I recently took the plunge and decided to go full time. Originally still ‘bloking up’ for work, but having had a great conversation with my employer, I’m transitioned there, too. New e-mail addresses. New business cards on the way.
It’s an interesting paradigm shift. In some ways, predictable, and in others not. So here are a few random thoughts and experiences.
Shaving every day and putting on makeup isn’t the chore I thought it would be. As a part-timer, I’d often go several days without shaving, and obviously I’d only put makeup on for ‘girl mode.’ But shaving takes about 5 minutes, and I’ve got my daily makeup routine down to less than 10. I have long hair anyway, so really the only other difference is putting on the bra (and popping the falsies) and having other clothing options besides jeans, T-Shirt and trainers.
It’s fantastic not to have to justify ‘dressing.’ Part-time, I would question whether I really needed to do ‘girl mode’ to go to the cinema or out to the pub. I would often find reasons why ‘bloke’ made more sense. Doing ‘part time apart from work’, that switched to defaulting to ‘girl’, and only doing ‘bloke’ if the situation expressly required it (which it did for work until I officially transitioned there.) And of course now, it’s just what I do every day.
It’s made life a lot less complicated. For example if I had a day that was just travel, I could do it in a dress, but if I got a work related call en route, I’d have to stop and change, or (if it wasn’t urgent) find an excuse to put it off to another time. There’s no need to do that, now.
Pitfalls?
While the toilet situation doesn’t really bother me, the changing rooms one does. So I’m reluctant to go swimming, or camping where I’d need to use gendered shower facilities.
Having makeup on throughout the day means you can’t spontaneously decide to wash your hair (at teatime, for example.) It has to wait until last thing at night, or first thing in the morning.
I still haven’t figured out ‘appropriate workwear.’ Black dresses with tights and boots seem to be favourite at the moment, but I need to diversify.
Apparently my hosting provider is migrating this blog over to WordPress. The upshot of this is that, for now, I can’t update the heading or right hand column text to reflect where I’m currently at. I’ll change those once I’m able to, again.
