(upbeat music)
- In addition to the content warning
for transphobia and suicide,
there's also cartoon nudity
without (mumble) body.
My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke,
I'm 43 years old and I'm transgender.
I wanted to hit this out to
the one person in the audience
who's also transgender
and afraid to come out.
It's for you.
I also want to start by saying
that my experiences
are far from universal.
I'm speaking for myself
and not tens of thousands
of other transgender people.
I live in a world where my
existence is controversial.
My daily life is a political statement.
It's a big burden to carry
but I tried to do my best
and I've learned some things along the way
in my journey that I want
to share with you today.
On October of 2012, I
sit in a train platform,
very much like this one, in Chicago.
The wind of an oncoming train
was whipping at my trench coat.
I wanted two things
more than anything else:
I wanted a cigarette
and I wanted to step in
front of the oncoming train.
What brought me to that place
was the fact that I was transgender
and I couldn't deal with that.
Let me explain what I mean by transgender.
I was male assigned at birth
but there's a mismatch between
how I knew myself to be
and how my body actually looked.
Despite my certainty that
everything was wrong,
I was socialized to conform
to male gender norms.
There's a tug-of-war between
my brain and my body.
My internal picture of myself
didn't match my external appearance.
Every time I saw myself in a photograph
or at myself in the mirror,
there's a jolt of non-recognition.
This is something I would later come
to understand was called dysphoria.
The DSM, Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual,
defines dysphoria as discomfort
related to a conflict
between physical gender
and gender identity.
If you've ever been around a doctor
you know that if they
talk about discomfort,
it means that you're really fucking hurt.
It's a kick in the teeth every day.
Things got worse as I approached puberty.
Puberty is tough for
everyone, I know that,
but imagine going through
puberty for the wrong sex.
The changes that were happening
to me were irreversible.
My vocal chords thickened,
facial hair came in,
my bones fused, all the side effects
of the wrong hormones
being produced by my body.
I had no idea there was
a word for what I was.
I had no idea that there
were other people in the world like me.
I had no vocabulary for identifying
what was going on with my life.
I had no community I could seek out.
There were no friends I had,
outside of three or four people,
I knew in my town of 400.
I was sure that something
was wrong with me,
that I was mentally ill, and that I
didn't deserve to live.
I was ashamed of who I was.
When I did see people that seemed to
question their gender identities,
who were the butts of jokes,
who were ridiculous figures
on daytime talk shows,
I knew that I wasn't like that,
I wasn't like them.
I hated them for all they were
and how they let themselves be treated.
I had constant thoughts of suicide.
40% of transgender people attempt
suicide in their lifetime.
Many of them are successful.
I was utterly alone.
To cope, I constructed a
second life for myself,
through my best to try to compromise
between who I knew I was
and what the world expected of me.
I have a memory from when I was about
three or four years old
of being in a stroller.
My mom was pushing me and
there was a woman that
came up to us, "Oh my god,
what a cute little girl."
And my mom said, "He's a boy."
And something in my head
said, "That's wrong.
That's not right at all. What
is my mother talking about?"
When I was five, my parents split up.
My mother was very abusive and effectful
but even after all the horrible
things she had done to me,
I used to fantasize
about her kidnapping me
and raising me as her daughter.
I would've forgiven everything
she had done prior to that,
if that were the case.
So I learned to hide my feelings.
Lego was my favorite toy
and probably the same
for a lot of you.
I could build a lot of crazy machines,
which was really cool, but I could also
secretly build doll houses.
I was always on the
computer when I was a kid.
I could lose myself and
forget myself in programming.
I lived in an intellectual bubble,
free from physical constraints.
This was a strategy that I would adopt
for most of my adult life.
Later when BPS's were around,
in front of the internet,
I found out I could experiment
with gender identity,
particularly in new scripts from the RC.
I used the handle Unlucky Girl,
because what could be more unlucky
than being born in the wrong body.
In my late teens and 20s, I
experimented with being goth.
This let me flirt with androgyny,
let me wear makeup, and grow my hair long.
That was full trouble.
I even turned to magic and
the occult in my desperation.
I gladly would have sold
my soul for 60 years
of life as myself, my true self.
At age 23, I learned that
my girlfriend was pregnant.
So, I got married, had
a beautiful daughter.
I concentrated on my family.
I concentrated on being
successful in my career.
But I had made a fortress around my heart
and walled off all of my emotions.
The only ones that I
allowed myself to feel
were fear and anger, because they felt
masculine and safe and easy to understand.
I was haunted, no matter how I tried to
push down feelings of wrongness,
they only intensified.
Which brought me to a train station
in Chicago on October 2012.
Something had to change
if I was gonna go in life.
I had to change it or end dead.
So I decided to come out.
I came out to my friends and family first
and they were very receptive.
In my professional life, I first
came out to my friend Aaron Cahlon,
and told him how I was afraid of
losing absolutely everything if I decided
to move forward with this.
He said that it would be difficult
but I should go to the
community and network around me
of people who understood, and help others
who would have come after me.
So October 2013, I stood onstage
with Aaron, Corey, JC and Nash,
we announced LGBTech.
In the process of
announcing our organization,
I came out to an auditorium
of 400 people as transgender.
Later that year my friend Evan Light
invited me to go to Ruby Dcamp
and told me to come however
I felt most comfortable.
I really wasn't sure that I could do it.
I really didn't know if the
community would embrace me.
But I did it and they did too.
I found that I was stronger
that I'd ever imagined,
and I knew then that
I could follow through
on the decision that I had made.
So Dcamp was my first
professional exposure as a woman,
and what was the reaction
from my peers like?
My friend Nole Rapon was very surprised
at my choice of editor.
(audience laughs)
So at 40, I decided to start my life over.
Approx 2013, I've been living,
what's called Part-Timing,
in that I presented female
everywhere except at work.
I began my physical transition,
started my hormone regimen
on August 11th at 10:13 pm.
I had to come out to my parents,
which was gonna be really difficult.
My father is a right-wing conservative,
Fox News watching, Rush Limbaugh
listening, kind of person.
I was pretty afraid of losing him
so I called him on the phone one day
and I was very circuitous
at getting to the point.
I was talking about things like:
"You know how you said you'd
love me no matter what?"
And "There are big things
happening in my life right now."
And finally he was
like, "What is going on?
Do you have an cancer?"
And I was like, "No dad, I'm transgender."
And there was this long pause
in which I was pretty sure
that I'd lost my father.
He lets out a sigh and says "Thank God
I thought you were going
to tell me you were gay."
(audience laughs)
I decided to name myself
after the two most bad ass
and inspiring woman I could think of,
Coraline Jones and Ada Lovelace.
Actually gave my parents the opportunity
to give me a middle
name, they came up with
Raven and Phoenix so I was
like, "Thank you for playing."
(laughing)
When I first changed my name,
there were no search results
for my name and now I totally own my NCO.
(audience laughs)
I started gender therapy.
I finally felt like I was on a path.
It was the scariest and
hardest thing I ever attempted.
But I still had to come out at work.
At this time I was working for
an apartment finding service
right here in Chicago called blank.com.
It has to do with apartments.
I picked them because
they were very corporate,
very safe unlike the start-ups
I had been working for
for four or five years.
They had diversity policies in place.
So it felt like a good
place for me to transition.
In February of last year,
my mentee was at (mumbles)
who was running a
Girl Develop It here in Chicago
at the time, invited me to
come and speak as Coraline
to the group on open source,
in this case on women,
so I agreed to do it.
After wrestling with a lot of fear.
So an email went out announcing the talk
and little did I know that
the technical recruiter
at my company was on the GDI mailing list.
So I got an email from her saying,
"I can't believe your
wife is also a speaker,
we should organize a trip to go see her."
So I had to tell her.
I didn't want things going
through corporate back
channels so I also
wouldn't with my manager.
After that I did what anything
would do and I came via Gist.
(audience laughing)
I told my boss I was going to transition
from male to female March 1st.
It was one of the toughest
conversations I've ever had.
Response I got was pretty negative.
"You're no longer
meeting our expectations,
maybe this isn't the right place for you."
So I had to start on my job search
two weeks after starting transition.
Imagine the awkwardness of
being a 13 years old at 30,
and trying to find the confidence
to sell yourself to a potential employer.
I talked to my friend Olivia
who was also transgender
and she had some advice for me
that I boiled down to this t-shirt.
I printed it upside down so that I could
look down and be reminded
that I'm not a monster,
I'm a bad ass who's
skilled at many things.
I finally found a job at a
company called Instructure.
I was very worried at first
because they're a Mormon run company.
But they have been nothing
but nice and accepting to me
and I've been there for over a year now.
I found that I've been not just accepted
but embraced in my personal
and professional lives.
The lesson I learned was
when you're not miserable,
people actually want to be your friend.
I started speaking about my experiences,
about the micro-aggressions I endured,
about inequality, about all the things
I've been afraid to talk about before.
And people were listening.
I had the opportunity to write
for Model View Culture twice.
And in June of this year I was named the
"Entitlement Princess Of The Month"
by some basement-going,
gamer gator for calling
into the open source
contributor on his transphobia.
And if you look closely,
apparently I am the mafia.
Which is pretty cool.
(clapping)
I was afraid that when
I started transition
I wouldn't be able to speak anymore.
I love speaking at conferences.
I spoke at 14 conferences last year.
I gave a keynote at Great Wide Open.
I closed out the Madison Ruby Conference
to a standing ovation.
I got to speak at Ralsconf, and I was even
flown half way around the world
to speak at Ruby Conference
Australia, thank you Pat.
So I definitely found my voice
but there's a price that I had to pay.
I lost my wife, I lost my
in-laws, I lost my godchild,
my niece, my nephews, my
entire extended family.
I decided to focus on the
community that had accepted me.
Giving back is one of my core values.
So we co-founded LGBTech as I mentioned.
I also have a project under way
called Open Source for women
which is seeking to
move the needle on women
staying in open source.
I co-created the Contributor Covenant,
one of the main codes of
conduct open source projects.
It's been adopted by Angular and Bundler
and Homebrewed and Exercism,
Rspec, even Mozilla.
I co-work on a Chicago Women Developers.
This is one of our hack nights.
And if you look, I don't
know if you can see in the
background the faceless
patriarchy watching over us.
(audience laughing)
I volunteered with Girl Develop It,
an organization the provides
learning resources for
women who are just getting
started in their tech careers.
We're volunteering by
being out in the community,
by making a political
statement that I exist.
I'm trying to break down barriers that
stand between people
like me in our success.
Helping even one person makes
all these struggles worthwhile.
I decided to be deliberate
in rebuilding myself.
Since I pressed the big red
reset button on my life,
I decided I had the privilege
of respective to start over.
There were several things that
I had to learn to do in the process.
I had to learn to let go of my ego.
I had to learn that I'm not
always right and that's okay.
I had to find my passion and live by it.
I loved learning and teaching,
finding opportunities
for growth and giving
back to the community.
I had to learn to listen again.
I had to learn empathy,
how to understand different
perspectives, open myself to new ideas
and challenge my existing way of thinking.
I had to deal with impostor
syndrome as many of us do.
In my case it was
complicated by the gender
and the issues I faced.
For that Girl Development talk
that I was giving for the
first time as a Coraline,
I got in a panic and I talked to Liz.
And I said, "Who am I to
stand before a group of women
and tell them how difficult it's going to
be for them at Open Source."
And she said that I had
a unique perspective.
I had lived life in two
genders, and this would be
something valuable to the
women that in attendance.
So what lessons did I
learn through this process?
More questions than answers.
I had to ask myself why I was
really afraid of pair program.
This is really a side effect
of the intellectual bubble
that I was living in.
That bubble was very fragile
and I never had expose myself.
I felt very vulnerable.
Am I willing to be less declarative?
I learned that when I
expressed an opinion as fact
I shut the conversation down.
I don't give the other
people an opportunity
to express themselves and
I don't get the benefit
of their thinking and experiences.
I had to learn to listen
with empathy and compassion.
Not rushing to state my opinion,
but taking the time to
understand what someone else
is talking about or coming from.
And I am painfully aware of the privileges
that I lost and that I still have.
And I try to use my privilege
to amplify other voices
rather than speaking
for them or over them.
I had to recognize and appreciate
nuances in conversation
which I want to talk about briefly.
And I started paying attention to
differences in gender communication.
I realized that male
communication is very direct
while women communicate on
a much more nuanced level.
Because I'm a geek I liken
this to http requests.
So men respond to men differently.
The man talks about having had a bad day.
The other man is likely to commiserate.
Men have an instinctive need
to solve a woman's problem.
So when a woman complains about her day,
the man wants to respond with a solution.
This can cause a real disconnect
in what she was expecting
to receive and what she actually got.
Women listen to other women with empathy.
That means that their headers are matched,
and they're communicating effectively.
So my little demonstration there.
So when I heave it up I understood,
I came to learn what this
privilege really means.
And I want to share some things with you.
As a cisgender person, you have
little fear of being misgendered.
How many times have you been
called by the wrong pronouns?
Even by the people with the best
of intentions they get other...
Damien wrote cis people get pronouns,
trans people get preferred pronouns.
Cis people get gender, trans
people get gender identities.
This really isn't fair.
As a cisgender person
you're rarely the subject
or the butt of an unpleasant joke.
You don't have to worry that the show
everybody's watching these
days is going to have
an episode ending in,
"But she's really a man."
A trope that never fails to
make me break down in tears.
Even shows that are
talented with feminists
looking very proactive like Veronica Mars
uses trope in their episodes.
As a cisgender person you have
unfettered access to bathrooms.
Increasing number of states the halloways
are trying to pass
so-called bathroom bills
which would prevent access
by transgendered people
to the bathroom corresponding
to their gender.
Most of these laws incur
civil and criminal penalties
holding it or moving to another state.
According to one study
conducted in Florida,
over half the people surveyed
did not agree that transgender
people should have access
to the correct bathroom.
As a cisgender person you
have access to health care.
Not only to basic health care
but the right to not be ridiculed
or turned away by medical professionals.
In this map, the blue
states have no explicit
policy regarding equal
coverage in private insurance
or state medicaid for transgender people.
The grey states have some protection,
either for medicaid or private
insurance, but not both.
Only the dark blue
states have both coverage
guarantees for medicaid
and private insurance.
As a cisgender person you don't
have to worry about passing.
There are a variety of
acceptable gender presentations
for you, from high-film to
tomboy to everything in between.
Thanks to stereotype threads,
transgender women are often judged as
too masculine to pass or so feminine
that they're considered
over-the-top parodies.
As a cisgender person you don't
get questions about your real name.
The process of changing your name,
for me cost over 600 dollars
and countless hours of effort.
But I still get dead-named by
places like Amazon and Paypal.
It's almost impossible to change
all references to your old name.
As a cisgender person you can't
be fired for living authentically.
The grey states on this
map offer no employment
protections for transgender people.
The blue states offer
sexual preference protection
but not transgender protection.
And only the purple
states offer employment
protection for transgender people.
As I learned in Illinois
which does have these
equal protection were
also a right to work stay,
which means you could
be fired without cause.
And it's very difficult to prove
that you were discriminated against.
So by understanding your privilege,
hopefully this helps you be a better ally.
There's some other advice I'd
like to give you as a transgender ally.
If you're unsure about someone's pronouns,
ask them but ask them quietly
and discreetly away from a crowd.
Be careful with your compliments,
never tell a transgender person
that you never would've
guessed they were trans.
Or that they look just like
a genetic male or women.
Recognize that words can hurt us.
Even words some people say
they're reclaiming from being slurs.
There are exactly two
words that are appropriate
for describing me as a transgender woman.
And those words are transgender woman.
Our body parts are off limits.
Don't ask us about our bodies.
If you can't ask a discreet cis,
white male at a party if had
a penis, we're no different.
Don't make assumptions about
our sexual orientation.
Gender is a distinct thing
from sexual preference.
And don't spout platitudes.
Don't tell me that gender is performative.
Don't tell me gender is a social construct
or that gender doesn't matter.
Money's also a social construct
but you wouldn't tell a poor
person that money's just paper.
Finally listen, listen and amplify.
Don't just favorite us or retweet us.
These are the lessons that I've learned
in three years since I decided
I needed to transition.
I hope that parts of this
story have touched you
or moved you or informed you in some way.
I want to tell you that
it's never too late
to learn and practice empathy.
I learned it at 40.
I would encourage you to have the courage
to be really who you are,
no matter who that is.
Thank you.
(clapping)
(upbeat music)
