Being You
Never underestimate the impact of being you.
In a few days I’ll leave my first cyber job as a SOC analyst, moving on to become a pentester. The last two years have had their ups and downs, but there’s one story that I’ve kind of kept and not told for a while.
You see a lot in the panels, and there’s a kind of parasocial feeling you can get being an analyst. You see people change positions, come and go, and sometimes you’ll see people get married/divorced through their last name changes. It’s a lot more common with technical users in IT or cyber because they’re in the panel pretty often.
When I first became a solo analyst, I had to raise a case for a user being added to a high privilege group. Usually I’ll just use ’they’ when talking about someone in third person but this person had an obviously masculine name and I wondered if it might come across odd if I did it here. I thought about what to say there as I gathered the rest of the information for the case, and eventually settled on ’they’ because you never really know.
The next week, I saw an alarm for someone with the same last name. I kind of thought ‘oh they must be siblings’, until I took a minute to look at the user ID and realised it was extremely familiar. It was in fact the same person I raised last week, and she had a new name. I felt immediately justified in my decision. Knowing she was an admin, there was also a fairly high chance she’d been shown the case, so I’d like to think that would have been better than seeing ‘he’. She will be called ‘E’ from now on.
This was, to be honest, pretty cool. I was closeted at the time, not one person at my work knew I was trans, and some of the things I heard said very openly in the office around this time were perhaps quite reflective of this. It was at times difficult, and there wasn’t really anything I could do, coming out did not seem like a wise decision considering the culture. Seeing E appear in the panels really did improve my day. In a world that often feels like it hates us, and a workplace that at times had felt much the same, it’s nice to see someone like you, even if they can’t see you back. More alarms coming through in one of our busiest customers was usually not a good feeling, but it was refreshing to see E, it was a reminder I wasn’t alone. Somewhere out there, probably in the same city as me, there was another trans woman in IT, being herself, working things out and making progress. It’s one of those things that keeps you going on a bad day. Her just being there, still existing, over and over was inspiring to me.
I hope that one day E will see this and know the positive impact she had on my life during that time just by being herself. Coming out really does feel like a statement as much as a life decision, and I think it’s important to know how many people’s lives you can touch without even knowing.
I will probably never meet you, but I hope things go well for you, and you keep being there, over and over, existing as yourself.