 I just want to point out that if this conference were being held in Arizona or Colorado I wouldn't be legally allowed to use the correct bathroom. I live in a world where my existence is a political statement. It's a lot of pressure for me to live under. It's a really hard road to travel, but I've learned some lessons along the way that I want to share with you, and I hope they're applicable to you. But most of all, this talk is for the one person in this audience who is also transgender and is afraid to come out. This talk is for you. In October 2012, I missed a train. I was standing on a platform just like this one. The train was coming down the tracks, and it creates a wind effect, so my trench coat was blowing in the wind of the train. There were two things that I wanted more than anything else. I wanted a cigarette, and I wanted to step off the platform onto the tracks. What brought me to that place? I'm transgender, and let me explain what that means. When I was born, to all appearances, I was a boy. But gender identity isn't something physical. Gender identity is in your brain, and there was 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 gender norms, so I was raised as a boy, and I got a lot of the bad habits that boys get as they're growing up. But there was this constant tug of war between my internal picture of who I was and my external appearance. This caused a shock, a literal shock of non-recognition, every time I saw myself in a picture or saw myself in the mirror. Puberty sucks for everybody. Puberty sucks even more when it's the wrong one, because it's permanent, vocal cords thickened, facial hair came in, bones fused, hormones started being produced. I was experiencing something known as dysphoria. The DSM, the Diagnosing and Statistical Manual, defines it as a discomfort caused by a mismatch between physical gender and gender identity. As you know, if any doctor tells you you're going to experience some discomfort, it means it's going to fucking hurt. There was no information for me. The slide that was up here before, that swampland, that's where I grew up. I counted 500 people. I had no idea that there was a word for what I was. I had no idea that there were other people like me in the world. I had no vocabulary for identifying what I was going through. I was lost and scared and alone. Back then, because I'm old, there was no internet. There was no community I could seek out. I had three or four friends from this tiny town and that was it. There was no help for me. So I suffered from emotional pain and self-loathing. I was sure that something was wrong, that I was either mentally ill or I didn't deserve to live. When I did see people who questioned their gender on television or in movies, they were always the butts of jokes or they were on daytime talk shows behaving like clowns. I hated them and I hated them for being anything like me. 40% of transgender people will attempt suicide at some point in their lives. I had constant thoughts and ideations about suicide. I had to construct a new life for myself, doing the best to strike a compromise between who I knew I was and who I had to be in the world. I have a stroller memory. I was less than five years old and a woman came up to me and said, oh my God, what a cute little girl. And my mother at the time said, that's a boy. And I was thinking to myself, what is she talking about? That woman was right and my mother was wrong. That was my first realization that the world didn't see me the way I was. My parents split up. My mother was abusive. Nonetheless, I had fantasies about her kidnapping me and raising me as a daughter. Even after all the horrible things she had done, that was a better life to me than the life that I was living. So I learned to hide. I learned to hide these things that made me feel ashamed and made me feel different. I played with Lego, which is like the best toy in the world. And I built like really crazy machines, but also secretly I could build doll houses with it. I was always hacking from the age of seven when I got my first computer. I could forget myself and lose myself in code. Later on in the BBS era, I could experiment with identity and the anonymity of the early internet or the appearance of an anonymity of the early internet allowed me to also experiment. By the time I was in my late teens and early 20s, I discovered Goth. Goth was pretty cool because it let me flirt with androgyny. I could wear makeup. I could wear my hair long. I could wear really tight clothing. It was cool, but I was very troubled. I actually literally turned to magic in the occult because I thought if there was a slight chance of being able to transform myself physically, I was going to pursue it. I would have sold my soul for 60 years as myself. At age 23, I found out that my girlfriend was pregnant. There was nothing I could do but get married. I had a beautiful daughter named Lydia Naomi Sachet. I concentrated on my family and on my career. And that was the next 18 years of my life. The whole time I was very troubled. I was very haunted. I tried to build a wall around the sense of otherness, the sense of wrongness, and tried to push all my feelings down into it. I actually completely cut myself off from allowing myself to experience emotion. And that brought me to a train station in Chicago in October of 2012. I knew that something had to change if I was going to go on with my life. I was going to change my life or I was going to end it. This is Aaron Kalen. He's a good friend of mine. He's a person who's on the LGBT spectrum. And I knew that as a friend and colleague that he was. So I took him out to lunch one day. And this was the first person for my professional circle that I told that I was transgender. I told him how I was afraid of losing absolutely everything. My family, my career, my just absolutely everything. And he said that it would be difficult but I should build a support network for myself and maybe turn that support network into a resource for other people like me. So we planned an organization, a nonprofit called LGBT. And in October of 2013, we stood on the stage of Madison Ruby. And I told the origin story of how LGBT became a reality. And as a result came out as transgendered 400 people, including everyone who would later see the videos of Madison Ruby online. Evan Light is a good friend of mine. And he runs a thing called Ruby DeCamp. It's an invite-only conference in the woods of Virginia. 77 people can attend because that's how many slots there are at the campground. And Evan, I told him that I was transgendered. He invited me to come to DeCamp in a more way I felt most comfortable. And I clarified what he meant and realized this would be my first opportunity to enter the professional sphere presenting female for the first time. It would be a test of my strength and my resolve. It would also be a test of how the community would treat me. I did it. They did it. I found out that I was stronger than I ever imagined myself to be. I knew then that I could follow up on the decision that I made that day in October. I was at DeCamp that year, too. And the reaction that he gave from the revelations at DeCamp were pretty funny. He's like, yeah, Corey's transgender, but did you know? Corey uses BP as an editor? That was really weird. So at 40, I decided to start my life over. What does that mean? I've been living what they call part-time. So socially, I was transitioned. I was presenting female to my friends. I began my physical transition on August 11, 2013 at 10.13 p.m. by ingesting my first estrogen pill. Did you notice I blacked out the dosage? That's because a lot of people aren't as privileged as I am and can't afford the medication, and they self-dose. And people like me who are that privileged have to hide the dosages from them because self-dosing is very dangerous. It can actually kill you. So we try not to share that information with people. It's pretty sad. It's incredibly supportive. I remember my dad's reaction. He's a Fox News-watching Rush Limbaugh listening right-wing conservative in the wilds of Virginia. And I called him up, and I was being really sort of circuitous, and I was like, you said you'd love me no matter what. And I went on for like five minutes. He's like, are you dying or what's going on? And I was like, well, actually, I'm transgender. And there's this long pause. And I thought to myself, this is the sound of me losing my father. And then he said, thank God, I thought you were about to tell me you were gay. To honor my parents, I asked them if they wanted to give me a middle name. My old middle name was Dale, which is really screwed up. I figured I'd give them a chance to make amends. They came up with Raven, and I was like, thanks, guys, but no. So I took my name from the two most badass women that I could think of, Coraline Jones and Ada Lovelace. In January of 2014, I won Google Act. There was exactly one search result from my name. And now I own my SEO. I was on a path. The scariest and hardest thing that I ever attempted was actually happening to me. I set a date for what's called my full-time transition, where I stopped pretending to be a guy altogether, March 1st. That, of course, meant some changes at work. In January of this year, I was given a glowing review and promoted to principal developer. I worked for an apartment-finding service called Blank.com that has to do with apartments. I picked them because they were very corporate. They were very safe. They had a 90% rating from the Human Rights Campaign. And unlike the startup I worked at before, they had nondiscrimination policies in place. I worked there for about a year. And then this happened. The woman that I had mentored, Liz Abinanti, was running Chicago Girl Developed at the time. And she invited me to come speak to the women there. As Coraline. This would be my first speaking engagement as Coraline. So she sent out the announcement late in January. And the technical recruiter at my company was really excited. She sent me an email. She said, I had no idea that your wife was also a speaker. Can we organize a trip for a bunch of us to go? Uh-oh. So I had to tell my employers that I am going to transition from male to female on March 1st. And their response was, you're no longer meeting our expectations. Maybe this isn't the right place for you. So two weeks after starting transition, I had to go out on a job search. Imagine the awkwardness of being 13 years old at 40, trying to find the confidence to sell yourself to a potential employer. It was pretty hellish. I talked to a friend of mine who was a doctor, also transgender, and we talked about the intersection of imposter syndrome and being transgender. And she says, the trick is to make absolutely sure that you understand that you are a badass who is skilled at things. So I actually made myself this t-shirt. It's upside down, so if I ever doubt myself, I can go down and read it. If you're not able to read upside down, I am not an imposter. I am a badass who is skilled at many things. I ended up working for a wonderful company called Canvas. I had a lot of uncertainty about it before. They're a Utah-based company. I was worried that it would be a very conservative company. I was worried that when they flew me out to interview that they would laugh. But I was assured that they were very, very nice and they treated me very, very well. I'm very happy to work there. That's my plug and we're hiring. So the next step was really about finding my voice. I found that I was not just accepted, but I was embraced in my personal life, my professional life, and by the Ruby community. The lesson that I learned here is that when you're not fucking miserable, people actually want to be around you and want to be your friends. Imagine that. So I started speaking about my experiences, about microaggressions, about inequality, about the things that I kept silent before, out of fear, and people actually listened to me. One of my grounding achievements was getting listed on the Feminist Cabal edition of 2048. I thought that was pretty awesome. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to speak at conferences anymore. Last year I spoke at four conferences. This year I've had 12 speaking engagements. This is number 12. I'm hoping for 13 if anyone can help me out there. I got the keynote at Great Wide Open, which is a big open-source conference. I closed out the Madison Ruby Conference to a standing ovation. That was the same stage I stood on a year before and came out as transgender. I got to speak at RailsConf, and I've gotten to meet some really amazing people. But there was a price. I lost my family. My wife and I couldn't make it work. Her family would not accept me at all, and they stopped talking to me, which means I can't ever see my niece and my nephew as a guy. I had to refactor myself. I had decided to be very deliberate in the way that I would rebuild from Corey and the Coraline. I impressed the big red reset button in my life, and I had the privilege and the perspective and the opportunity to start over. Here are some things that I learned along the way. I learned to let go of my ego. I was working with Sarah Gray and Corey Haines a couple of years ago, and our boss presented an architectural problem to us, and Corey Haines had an opinion, and he stated his opinion about how we should solve it, and I had an opinion and I stated the way that we should solve it, and we argued a lot, and we didn't make any progress at all. When we got out of the room, Sarah Gray turned to me and said, never have I been in a room where two people were so certain that they were right and the other person was wrong, but you're probably both wrong. I had to find my passion. I asked myself, what are my values as a developer? It's learning, it's teaching, it's growing, and it's giving back to the community. I decided since those were my core values, that's what I would live by, and I would learn how to be a partner, professionally and personally. When I was at DeCamp, we did a code retreat, which is basically solving calmly's game of life, seven or eight times in a row, and 45 minutes tense, each time with a different partner, with a different constraint. At the beginning, I knew how to solve a problem, right, because I'm really smart and I'm always right, so I would bring my solution to the table and watch as the other person struggled to type what I was telling them to type, and I realized that's really unfair and that's kind of a jerky way to behave. So, I learned to listen. I had to deliberately learn to listen, open myself up to new ideas, and allow other people to challenge my way of thinking. I would shut up and actually let other people talk. This was a new thing for me. I also had to deal with imposter syndrome, which is not easy. A lot of people talk about it these days. It's not a popular, it's not a fad, it's a real thing for a lot of people, especially as I get further and further along in my career, I'm just amazed that no one's figured out the most fake ad. I had to learn that there were valid and invalid sources of feedback in my life, and I actually had to learn that high was not a valid source of feedback for how I was doing. So, I told to my four values and giving back is a key value for me, and I wanted to share how I'm doing that. LGBTAC, I co-founded with Ari Kalin, Astrid and Corey Stevenson, JC Grubbs, and Nell Shamaral. We're dedicated to, my keeps cutting out on me, we're dedicated to promoting LGBT people in technology and making it easier for them to come out and to live and grow in their careers. I founded Open Source for Women, which is a project that aims to connect women to open source projects that are welcoming to them. I worked with the contributor Covenant, which as far as I know is the first code of conduct for open source projects. It's been adopted by Angular, by Homebrew, by Exorcism, and even by some Mozilla projects. I worked with Chicago Women Developers to teach and mentor women who were coming into technology for the first time or who were further along in their careers. And I also helped teach a girl develop at Chicago. Through volunteering and being out in the community, by making the political statement of existing, I can break down barriers that people like me face, barriers that hold people like me back. And when I get feedback from someone else that has somehow found strength through my example, it's very humbling and usually I cry. Helping even one person would make everything that I've gone through worthwhile. So some other takeaways from my experiences so far, not answers but questions, could I be a better communicator? I was at a party at my friend's house once and he's a filmmaker. And all of the guys that had sort of congregated around the snacks in the dining room and all the women were in the living room. And the guys were talking about film like guys are, they were each and every one of them absolutely right and everyone else was wrong. And they approved this by raising their voices at each other and interrupting each other. And the women meanwhile were asking each other questions and getting to know one another. And I had this really stark contrast of people standing five feet away from each other demonstrating two very different communication styles. And I had the privilege of picking which one I wanted to adopt. I asked myself, why am I afraid to pair a program? I was afraid because I knew what the answer was and I was too impatient to work with anyone else which obviously was wrong. Now I'm afraid to pair a program because I think it's a very intimate experience but I do it anyway. I challenge myself to do it anyway. If you're afraid to pair a program, why is that? Ask yourself. I learned that when I state opinion is fact I shut a conversation down. I don't give other people an opportunity to express themselves and I don't get the benefit of their knowledge and experience. I learned that I didn't know how to listen. I couldn't listen with empathy and compassion. I would rush in to state my opinions instead of taking time to understand someone else and what they were going through and what their thinking was. By giving up male privilege I learned what privilege really means. I learned that it's normal for women to feel afraid to walk down the street even in daylight. I learned lots of things that I just had taken for granted living as a male. I learned that it's important to amplify the voices of people who don't have the platform that you have not to speak over them. I learned that it's important not just to favor it but to retweet. Use your platform for good. I learned how to be a better ally and I'd like to share some things with you specifically about being an ally to transgender people. If you're not sure what someone's chosen gender is, if you're not sure what pronouns to use ask them politely. Never, ever, ever use it. Don't compliment transgender people on their ability to pass. Don't say things like I never would have known or you look like a genetic female. That's rude. There's exactly one set of words you can use to describe me as a transgender woman. Those are the words transgender woman. Anything else is a slur. Don't ask us about our bodies. It's a very personal thing. You wouldn't ask a cisgender person about their bodies and it's very rude to do that to a transgender person as well. Don't make assumptions about our sexual orientation. I was home in Virginia last week and I actually had to come out to my parents that's straight. Which was really rough. My dad was pretty upset about that one actually. Don't tell me that gender doesn't matter. I've heard people say well gender is just a social construct. That's like telling someone who's dirt poor that money is just a piece of paper. Don't do that. Most of all listen, listen, listen, amplify. These are the lessons that I learned in the two years since I realized that I needed to transition. I hope that my story is informed, moved, touched you in some way. I hope that I can make things easier for the people who came after me. And to that one transgender person who's in this auditorium I want to reassure you that you are not alone. You can have the courage, all of you, to be who you really are. Anybody can do this. Thank you.