Interview with Shelli Renee Joye - Part 2

Monika: Take me back to your first job interview as a woman. Do you remember how it felt?

Shelli: Oh yes, I was terrified, terrified! But I had very good credentials and references (my former bosses in Saudi were quite sympathetic, they had liked me and my work as a male for the two decades I worked and lived in Saudi Arabia, so they gave me good references, using my new name, and said nothing about me having been male). But I thought I would die. Still, I got the job, to my amazement. But during the full year that I transitioned back in San Francisco, I did not work at all, luckily I had savings from the years working for the oil company.

Monika: When I came out at work, my male co-workers treated me as if the transition had lowered my IQ. Did you experience something similar, and do you think it happens because we are women, because we are transgender, or both?

Shelli: Oh yes, I had some eye-opening, conflicting experiences! I have a degree in electrical engineering with a focus on computers and eventually grew into a focus on software development. In Saudi Arabia, I became a Microsoft Certified Software Engineer and led a team of developers to roll out an amazing application that was used all over the company for a few years. It took a lot of legacy data from the mainframe and processed it into the PC platform. It was called “MIS95” for Management Information System ‘95 and ran on WIN95.

My experience was always that if there was a technical problem to solve, I would almost invariably come up with an elegant solution and bring it up at a meeting. Usually, it was the route that was agreed upon.

“One thing about creativity, it is always evolving
if you “get out of the way” and let nature take
its course by working through you.”

However, back in the USA and now Shelli, I recall sitting around a big conference room table with the other software engineers on our team, all male of course, and we had a problem to solve. I quickly saw a great solution and began talking. I noticed some of them were not even paying attention, but looking at their laptops!

When I finished articulating the design that would solve the trick, there was a long silent pause, then one of the guys started discussing what they had been talking about prior to my contribution, in other words, my proposed solution was completely discounted and ignored! Well, my reaction was also surprising, I thought, “Wow, I’ve actually made it, they are treating me like a woman!!” ... ironic, eh?

Monika: What advice would you give to transgender women who are searching for employment?

Shelli: I have no idea what to advise others. Just have courage and keep trying, and eventually you will find a job. I had actually thought when I began transitioning, that I would never have a good software job again. So as a failsafe, I planned to learn how to do nails and work at a nail salon! I would have done that (at least I speculated in my fantasy of transitioning) because I would feel “whole” at being able to work and be seen as a woman! A bit stupid. But you know, coming off of testosterone (via spironolactone) and taking estrogen, we all initially are thrust into puberty again, an even more intense, accelerated puberty, which clouds our thinking a great deal, makes us feel more optimistic but has a lot of downsides too.

Monika: How involved are you in the local LGBTQ community?

Shelli: No, not at all. For the last 12 years, I lived in relative isolation in the mountains in northern California, completing my Ph.D. dissertation and then writing books. I lived there with my wife, Susanne, who is also an m2f transgender woman. We met when I was in Saudi Arabia and she in San Francisco, via an early online email chat group called “The Saturday Night Sewing Circle” of about a dozen of us in transition, most of them in Canada and the USA.

“For the last 12 years, I lived in relative isolation in
the mountains in northern California.”

Monika: Love is such a central theme in life. What role does it play in yours?

Shelli: Love is very important, not the physical kind so much, but the emotional, empathic kind. Susanne and I are still deeply in love, though the flavor has changed and matured (like a fine wine?) since we met in 1999, my year of transition. She began her transition a year before me while supervising a crew of hard-hat emergency services tow truck drivers on the Bay Bridge that connects Oakland to San Francisco. She had a more difficult time than I did in her transition, which was “on the job.”

Monika: How did the two of you grow close?

Shelli: In fact, we grew close when one Christmas Eve I read her email about her considering suicide, stepping into the bridge traffic, because her family and her ex-wife would not see her for Christmas. I talked her out of it and thus became her partner for life, somehow! When I flew back a few weeks later to see my therapist and have some electrolysis, we met physically for the first time and it was love at first sight! I don’t know what I would have done without her companionship and support. We share the same sense of humor and high level of intelligence and many interests.

Monika: Some transgender women are held back by their fear of transition. What would you tell them?

Shelli: Get over the fear and just do it, one step at a time! It will make all the difference in your world.

Monika: My pen-friend Gina Grahame once wrote to me that we should not limit our potential because of how we were born or by what we see other transgender people doing. Our dreams should not end on an operating table, that is where they begin. Do you agree?

Shelli: Yes, I agree.

Monika: Shelli, it was a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much!

Shelli: Thank you for your work in offering this platform for some of us to express ourselves.

END OF PART 2

Back to PART 1

 

All the photos: courtesy of Shelli Renee Joye.

© 2023 - Monika Kowalska

More info about the book.

The book is available on Amazon.

Full title: “My Transition Journal: A Transgender Arc of Self-Discovery” (2022) by Shelli Renee Joye.

Joye's story is unusual not only because of the circumstances of her transition, but also because of the person undertaking it. A scientist, engineer, academic, philosopher and author, she had spent much of her life exploring questions about consciousness, identity and the nature of the self. Her transition therefore became part of a much larger intellectual and spiritual journey. The book is described as an intense journal covering two years of transitioning, including a year of daily correspondence with gender therapist Dr. Lin Fraser through what Joye describes as pioneering email-based "telehealth" counselling.

 

This makes My Transition Journal different from many transgender autobiographies. It is not simply a chronological account of changing one's appearance, beginning hormone therapy or learning to live socially as a woman. For Joye, transition is inseparable from the question that had fascinated her throughout her life: Who am I? That question had followed her for decades. Before transitioning, she had tried to suppress her femininity and construct a successful life within the role expected of her. She describes dressing privately in hotel rooms during business trips, followed by shame and regret the next morning. Eventually, while living in Saudi Arabia, she began searching the newly available internet for information about being transgender. That search led her to Dr. Fraser and ultimately opened the possibility of transition.

 

One of the most compelling aspects of the story is precisely this contrast between the apparently successful person Shelli had become and the private reality she was carrying inside. She had worked as a software engineer, had a family, and had been a successful professional. Her transition therefore did not mean simply changing one aspect of an otherwise empty life. It meant confronting the foundations on which much of that life had been built. And the consequences were painful. Joye has spoken openly about the effect her transition had on her former wife and children, particularly the period when her daughter stopped speaking to her for almost a year. Yet the story does not remain exclusively one of loss. Her relationship with Susanne, another transgender woman whom she met through an early online support group, became a particularly important source of companionship and love. The journal format is especially appropriate for such a story because transition is rarely experienced as a neat sequence of events. It is full of doubts, anxieties, discoveries and contradictions. A journal can preserve those moments before they are reorganized by hindsight. Rather than presenting transition as something that was inevitable and obvious from the beginning, Joye's story shows how complicated it can be to arrive at an understanding of oneself after decades of suppression.

 

Another distinctive feature is the role of spirituality and philosophy. Joye had studied Indian philosophy and was particularly interested in Tantra and the integration of masculine and feminine principles. Her professional and intellectual interests in consciousness became intertwined with her attempt to understand gender and identity. This gives the book a somewhat different atmosphere from a conventional transition memoir. Joye is not interested only in the social question of how to transition. She is equally interested in the deeper question of what the self actually is. For her, gender is part of a much larger exploration of consciousness, individuality and the relationship between inner identity and the physical body.

 

At the same time, the book does not lose sight of the very practical realities of transition. Joye writes about electrolysis, the anxiety of being perceived by strangers, being misgendered on the telephone, returning to employment as a woman and learning to navigate professional life after transition. Her first job interview as Shelli was, by her own description, terrifying, despite her extensive professional qualifications. Eventually she got the job. Her experiences at work are particularly revealing. As an accomplished software engineer, she had been accustomed to having her technical contributions taken seriously. After transition, she encountered situations in which male colleagues appeared to ignore her ideas. She remembers the experience with a mixture of frustration and irony: she realized that she had, in a very uncomfortable way, begun to experience some of what women encounter in male-dominated professional environments. 

 

Perhaps the most interesting quality of My Transition Journal is therefore its refusal to reduce transition to one single dimension. It is simultaneously a personal story, a professional story, a family story, a love story and an intellectual investigation into identity. Joye's perspective is also very much her own. Her scientific background, fascination with consciousness, meditation practice and philosophical interests inevitably shape the way she understands her experience. Readers who are looking for a straightforward medical or practical guide to transition may therefore find the book different from what they expect. This is not primarily a handbook. It is a record of one woman's attempt to understand herself after spending much of her life trying not to. And that is ultimately what makes the journal valuable. Transgender memoirs often remind us that there is no single timetable for self-discovery. Some people understand themselves in childhood, others in adolescence, and some only after decades of building an apparently successful life in another identity. Joye's story belongs to the latter category.

 

My Transition Journal is consequently not only a book about transition. It is a book about what happens when the person we have constructed for the outside world can no longer contain the person we know ourselves to be. Shelli Joye spent years asking questions about consciousness, identity and the nature of the self. Eventually, one of those questions became impossible to postpone: who was she really? Her journal is the record of what happened when she finally began to look for the answer.

 

Monika Kowalska