Dysphoria had cooked my ability to do my last job, so it was time to find a new one. With the structural integrity of our social safety net being low and stigmatization of the transgender experience being high, I could not retreat to focus solely on my transition and then reemerge on the job market as the realized version of the real and better me. The knife that is the debasing nature of the job search twisted in the form of having to put a name I desparately want to discard along with a title I do not have a strong affinity for on the top of every resume. Rugpulls are the name of the game in society writ large, and being unable to accept the first offer I got because the landlord for the last vacancy in town decided the arrangement described in the job wasn't enough financial reassurance to apply for the unit extending my layoff from 4 months to 10 fits that to a tee. As of the time of this writing, I am at the job I described previously, working in the closet for inscrutable reasons.
Gender is frequently likened to performance art.[1] Appropriately, playing with this framework allows one to identify the self-actualization that comes with gender transition as figuring out the best role for one to play. In the medium of role-playing games, the creators may find it convenient to make up a system that defines all the roles one can play, known as "jobs" or "classes"; this is the reason for the parentheticals in this post's title. As hormone replacement therapy started working to make my body function the way I want it to, I began to think about what aesthetics and mannerisms I would like to utilize to ensure my outward-facing appearance is as authentic to myself as what I see and feel to be true when I'm naked in the mirror. The framework I used for this was abstract, often (but not always) single-word job titles just like a RPG would have.
My current and most recent prior jobs were in the same morose field and involved a lot of working in the morose field. With this in mind, it's fitting that I theorized the ideal of the Ordinary Office Lady to express my desire of being productive while also not taking on a huge physical and mental burden to get the job done. As a bonus, I'd have a nice outfit that I wouldn't be at risk of destroying. I think the pantsuit fits best with the "all business" mindset I take towards achieving my personal triumphs. The pantsuit also brings with it the connotation of the attention and importance that comes with being in a public-facing position. This is great, but at odds with the archetype of "Ordinary Office Lady". This contradiction gets squared by the fact that I'm willing to rise to the occasion of being the type of authority figure I want but don't have: an adult who treats their audience like adults too. To be more specific about how I prefer to exert "authority", I most closely see myself as one who is armed with knowledge and is eager both to apply it myself and help others wield it.
I can think of a pair of single-word job titles in my head that check all of these boxes. The first one, "librarian", is attainable enough that I can easily envision myself putting in the work for it if I have to say goodbye to manufacturing for good. I can be an "Ordinary Office Lady" in all aspects of the ideal with the added bonus of serving a universal public good instead of a private corporation. The ground rules of a public library are in effect everyone engaging in parallel play of my preferred workflow: completing tasks in peace and quiet while extending the occasional helping hand. The other, which arose from the most memorable reaction I recieved to me correcting them for misgendering me,[3] is the "referee". It's funny to think that two jobs with opposite average approval ratings are spiritually similar, but hear me out. You are responsible for a body of knowledge organized by numbers with multiple decimal points, have ground rules to enforce, occasionally spend time looking closely at screens, and keep a quiet confidence.
Ultimately, what got me to think about how I live and express myself in these abstract, RPG-esque terms, is that it is an extension of what my single most base desire is: for the world to be a simple place to live and make choices. I've reflected on this want a lot, and have made myself better equipped to navigate the world we actually live in.