I'm Andrea. I'm 38. I've spent fourteen years designing databases for other people's businesses, and I'm good at it: I like things normalized, indexed and documented. This year I'm doing the same for my own life. I'm a transgender woman, and as of Monday, September 13, 1999, I go to work as myself. This is where I keep the notes.

I don't write my old name here, and I'll thank you not to write it to me. Everyone else in these entries gets an initial or a first name, because they didn't ask to be on the Internet.

I watched the Ryder Cup today because my father would be watching the Ryder Cup. That's the whole reason. The Americans went into today down 10 to 6, and by lunchtime out here they'd come back, and a whole team of men in matching shirts was running onto a green in Massachusetts, and I sat on my couch in my bathrobe and cried, which I blame partly on Premarin and partly on golf.

Then, before I could think about it, I called him.

He answered on the second ring. "Holbrook." He always answers the phone like it's the shop floor.

I said, "Dad, it's me." I didn't say which name. I didn't have to.

A long pause. I could hear his TV behind him, the same broadcast as mine, a second or so out of sync, which is the sort of thing I notice.

Then he said, "They came back."

I said, "They did."

He said, "I have to go," and hung up.

Kath says that counts. Kath says for Dad that's practically a parade. I don't know what it is. I'm writing it down so I'll remember it was three sentences, and not zero.

The restroom question. Every one of us has a restroom story. Here is mine, so far.

The week before I started, D. in HR (who has been decent throughout) asked what I planned to do. I said I planned to use the women's room, like a woman. She said some employees "might need time," and asked if I'd be willing, "for now," to use the single-occupancy restroom on the second floor by the loading dock.

For now. I have written enough temporary code to know what "for now" means.

I said yes, because I wanted the first week to be about work. So for a week I walked past the women's room on the third floor, where my desk is, down a flight of stairs and across to the loading dock, three or four times a day. You would be surprised how public a private walk can be.

Today L. from accounting, a grandmother of four with reading glasses on a beaded chain, caught me on the stairs and said, "Honey, where are you going?" I told her. She said, "That's ridiculous," walked me back up to the third-floor women's room herself, and stood at the sink fixing her lipstick until I came out.

Tomorrow I'm going to ask D. to put "for now" in writing, with an end date. Politely. With a proposed schema.

I haven't said enough about G.

G. is our senior Unix administrator. He is fifty-something, has a gray ponytail, rotates the same three Grateful Dead shirts, and speaks about eleven words a day, most of them "reboot." I had been dreading the account changes: login, e-mail alias, phone directory, voicemail. At a company our size that's five forms to three departments, each one a small chance for someone to say my old name out loud across a room.

When I sat down Monday morning, my old login was gone and "aholbrook" was waiting. Mail forwarded. Directory updated. Voicemail greeting cleared so I could record my own. A yellow sticky note on the monitor: "new keys. -G."

I found him in the machine room today to thank him. He didn't look away from the console. He said, "Name's a primary key. You don't make the row ask twice."

Then he said "reboot" to somebody else, and that was the end of the conversation. I've been thinking about that sentence for two days.

Day one.

Alarm at 5:30, though I'd been awake since 4. Did my makeup the way the woman at the department store counter taught me in March, then took off half of it, because it's a Monday at a software company and not the Oscars. Gray slacks, a plum sweater set, flats, and small silver earrings Kath sent in a box marked OPEN MONDAY. I looked like a database engineer. That was the goal.

In the car I played Sarah McLachlan, then turned it off because I was going to cry, then turned it back on and cried a little on 101 anyway and fixed it in the parking garage.

M. at the front desk, who has said good morning to me for four years, said "Good morning, Andrea," like she'd practiced. I suspect she had. My badge worked. On my chair: a card signed by most of my team and a few people I barely know. Somebody drew a little database cylinder with a bow on it.

At 10 we had the regular Monday status meeting. My manager, P., ran it exactly like always, around the table. When he got to me he said, "Andrea, where are we on the replication issue?" I said we were close and gave the numbers. He nodded and moved on, and I understood that he'd planned that too. Ordinary. The most extraordinary thing he could have done.

Not everyone. A man from sales turned all the way around in the hallway to watch me pass. Two people I've known for years found reasons to be very busy. That's fine. People need time. I needed thirty-eight years.

Home at 6:40. Kicked off the flats. Called Kath. She said, "Well?" I said, "I fixed the replication issue." She laughed until she had to put the phone down.

Tomorrow. Clothes laid out on the chair like the night before third grade. I've ironed the same slacks twice. Kath called at ten just to say, "You are going to be so boring tomorrow. It's going to be great." Can't sleep. Going to try anyway.

Sent it at 4:52 p.m. to the ten people on my team, so they'd have the weekend. P. read the draft first and changed one word. Here it is, minus names:

Then I shut down, drove home, and didn't check my mail for three hours, which for me is like not breathing.

By Sunday night: eight replies. Six kind. One that said only "OK. Thanks for letting us know." One from T., who sits across from me: "Cool. Does this mean you'll finally let me denormalize the orders table?" I wrote back: "No." He wrote back: "Worth a shot, Andrea." The first time anyone had written it to me at work.

Two haven't replied. I'm trying not to count.

Told P. at 9 this morning, in the small conference room with the broken blind, before I could talk myself out of it. HR at 11.

I had a one-page summary. Of course I did. What, when, and what I'd need: the systems, the badge, the directory, a date. The last paragraph said, in effect, I'm not asking for anything except to keep doing my job.

P. read it twice. He's forty-five, three kids, a minivan, coaches girls' soccer, and I had no idea what he'd do. What he did was take off his glasses and say, "Okay. What do you need from me?" I said: as ordinary as possible. He said, "I can do ordinary. I'm very good at ordinary."

HR was harder, only because D. admitted, very honestly, that there was no policy, and she had to call the company's lawyer to learn what the rules were. I'd already called one of my own. Neither of us loved the answer. Nothing in writing says they must do this well. They've decided to do it well anyway. I'm grateful, and I'm aware that grateful is not the same as safe.

We settled on Monday, September 13. Twenty-seven days. On the way home I bought a calendar with kittens on it, the only one left at the drugstore in August, and I'm crossing off the days.

Kath drove down from Sacramento for the weekend to help me clean out the closet. Two bags to the thrift store, and one bag of ties I couldn't quite part with. I'm keeping one: the green one Mom gave me in 1987.

Afterward we sat on the floor eating Chinese takeout from the cartons, and she read the letter I wrote to Dad. Four pages. She said, "It's good. It's too long. He won't read past page one." She's right. He reads the sports page and the obituaries and nothing else. I mailed all four pages anyway.

Kath has been, from the first phone call in June, exactly what I needed, which is to say completely unimpressed by my drama. She has called me Bug since she was four and I was one, so that part didn't have to change, and she has not slipped on "she" once.

Dad is seventy-one and lives alone in Fresno, in the house we grew up in, with Mom's roses, which he keeps up badly and faithfully. I don't expect an answer. I expect to check the mailbox every day for a while anyway.

Older entries, January through July, are in the Archives.

If you'd like a note when I update, write me with "notify" in the subject line. To the reader in Oregon who wrote that she did all this in 1983 with no Internet and no Kath: I think about you every morning in the parking garage.