Transitioning as a Hubber

When I joined GitHub, my legal name was Ursula—but my handle was gleeblezoid. Now, as Arthur, I’m still gleeblezoid.

Since our remote-first culture primarily uses handles, transitioning at GitHub was easier than it would have been earlier in my career. I previously worked in IT at companies that only used names for identification, which can be challenging for professionals transitioning.

I started my career doing IT support and operational work, but being interested in computers meant teaching myself how to code. A colleague from a previous role referred me to GitHub, and I started out five years ago on the IT Engineering team. After repeatedly bothering various security teams with issues and pull requests, I got adopted into the Enterprise Security team after just six months. I’ve been there ever since.

While here, I’ve been proud to work with my team on migrating our main SaaS platform to infrastructure as code, and to be a guest speaker a handful of times at Oxford University on the subject of version control.

But another great thing about working here: GitHub offers gender affirming care related benefits to all employees in terms of covering healthcare; I can expense voice training, HRT prescriptions, and therapy among other things.

There are also less obvious things that made GitHub a safe place for me to transition. Being a remote-first company means I don’t need to agonize over what to wear to the office or who will see me on the way there. Most of my work is captured in writing within Slack or GitHub itself, so when I started voice training and eventually having my voice break on HRT I wasn’t spending the whole day talking to people out loud.

We have the kind of culture where my main avatar can be a cartoon frog in a suit and nobody bats an eye, which removes the entire problem of people guessing my gender by my appearance.

I know a lot of people in the tech industry, and more trans people than the average person probably does. I know people who are closeted at work, people who go through bureaucratic nightmares on changing their name, and people for whom coming out at work is something they end up doing on a recurring basis with every new set of people they interact with.

I’ve not experienced that. Outside of the understandable bureaucratic friction of changing my name in places like payroll it’s been smooth. My team call me what I want to be called and treat me like a regular human being—as has everyone else at work I’ve interacted with. I updated my name and pronouns on our internal systems, and that was that.

Being trans isn’t easy or universally accepted. I’m not sure when I’ll next get to see my overseas teammates in person, for example. It’s also not an experience solely defined by hardship or social barriers. There is a great deal of joy in showing up as yourself and in sharing that joy with others. I nearly cried on a Zoom call when I heard someone use my name and refer to me as “him” for the first time at work, and I absolutely did cry when one of my teammates sent me a shaving kit in the mail.

Every Hubber I have mentioned my transition to has been genuinely happy for me. Several of them expressed this through Arthur the aardvark, and Monty Python Holy Grail memes (we are geeks after all).

I’ve always been a man, I just needed time and support to live as one and participate as one in society. In most settings I need to explain to people how Ursula Searle became Arthur Searle, but at GitHub I’ve thankfully always been gleeblezoid.

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