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Storytelling in the Cisgender Workplace
Work can often be a lonely place for transgender people. More often than not, we are the only trans person our coworkers know.
Last month, I spoke at the Worldwide TransTech Social Summit. The topic of my talk was “Storytelling in the Cis-Centered Workplace”, and in it, I explored ways in which people (trans people, in particular, but the principles are universal) can use storytelling as a tool for building community, decreasing otherness, and reducing loneliness. I’m not sure when or if the recording will become available, but here’s the transcript.
Hello. My name is Daelynn Moyer. I’m an engineering manager with Driveway.com. My tech career started way back in 1982, in 7th grade. I was a TAG kid (for better or worse) and was invited to an extracurricular course on ‘Computers’. I learned BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80, which had so little system memory, you actually had to perform a hardware upgrade if you wanted to be able to use lower-case characters. I didn’t really touch computers again in any meaningful way for a very long time. Later on, my college experience ended like so many others… I met someone, fell in love, had a baby, got married, and dropped out. I spent the next 10 years working in restaurant and retail jobs. And so it came to pass that I found myself shelving computer books at Borders Books, which had an employee book lending…
