Editors’ note: It is common for students to attend business school for the purpose of making a major career change, and there are myriad programs and support staff in place to help facilitate this sort of transition. But a second year at Owen, Danielle Piergallini, is undergoing a much more profound change. OwenBloggers is proud to present the first in a series of lifestyle pieces written by Danielle chronicling her experience as a transgender student at a major American business school.
Door number one is safe. It’s comfortable. You’ve opened it all your life, and people have even been nice enough to hold it open for you. It’s the door to the house you grew up in, the one that feels so familiar every time you step inside, especially those times when you return after being gone a little too long. Yet despite that – you’ve always wanted to crack open door number two and peek inside. It’s the door they steered you away from time after time. It’s at the end of a long, dark hallway. It’s locked. If you open that door, people will scream at you (if you’re lucky).
That’s the melodramatic fifteen second drama that plays in my head for the split second before I introduce myself to someone for the first time as either Dan or Dani (which I know is stupid because most everyone would assume “Danny” and I wouldn’t be giving anything away). But I have similar monologues pretty much whenever I do anything outside of the classroom – even if that thing isn’t remotely related to my transition.
This is why when classmates (or other people, they do exist!) ask me why I don’t just “run with it” I sigh and reply, “Everything in time.” To be fair, making those changes seems pretty straightforward and easy when you just treat it as a thought exercise. If I were to ask you to imagine what it’d be like to suddenly wake up as the opposite sex, you could probably give me a reasonable list of things you would need to do to adjust. However, you probably couldn’t describe (let alone imagine) any of the associated feelings that would come along with that shift. It’s okay – I wasn’t able to bridge that gap at first either, which is why I pushed my ‘full-time en femme’ start date back a couple of times as I’ve re-calibrated.
Those metaphorical doorknobs can be a real pain when you reach for them. For example, last October an MBA student from HBS asked if there were any transgender students at their programs during lunch at the Reaching Out MBA Conference. At an LGBT MBA conference (of all places!) I paused before answering. How ridiculous is that? It was empowering to clear my throat and say, ‘well actually, we do have a transgender student at Owen’ (it was also pretty cool to briefly steal the spotlight from the Google employees sitting at our table). I really think I would’ve had a much less enjoyable weekend if I hadn’t spoken up, if for no other reason than I would’ve made fewer awesome Cornell MBA friends.
And that’s the thing about peeking behind door number two. Once you do it one time and nothing bad happens (despite what you’ve always been told) – it seems okay to try it again. So you start straightening your hair every now and then. You wear more flattering clothes. Eventually you venture up to a cosmetics counter and say, ‘this is the look I’m trying to achieve, how do I do it?’
This is why I’m glad I’m at Owen. It serves as a distraction because existential identity crises have to wait for me to finish all my homework. And despite the fact that all of this seems so batshit crazy, my classmates keep me grounded. Nobody can tell me what is behind door number two, but they don’t try either. They haven’t read a manual or discussed best practices – they’re just themselves, which is enough to keep me sane.
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