My wife surprised her coworkers when she came out as trans. Then they surprised her.

#1

http://www.upworthy.com/my-wife-surpris ... prised-her

Society, pay attention. This is important.
My wife, Zoe, is transgender. She came out to us — the kids and me — last summer and then slowly spread her beautiful feminine wings with extended family, friends, and neighbors.

A little coming out here, a little coming out there — you know how it is.

It's been a slow, often challenging process of telling people something so personal and scary, but pretty much everyone has been amazing.

However, she dreaded coming out at the office.
She works at a large technology company, managing a team of software developers in a predominantly male office environment. She's known many of her co-workers and employees for 15 or so years. They have called her "he" and "him" and "Mr." for a very long time. How would they handle the change?

While we have laws in place in Ontario, Canada, to protect the rights of transgender employees, it does not shield them from awkwardness, quiet judgment, or loss of workplace friendships. Your workplace may not become outright hostile, but it can sometimes become a difficult place to go to every day because people only tolerate you rather than fully accept you.

But this transition needed to happen, and so Zoe carefully crafted a coming out email and sent it to everyone she works with.
The support was immediately apparent; she received about 75 incredibly kind responses from coworkers, both local and international.

She then took one week off, followed by a week where she worked solely from home. It was only last Monday when she finally went back to the office.

First day back at work! I asked if I could take a "first day of school" type picture with her lunchbox. She said no. Spoilsport.

Despite knowing how nice her colleagues are and having read so many positive responses to her email, she was understandably still nervous.
Hell, I was nervous. I made her promise to text me 80 billion times with updates and was more than prepared to go down there with my advocacy pants on if I needed to (I might be a tad overprotective).

And that's when her office pals decided to show the rest of us how to do it right.

She got in and found that a couple of them had decorated her cubicle to surprise her:

Butterflies! Streamers! Rainbows! OMG!

And made sure her new name was prominently displayed in a few locations:

They got her a beautiful lily with a "Welcome, Zoe!" card:

And this tearjerker quote was waiting for her on her desk:

To top it all off, a 10 a.m. "meeting" she was scheduled to attend was actually a coming out party to welcome her back to work as her true self — complete with coffee and cupcakes and handshakes and hugs.

(I stole one, and it was delicious.)

NO, I'M NOT CRYING. YOU'RE CRYING.

I did go to my wife's office that day. But instead of having my advocacy pants on, I had my hugging arms ready and some mascara in my purse in case I cried it off while thanking everyone.

I wish we lived in a world where it was no big deal to come out.
Sadly, that is not the case for many LGBTQ people. We live in a world of bathroom bills and "religious freedom" laws that directly target the members of our community. We live in a world where my family gets threats for daring to speak out for trans rights. We live in a world where we can't travel to certain locations for fear of discrimination — or worse.

So when I see good stuff happening — especially when it takes place right on our doorstep — I'm going to share it far and wide. Let's normalize this stuff. Let's make celebrating diversity our everyday thing rather than hating or fearing it.

Chill out, haters. Take a load off with us.
It's a lot of energy to judge people, you know. It's way more fun to celebrate and support them for who they are.

Besides, we have cupcakes.

Deepfake · #2

Lovely story, this kind of stuff really gets me.

I REALLY HATE POKEMON! · #3

The most important question is what type of cupcakes those are.

#4

[QUOTE="I REALLY HATE POKEMON!, post: 1592235, member: 18119"]The most important question is what type of cupcakes those are.[/QUOTE]
ONE OF THEM HAS GOLD GLITTER ON IT YOU KNOW THAT **** IS AMAZING

I REALLY HATE POKEMON! · #5

I remember watching a Food Network program detailing rich people food. It blew my mind to learn that people literally eat actual gold. It is like shavings or something but good God man, even Scrooge McDuck didn't **** eat gold.

i wana eat gold

(I think I found the pastry I mentioned here. Not as expensive as I recall but still.)

#6

^...what if it hurts coming out, though?

I mean, imagine paying extra money to have food with bits of gold in it, and then your end result has bits of gold stuck all over the outside of it, so it's like trying to poop out a cactus. Wuff.

#7

the rich are wasteful, eat the rich

I wish we lived in a world where it was no big deal to come out.

this part is extremely important

#8

GAH!! TISSUE WARNING MISSING!! Those are amazing co-workers.

YouTube · #9

the rich are wasteful, eat the rich

The thing is that gold has legitimate practical uses (just ask Iron Man), but things like eating a rare metal drive up the price, making the practical uses more difficult.

this part is extremely important

Agreed.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

I REALLY HATE POKEMON! · #10

Yeah, gold is used in medicine in many ways from what I hear. People shouldn't be allowed to eat gold any more than hunt endangered animals or destroy the environment.

#11

Well, it's valuable, but it's also fairly abundant. Like, if it were that rare, so rare there was a moral argument to be made against people eating gold, then there'd be a much, much stronger moral argument against using it for jewelry or coinage.

I mean...it's a commodity. Eating it is dumb and wasteful, but so what.