"Are you a man" — hand chop left — "or a woman?" — hand chop right, asks a Nightline correspondent interviewing Megan Wallent, the Microsoft executive who came out as transgender last fall. "I'm me," Wallent replies. Good answer! But did the Nightline guy really need 15 seconds to spit out the question?
Megan Wallent, the Microsoft executive who first revealed her plans to become a woman on Valleywag, has told her story to ABC's Nightline. The segment airs tonight at 11:35 p.m. on KGO. Wallent rarely speaks about her relationship with her wife Anh. But in the TV profile, Wallent explains how he first confided his discomfort with his birth gender to her. "It felt like a betrayal," Anh told Nightline. "In 38 years he couldn't find someone who he felt comfortable enough to open up to and share this." Until Wallent met her, that is. The couple, who have a young child born before Wallent's transition, say they are staying together. When I first met them last December, shortly after Wallent's first surgery, the two spent most of lunch flirting with each other like newlyweds.
Megan Wallent, the newly female executive at Microsoft who formerly went by the name "Michael," reports that her return to the office yesterday was mostly uneventful. The women's restrooms have pink tile, she discovered. (No "trannie restrooms" for her.) "Microsoft Pink," she says, as opposed to the usual Microsoft-logo blue one encounters so much on the Redmond campus. Telling her story to Valleywag and then starting her own blog helped, she believes: "I thought just about everyone who would interact with me knew. Surprising people with a cool new set of 38Cs — not a good idea."
Wednesday was Michael Wallent's last day of work at Microsoft. Not because the fast-rising executive, previously responsible for the Internet Explorer browser, quit, or was fired. Nothing of the sort. Rather, on Monday, he'll begin a course of surgeries that will allow him to return to his job in January as Megan Wallent. Wallent, who came out as transgender earlier this fall, has started blogging about the experience.
Michael Wallent, a general manager at Microsoft, will return to work in January as Megan Wallent. He came out to colleagues as transgender last month, first in person and then by email. Wallent says he encountered nothing but support — mixed, of course, with some awkward curiosity. That's unremarkable. Microsoft is located in the progressive Pacific Northwest, where one's less likely to raise an eyebrow at Wallent's self-discovery and more likely to worry about the politically correct term to describe it. (For the record, "sex change" is considered derogatory by many; the preferred word is "transitioning.") He's unlikely to encounter blatant transphobia on the job. He should worry instead about plain old-fashioned sexism. How will Wallent's developers react when they come to work on January 2 and it hits them: They're working for a girl?
