The past two days have been the start of my actual work. The pre-training is over, and on Monday, I went not to a classroom, but to an office. And it all felt oddly familiar…

We call headquarters in Redmond a campus, and it looks very much indeed like a college. There’s grass, trees, curving roadways, shuttle buses, cafeterias (complete with meal cards), a library, a store to buy pens, hoodies, and all your logo’d gear, and even sports fields.

Coming from New York City, most colleges don’t look much like HQ…except for the one I attended straight out of high school. I swear, the buildings closest to my office are even the same color.

I spent one summer sitting in a small office off of a winding hall in the bio labs. There were whiteboards on the wall, empty cardboard boxes in the corner, and men walking in and out wearing t-shirts they purchased at GameStop or ThinkGeek. Sometimes the adjunct I was assisting would come in and look at my computer screen. It’s not so different.

So many other things were different back then, though. It feels very bizarre to be re-experiencing college in this way.

I’m passionate about biology, but when I was majoring in it, I was very lonely. I’d spend so much time reading and taking notes that I was a top student, but I didn’t have any friends among my classmates. I’d sit long hours in the library. Then I’d go home and spend all night on gaming forums, where I’d make jokes, read topics, and sometimes get trolled and sexually harrassed. At the time, I identified as a cis lesbian.

Less on the forums, and more in class, I just felt like there was this unnavigable gulf between me and my fellow male geeks. I could dress the same way as them, share all of the same interests, excel at school, behave in the same supercilious manner, but it wouldn’t change a thing. I’d still be seen as other.

Now, all these years later, I pass as a cis male most of the time. People offer me easy authority on things I don’t have the slightest idea about, and make assumptions about my upbringing that don’t bear the slightest reflection of reality.

It’s very strange for me to walk into a heavily male geek space and be ignored – treated as if I belonged there, as if I fit in. You don’t really lose that sense of otherliness after so many years of it, though.

When I first started HRT, I felt angry all of the time for being treated better – why couldn’t everyone be treated the same way? I had known, of course, that sexism existed, but medically transitioning made it extremely solid and visceral in a way it hadn’t been before.

The company says they’re trying to be more diverse. I can’t help but notice how heavily male a lot of the spaces are, though. Plenty of women leave STEM due to the hostility and the loneliness, and then you wind up with spaces where the men are all scratching their heads, wondering where the women are.

When I walk around campus, sometimes I’m overwhelmed by how big everything is, and how much I’ve lived through to get to this moment. Would I like myself now? Would I be scared or upset? I like to think I’m a better person now, but maybe I’ve just become a different one.

My beliefs have changed a lot since I was 19, and some of the things I thought I liked or wanted are no longer desirable to me. On the other hand, I’ve been granted so much more freedom to be myself and live my life, that it would have been almost unimaginable to me back then.

Some people say they wish they had gotten into computers when they were younger. I don’t know if I could have handled all of this.