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 is undergoing a much more profound change. OwenBloggers is proud to present the first in a series of lifestyle pieces written by a student chronicling her experience as a transgender student at a major American business school.
One of the things that surprised me about business school is how applicable a lot of the frameworks we’ve learned are in unpacking and processing a lot of things related to transition. For example, lately I’ve felt that people (mostly strangers) seem to look and/or stare at me a lot more than they did before. Instead of the socially acceptable “I’m going to look at you and then look away,” I get something more along the lines of, ‘wait, what?’ that comes with an apparently instinctive second look that… nags at me. I usually assume it is because they can’t figure out my gender, which surprises/bothers them so much that they briefly forget how their mamas raised them – but being kind of nerdy, I try to figure out what’s going on.
(a.) Do I have some kind of new found estrogen fueled Spidey-senses alerting me when some creeper actually is looking at me too long?
(b.) Am I hyper-aware these days and more self-conscious as a result of transition, and no one is actually looking at me anymore than they did before?
(c.) Is this simply the price of having a somewhat gender-ambiguous appearance?
(d.) What, like I wouldn’t do a double take if I were them?
(e.) How many bullet points does it take for me to be labeled certifiably insane?
In reality, it’s probably all correlated, but there’s not really causation. There’s also some perceptual and confirmation bias action (like we often talk about in marketing) taking place. “Oh, they do look at me more often these days when I’m out running” gets confirmed every time I go running. After all, people tend to look at runners anyway. I do. So that could be the why, but I can’t possibly know what they’re thinking. Regardless, thinking about all this only helps so much since it’s all conjecture.
Game Theory is about making decisions based on other participants’ actions. If I anticipate that people will give me funny looks and make me feel awkward if I’m out in public, I can either not go out in public and feel weird about that, or go out in public and feel weird about how people interact with me. So if I’m going to feel awkward no matter what, then I might as well do what I want – right? And! Since this is a ‘repeated game’ the awkwardness I feel out in public might start to decrease the more I do it.
In class we also talk about making “strategic moves” to signal or commit to a particular strategy. By continually giving my old “boy clothes” away to charity – I’ve slowly been forcing myself to make a change because I’m running out of guy stuff (save t-shirts) that fits and I don’t really want to go out and buy more clothes I won’t have much use for soon. When I tell classmates or professors, “I’m going to do X on Y date” – I’ve staked my reputation on that claim. However, the Owen community isn’t the type to hold it against me if I change my mind later because they’re too nice. Each time I’ve signaled and visibly committed to transition they have made it a little less awkward for me.
Now if I only I could figure out how to outplay the snooze button on my alarm clock in the morning to get up earlier and get more done.
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