's tempting to remove your old e-mail address. Don't. You can change which one gets displayed publicly (if any) but you want to have all of them listed. That way GitHub can properly re-map your old e-mail addresses to your new name.
If you don't like your GitHub username, don't create a new account (unless you really want to). Instead, GitHub has a "rename account" feature that will let you change it and keep all your repos. It works quite well. Any links to repos or wikis under your old handle will automatically re-direct to the new one.
There's one caveat here which is that someone can then come along and create a new account with your old handle and create a repo in that account with the same name. That will cause the re-direct to break and to go their repo instead. The solution to this is to immediately create a new account under the old username that has nothing in it. Just write a quick bio line that directs the reader to your real account. That prevents someone else from creating that account and should ensure that the re-directs continue working.GitLab
The story here is similar to GitHub. Just update your profile with your new name and add your new e-mail address. If you want a new username, they also have an account rename feature.
However, and this is important, re-directs work differently on GitLab. Re-directs only continue to work as long as no account with your old username exists. If you create a new account with the old name, all re-directs will instantly break. Yes, this is annoying.BitBucket
I'm honestly not sure. I assume profiles are pretty similar to GitHub and GitLab but I don't know if it handles re-directs or how they work.Offline git tools
.mailmap is your friend. If you're not aware of it, .mailmap is a little file that gets checked into a git repo that provides a mapping from e-mail addresses to a single canonical name and e-mail address:
https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmailmap
It's respected by all modern Git tools these days. I know the command line tools respect it and I would hope that things like Visual Studio's git integration do as well.
I should note that .mailmap is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means that there is a permanent record of your transition in the repo. You may or may not be comfortable with that. On the other hand, it means that you will no longer see your deadname come up in the git history. As someone who has worked publicly for a long time and continues working in those same projects, .mailmap has been a godsend. My transition was going to be a matter of public record anyway so there's no sense in seeing Deadname all over everywhere.Discord
This one's pretty easy. Especially now that they have real usernames, all you need to do is update your display name and your username. You probably also want to update your e-mail address but it's not displayed publicly by default so that's okay.Slack
This one is super annoying. On most public slack servers, you can't actually update your e-mail address. When you look at your profile, your e-mail address is sitting there with a handy "edit" button right next to it. If you click the "edit" button, it will pop up a little window with a text field that you can't actually edit.
With a corporate Slack instance, there may be a way to update it but it likely requires getting IT involved.
I still haven't figured out an answer for the couple of public Slack servers I'm in. I'll probably just get myself a fresh invite one of these days so I can have the right e-mail address there.IRC
lmao, just get yourself a new nickLinkedIn and other socials
Just update your display name and e-mail address move on. It's typically pretty easy so I won't go into detail.
Again, if you do make some sort of announcement, I'd personally recommend keeping it low-key. For my coming out on Twitter, I just added a short note to a tweet about a blog post pointing out the new tag line. I wanted people to know that the name change wasn't a joke or something but didn't want to draw too much attention to it. Twitter is hell, after all. LinkedIn and my professional Mastodon were similar.Wrapping up
That's most of the things I can think of when it comes to rolling out a transition across the internet.
The most important thing to remember is that it's possible. Make a list if you need to and do it. It'll be okay. 💜 Yes, it takes time but it's really not that bad. You should probably plan to spend your first couple days after coming out talking to people and updating stuff. That's enough time to take care of the majority of it. Your nerves are going to be a wreck so you probably won't get much else done anyway.
Once you are out, take a little time for self care. Relax and enjoy it. Being self-aware and in the closet was horrible. Being out professionally is one of the best feelings in the world. 😁 Once you get over the fear and the rush, you'll be floating on a cloud for weeks.