n the summer of 2006, a friend rushed into Gretchen Ruck’s office and, laughing, closed the door.
       “What’s that?” Ruck asked.
       “You were just walking down the hallway,” the friend said, trying to control her laughter, “and afterward these younger associates who didn’t know you were giggling and I heard one say to the other, ‘Was that Pat from “Saturday Night Live”?’”
       Ruck was stung by the comparison. Though she was in the middle of a transition from male to female, changing from Greg to Gretchen, she didn’t think she looked like the chubby, androgynous “Pat” character, played by Julia Sweeney on the late-night comedy show.
       “I am not built like that!" she told her friend.
       By that time, Ruck was living outside of work as a woman, but her job at KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, was the last frontier. It was a conservative company, and Ruck worked as a senior manager in data security at the Washington, D.C. office, where most clients were government and military types. Ruck had drawn up a meticulous plan for revealing her new self, and she was not ready to go public.
       But as she waited for the right time to come out, her hormone treatments were causing her to lose weight, and she was growing out her hair. Her male form was melting away, and to camouflage her changing body just a little longer, she came to work with two or three T-shirts under a button-down shirt and a suit jacket, sweltering in the summer heat. She slicked her corkscrew curls back, trying to hide their length.
       “I mean, it was pathetic,” recalls Ruck, 36. “To me it was a bizarre joke. I was wearing all these bulky clothes, and it wasn’t untrue. But it’s like, damn it, I have totally different glasses than Pat!”
       Ruck had known there was something wrong with her gender since she was four years old.
       “I just realized that things weren’t the way they were supposed to be,” she remembers. “Things didn’t seem fair. People said I was a boy and that I couldn’t wear certain things or play with certain things. It just simply was not right, and it never went away, of course.”
       She kept her gender problem a secret, compensating by growing a mustache and building muscles until she could bench-press more than 300 pounds.
       “I tried to be very macho. I was like, maybe if I do enough stuff like that my brain will flip over and be a boy brain, like, rock on, let’s go to the strip bar!” Ruck laughs today.
       Ruck married at 22 and had two sons, but by the time she was 30, she realized she could no longer stand to be someone she was not.      
      “It got to the point where I was preparing to kill myself,” Ruck says today. “It wasn’t an emotional decision, it was like, well, you know, here’s my two choices, I transition or I die. Seems reasonable. That’s the only reason you do it. You don’t do it for any other reason, because it’s so difficult.”
       In the fall of 2005, Ruck began therapy and hormones. Realizing that she would eventually have to come out as transgender to her bosses and co-workers, she sent an anonymous email to the human resources department at KPMG, where she had been working for more than a year, asking about what would happen. Fortunately, they had just changed their Equal Employment Opportunity policy to protect gender identity, but this change was theoretical. They didn’t know how to deal with a real-life transgender employee.
       “They were like, ‘We’re so ready to help, now what do you want us to do?’” Ruck recalls. “And I’m like, ‘I kind of thought you guys would know what to do.’ You just kind of assume that they’re the experts. But they had no clue.”
       Ruck realized the burden was on her, and she spent the next few months planning her approach, talking to other trans people to find out what worked for them. In April 2006, she met with her human resources representatives in person.
       “I put together a PowerPoint presentation,” she says. “It was, I think, very helpful for them. The language of business is PowerPoint. Think of it like any other project: yeah, it's about something weird, but it's just another project.”
       In the presentation, Ruck explained the basics of gender identity and how she would go about transitioning at work. “I realized that I had to pretend to be the expert, since they wouldn’t,” she says. When you’re the first person to transition at a company, she explains, “you’re a trailblazer, which means you’re putting your ass on the line,” but you also “get to dictate the way things go, because if you say it with enough gumption they think it’s the truth: This is the way things are supposed to happen."
       Over the next few months, Ruck continued to go to work as a man, though she realized her masculine appearance was becoming less convincing.
       DeAndre DeVane, who now works closely with Ruck, was a senior associate at the time. He recalls “this person with big curly hair, and it just kept getting bigger and curlier. I’m like, ‘What is going on with that mop?’”
       Like most of Ruck’s coworkers, DeVane had never known a transgender person before, so it did not occur to him that Greg Ruck was transitioning. When they began working together in early 2007, Ruck had to explain what “transgender” meant.
       “I never put any thought into how much of an impact gender identity disorder could have on someone’s entire life,” says DeVane, who became friends with Ruck after they both transferred to New York. “But it’s difficult for you not to take into consideration someone that you know, respect and care about, once you know what the struggle really is about.”
       In Summer 2006, Ruck came out to close friends, and then she announced her transition to her boss—this time, with a slightly different PowerPoint presentation. She planned to leave work in September and come back as a woman in October. In August her boss leaked the story and she had to come out early, but she had prepared so thoroughly that it was only a matter of changing a few dates. In a letter to colleagues, she explained her transition and reassured them that she was still the same person she had always been.
       “She was very methodical in her approach of everything that needed to happen,” says DeVane, “She knew what she had to do.”
       Besides the early outing, Ruck’s work transition went smoothly. She had been planning to move to KPMG’s Albuquerque office, but in October 2006 the company transferred her instead to its New York headquarters, where she began work as a woman. Still, she makes no secret about being trans.
       “I think being out at work is the best possible way to protect yourself,” she says. “It’s scary to be out at work,” but “I take my rights very seriously. I'm not doing it just for me, I'm doing it for everyone else who comes after me.”

Read about Stephanie Battaglino at New York Life or Mike Waldman at Baruch College, or
learn about political issues important to the trans community.