Diary

Tonight my twenty-sixth column was broadcast in Gendertalk #536.
You can find the complete program in the Gendertalk archive.
Or you can find just my column at:
http://eveliensnel.nl/audio/TELL12.mp3
A full transcript of the text is below:

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Should I Tell?
Have you ever heard of Lynn Conway? I think you should! Lynn has a wonderful website about her life as a transsexual woman with lots of advice for those who discover that they are transsexuals themselves.
One of the most important things on her website is a gallery of successful transsexual men and women. These are all post-op transsexuals who share their story with us to show that it is very well possible to live a happy life after your transition. This gallery provides role-models so that young transsexuals can see what the life of a transsexual can be like. I think Lynn is a very good role-model herself too.

In the sixties, when she was still a young guy, she invented an important improvement in the architecture of microprocessors that is widely used nowadays. But for a long time, nobody knew who invented this, because the inventor had disappeared into thin air!
Or had he? We now know what really happened: The inventor was fired from IBM because he was a transsexual. Soon after that he underwent the sex-change operation and became a she: Lynn Conway!
Lynn started her career way down at the bottom again as a programmer and worked her way up the ladder to become a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.
And she did all that living in stealth mode: Nobody knew of her past life as a man. For thirty years she kept quiet about that and she got away with it! I think this must have been very difficult and I admire her for her courage and strength.

What can I learn from this? Can I do the same thing? Can I live in stealth mode? Should I? On one hand, it is not nice to have to be a transsexual forever. What I wanted was to live as a woman! On the other hand, if you want to completely hide your past you will have to lie and cheat a lot. You will have gone out of one closet and back into another one, living in fear of being outed day after day...

I don't want that. But I also don't want to tell people about my situation too soon. This is very complicated. It is something I should think about in advance now that I am starting a completely new life.

I am very much 'out' at the moment of course. I have an internet site where I publish a lot of information about myself and I have made these columns that are on the Gendertalk site. I have also helped Lynn Conway by translating several pages on her site into Dutch language.
If you do a Google search on my name you get more than 500 results. And if you do a Google search on transgender related issues you might find a page with my name on it on the first page of results, especially if you tell Google to look for Dutch language documents. I think many businesses would envy me for that. There is no way I can ever hide that again.

So I think complete stealth is out of the question for me already. If that was what I wanted, I should have kept my big mouth shut right from the beginning. But these are not things I thought about in advance. And I don't think it is very helpful to other transsexuals to treat this fact about myself as a big secret.

Of course when I first meet people I don't have to tell them. There is simply no need for them to know. But things can change over time. What should I do if I want to date someone? If I tell them too soon, they might loose interest in me, but then they will know about my little secret already. If I tell them too late, they may get very angry or disappointed.

This will likely be a dilemma I have to solve time and time again for the rest of my life...


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