Title: REFLECTIONS FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE GLASS CEILING: FINDING MY TRUE SELF IN CORPORATE AMERICA
For Stephanie Battaglino, her lifelong journey of self-discovery closely paralleled her daily grind of trudging up the corporate ladder. Amidst the successes and failures of working as a male in the corporate world, Stephanie finally realized that the only path to career fulfillment was to embrace her true self once and for all. That it resulted in her becoming the first officer in the history of New York Life to come out on the job as transgender is not surprising. What was surprising was her abrupt introduction to that generations-old nemesis of working women everywhere, the Glass Ceiling. What she quickly realized was that her embrace of her authentic self came with a price: the loss of male privilege.
Reflections from Both Sides of the Glass Ceiling: Finding My Authentic Self in Corporate America is part memoir, part cautionary tale of what it is like to experience a career on both sides of the gender divide. Stephanie’s unique and very personal experience provides a powerful trailblazing story of inspiration, self-discovery, and triumph – for ALL women.
Chapter One
Hiding in Plain Sight
“Growth is painful. Change
is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t
belong.”
~
Mandy Hale
KEARNY,
NEW JERSEY LIES EIGHT MILES DUE WEST OF New York City. I had a clear view of the city’s skyline, across
the Meadowlands, from my
high school. I like to say that I grew up in the shadow of the city, and in
many respects, I did—both literally and figuratively. It was a place where I
found out that feeling different from everybody else meant hiding in the
shadows at a very young age. For me, hiding wasn’t an option. I
was a natural extrovert. On the playground, in school, and at family gatherings, I was
always the center of attention—and I enjoyed the spotlight. So, instead of
retreating to the shadows, I hid in plain sight.
God, I wanted to get out of that town as fast as I could. By the
time I attended high school, I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my
future—whatever it was going to look like—was most definitely not going to take place
in Kearny. I feared that if I didn’t go away to college,
I would
be resigned to a life of pumping gas and on the weekends hanging in some dive
bar. But that only sounded good in conversation with friends. I was going for the laugh—and I
usually got it. The real reason
that I was running away was
that I was running from myself. Wearing a mask every day was exhausting.
Leaving home meant that maybe I could finally leave behind the
dirty little secret I held onto for so long. In my most private and intimate
moments, when no one was around, and I could retreat from being the center of
attention, I felt like a girl inside, not a boy. I realize now that it was the
first of many attempts to eradicate this “sickness” inside me. It was a
pseudo-sickness that I would battle in a series of epic failures both in the
workplace and my personal life for the next twenty-seven years.
My socialization process as an overachieving male in the
workplace and society was
well on its way. My acquired machismo gave me a sense of competitiveness that fueled my
successes and failures as a manager, executive, and a male in corporate life. My desire to compete
and win has been a part of
my personality my entire life, even after I transitioned. It is a trait that
ultimately chaffed my male colleagues who were convinced that women should not
act that way.
During that first part of my life, I had no one and nowhere to
turn to with my feelings.
There was no outlet for me to share my deepest feelings. No support group. No internet. So
I just lowered my head and so journeyed on, thinking that if I worked hard
enough and did all the things that
“manly men” did, I could destroy all traces of this horrible sickness.
Growing Up Different: Was God Joking?
I am the youngest of four
children born to Jim and Rose Battaglino. I was born nearly twelve years after my middle brother and
sister, fraternal twins,
and almost fifteen years after my oldest brother. Despite the age
difference—and what seemed like a generational difference—I got along just fine with my brothers and
sister. But we only lived together in the same house, and in the case of my brothers and me, in the
same attic room—for a few years. Both of my brothers were married and out of
the house by the time I was thirteen.
I was raised in a very Catholic family. I was begrudgingly
carted off to mass every
Sunday at St. Stephen’s Church. It was there that I first realized I was
different from other boys my age, and more significantly, that it was a sin to feel that way.
There was no way God could have ever created somebody like me on purpose.
I must have done something horribly wrong to have this happen to
me. I couldn’t determine if it
was God’s will that drew me toward my mother’s closet that very first time. I was convinced that God
was playing some sort of
horrible joke on me. After all, he was watching me every single time that I would feel that
overwhelming urge to slip into my mother’s or my sister’s undergarments and
retreat into my fantasy world of
being a girl—He knew I couldn’t stop. God knew it was never going to
go away. And, He was responsible for making me the way that I am.
Was this supposed to be my little version of hell on Earth that
I was fated to endure for the rest of my life? I even thought it was all just
some sort of supreme test that I had to pass to earn my place in heaven. I figured
that I deserved it. After all, I couldn’t stop myself. I had to be punished for
feeling the way I felt. How could I ever be one of God’s divine children? I was destined for the
spiritual scrapheap. All I ever wanted was to wake up one morning and find that
I was magically transformed into a girl. That was far too much to ask of
God.
All of this served to instill a deep sense of guilt and shame in
me that I was determined, at all costs, to keep hidden from everyone. How could
I ever possibly tell one of
the priests or the nuns about my feelings? That was just not going to happen. Ever. It was a pang of
guilt and shame that I
carried like an ever-growing millstone around my neck for more than forty
years.
I was very conflicted, and I wanted to do everything right. I
made myself half-crazy trying to make everybody happy. Go to catechism classes and obey the nuns. Take all of
my sacraments and be a good boy. Happy parents meant I could more easily get away with all the
cross dressing and all of the masturbatory fantasies of what it would be like
to be a girl like my mom and my sister.
But this was
all a sin, wasn’t it? I was damned to the eternal flames of hell, wasn’t I? Those thoughts would stop me, but only for a moment. They could not overcome the much stronger feelings of
femininity I would
experience when I went off to my secret world. Once there, I couldn’t have cared less about all of the retribution. It was the furthest thing
from my mind. But I would never get to heaven being this way. I even thought
for a time that being a priest might be an excellent way to go. I could do the proverbial end around
all of this. Thankfully, I decided that wasn’t a good option for the Roman Catholic Church and me, after all.
The Times They Were A-Changing …
The world—as I mostly saw it through our furniture-sized RCA
color television —was turning upside down in front of me. So many moments
unfolded before my eyes: the war in Vietnam, Dr. King’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, and
Woodstock. They all occupy, each in
their
way, an indelible place in my memory. But what rises above all of that are
my memories of the women’s liberation movement: Gloria Steinem and the
ritualized, public bra-burning that feminists did in the early 1970s. These
images were always on the news, and it hit much closer to home.
My
sister Betty was a feminist in her own right. Well, as much as she could be a
“feminist” in a very male-dominated household like mine— with parents like
Archie and Edith Bunker of the hugely popular All in the Family television show of that same time. I can
remember my sister and her girlfriends having the audacity to wear hot pants
and go go boots, which was the very trendy fashion choice of newly liberated
women of the day, out to the bar they used to hang out at one particular Friday
night—much to my father and mother’s chagrin. But what stayed with me most was how women, including my
sister and her friends, were celebrating
their womanhood in the fashion choices they made, the cigarettes they smoked,
and aligning themselves with the broader movement with the “Women’s Lib”
buttons they had on their purses.
In their way, these symbols of culture sent a message to the
world around them that they were standing up to society and saying it was time
we were treated fairly in the workplace and society as a whole—and it was time
the men of the world realized that. It struck me as strangely empowering
because it encouraged them to change how they carried themselves in the world. They seemed to
have a newfound pride in being women
and their solidarity with the other women in their social circle. And since I
was so close to my sister at that time, my gender issues not withstanding, I
felt that connection too. It all made perfect sense to me. Times were changing,
and it was all reflected back to me through the television and my sister’s
representation of what the movement looked like close to home. If it were
me—and I so wished it was then—I think I would have been a part of the women’s
lib movement too. It was time for women to be treated fairly, I thought, on an
equal footing to men in all
aspects of society. Pretty big thoughts for a twelve-year-old kid. Little did I know that I would experience that
lack of equal footing for myself later in my life.
But
the reality of social change only went so far in my house. My
mom
and dad were very conservative in their views on the roles of men and women.
Dad was the breadwinner, and mom was the homemaker. As the only girl among the
siblings, my sister had it rough because my mom had her life all figured out.
It was already pre-scripted: find a husband who will provide for you, have
kids, and stay home and raise them. My mom—and my dad, too—certainly felt that
my sister should be pursuing the whole “house with the white picket fence”
thing. From my vantage
point as someone who was trying to emulate, on some level, how my sister presented herself to the
world, the script our parents had for her life created an uphill battle in her
quest to be an independent woman.
Betty was trying to find her way as a working woman in the
world, which in the early 1970s was still something of a new phenomenon. She
tried to establish some independence measure from my parents, who had a
more conventional idea of how things should be for her. I can remember it
leading to more than one argument between my sister and my mother, especially
when Betty presented them with the idea of mov ing out and finding an
apartment. She made the mistake of asking their permission rather than just
doing it, and it led to utter pandemonium. You would have thought my sister was
declaring her allegiance to the Communist Party. Suffice it to say, it did not
end well at all. At least she emerged from the confrontation still in
possession of her bedroom in our house.
I believed my sister had the right as a woman to blaze her own
trail. My parents held her back and forced her to conform to outdated social stereotypes. The social upheaval was
running rampant in society, and my parents were simply not participating—and expecting my sister to
do the same. It wasn’t fair to her then, and it feels just as unfair today.
While
the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s undoubtedly created a tidal wave of change, it also
marked the start of a debate about women’s roles, and more broadly, gender roles in society that
still rages to this day.
While gains for women, particularly in the workplace, have certainly been realized since that time,
it seems to me that so much more is still left to be done. The societal definitions of what
women’s and men’s roles
look like are shifting. The rigidity of gender roles seems to have softened.
For example, men can choose to stay at home and raise the kids
while
their wife goes off to work each day. But in the workplace, this shift is less apparent. If it weren’t, then perhaps we
wouldn’t still be talking about a phenomenon like
the glass ceiling in the first place. The women’s liberation movement may
have started a revolution, but for many of the women I worked with, they
were still waiting for that revolution to arrive.
I distinctly remember hanging out with my sister when she would
be getting ready for work in the morning before heading off to school. In her
room, the radio would be playing the hit songs of 1970, like The Carpenters’ “Close to You” or “I’ll Be There” by the
Jackson Five, while she sat
in front of her mirror and put on her makeup. I would sit mesmerized by how she would transform herself with
each step of the process. First, she’d apply the foundation, then the blush, followed by her eye
shadow, mascara, and lipstick. It was like she was taking on a different
persona, ever so slowly, so precisely, one step at a time. I wanted to do that
too. I wanted to be able to
create a different “me” for the world to see, but I didn’t dare. I couldn’t—at least not
when anyone was around to see. It was simply not in the cards for me then.
I wondered what it must have been like for my sister at her workplace.
From the stories I heard, she was well-liked and had lots of work friends, but
what was it like inside the walls of the now-defunct Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company? I didn’t think at all about
it then, but
I wonder
if how she dressed, did her hair, and did her makeup had any sort of bearing on
her status in her workplace.
I was
captivated by my sister’s daily transformation. She became someone
else right before my
eyes. And I found that strangely appealing. Her routine pulled me in. It was as if she had to create a
mask of some sort every morning that separated the “around the house” person
from the “working
woman” person. Whatever it was, it was a daily ritual that I found myself doing in much the same way
when I was preparing for myfirst day of work as my authentic self some thirty
or so years later.
My Father’s Lessons
My dad was a Teamster—and a patriot. He was a veteran of World
War II, where he served in the Pacific as a Seabee in the United States Navy. They
were the ones who built the airstrips—among other things— after we had
overtaken places like Guadalcanal, an island once held by the Japanese. He went
off to war not long after my oldest brother was born. When he got back home,
having no high school diploma, he found a job driving a truck. It was to become
his life’s work, and that’s how he became a union man. “That was back when
being in a union meant something,” he used to tell me. The trouble is, when he
finally retired from
driving, his pension somehow became less than it was supposed to be. But his distinctly organized labor
focus had an impact on me. It made me realize that as I grew up and began to
think about what I wanted to do professionally, I most certainly did not want
to be a tradesperson, or a truck driver like my dad was. I had loftier
aspirations of nailing that executive position with all of the perks and the
corner office. Fortunately, my dad was in full support of that vision. He often
told me that he wanted a better life for me. That’s one reason I knew that
college was most definitely in the cards for me at a very young age. Despite
never graduating high school, my dad knew that education was the most crucial prerequisite for my success in
corporate America, and I ran with it. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped.
Like
many fathers of his generation, he wasn’t exactly the
nurturing sort; that just
wasn’t his way. I don’t recall him ever saying the words, “I love you,” to me. But he was always supportive of whatever I was
doing in school and sports.
I did whatever I could to make him proud of me. Not just in sports, in life as well. I couldn’t ever tell him about who—or what—I really was. I doubt that he ever had a clue about the
“real” me. I hardly knew myself. Was I overcompensating for not having the
cojones, to be honest with
him? Perhaps. I never really thought that much about it then.
When I was a kid, my father and I went to the Two Guys department
store together, where he’d buy me a Matchbox car or truck. I loved playing with trucks and cars when I was
little. I was always building some imaginary highway on the living room floor while my parents
watched television. I never
had any inclination to play with dolls or anything like that. I think the closest I ever got to
that was my G.I. Joe collection that my uncle Augie started for me. He worked
as a window dresser in New York and could bring them home for free after the
display came down. My dad and my uncle also took me to my first baseball game
(and many others) at the old Yankee Stadium.
I savor my memories of my time with my dad and uncle, even
though they are a bit male-centric. My socialization process growing up was
centered around being the alpha male in society. I went along willingly because
it allowed me to hide my
true feelings. I didn’t embrace
my feminine feelings. I ran from them until I
couldn’t any longer. That took over forty years! From around the
age of ten right through my high school years, I was most vulnerable when I was all by myself. It
was only then that I’d
wander off into my fantasy world, thinking that, “If I did it just this one more time,” that I wouldn’t ever do it again. The only person I was
deluding was myself.
I hid
it from him, just like I did from everyone else around me. I didn’t feel right about not being honest with him then, and even some eighteen
years after his
death, I still don’t feel good about it. But my gender
issues became such an immovable mountain in my mind that I felt like I had no
other choice but to hide my true self from him and everyone else. I had fully
compartmentalized the idea of being a girl into the deepest recesses of my
brain. The mere notion that I would reveal the real “me” to the world brought nothing but abject fear.
And not just any garden-variety
anxiety. I’m talking about the kind of fear that permeates every fiber of your being and paralyzes
you in a way that would make petrified wood seem like a wet sponge. Coming out
to my father, or anyone else for that matter, was just not an option for
me.
My
Mother’s Pain
By all accounts, my mother had a pretty rough life. Like my dad,
she was born in Jersey
City, the third sibling of four. Both of her parents had passed away by the time she was fifteen.
She dropped out of high school and
went to work as a laborer in a cigarette factory in Jersey City by the name of P. Lorillard. That’s where she
learned to smoke for the first time.
But it wasn’t the cigarettes that ultimately led to my mother’s
passing. She died of ovarian cancer in 1986, at just sixty-six years old. I was
twenty-seven years old at
the time. My mother was not present in my life very much in her last years
because I had distanced myself both physically and emotionally. In the late ‘70s, I lived in
Delaware and was floundering
at life, working my way through two failed marriages and dealing poorly with my
gender issues.
To
this day, I never really quite understood what happened to her.
From right after my junior
high year through college, my mom was physically present, but she had tuned us out. I can vaguely
remember discussions among
the adults in my house about the effects of menopause and low blood sugar, leading to
“episodes” of bizarre behavior. Still, as I look back on it, I honestly think my mother had a nervous
breakdown. She became a shell of her former self.
Before getting sick, she was a
gregarious, warm-hearted woman who would welcome a first-time visitor to our home with open
arms with a, “What can I get you?” After getting sick, she became vacant and
swallowed up by all the pain she absorbed in her life.
I never saw my mother as any kind of
role model of female behavior. She
was too broken to be present in a nurturing way. Through no fault of her own,
she surrendered her role as my mother during the most critical years of my life.
She didn’t share in any
of my academic and athletic successes—or any other part of my life, for that matter.
Everything I tried to accomplish in my early years was to make my mom and dad
proud of me. It did not matter what I accomplished. My mother had checked out. I
felt more isolated than ever before. Sure, I kept up appearances on the outside, but inside I was a mess.
As the founder and owner of Follow Your Heart, LLC (www.StephanieBattaglino.com) Stephanie is an internationally recognized speaker, workshop presenter, trainer, author and workplace diversity & inclusion consultant. She currently sits on the Board of PFLAG National and is the Chair of their Business Advisory Council.
Here’s what critics are saying about Stephanie Battaglino:
“From all of us – for your brilliant words and thoughts . . . And heart.”
-Diane Sawyer, ABC News
“You were just outstanding . . . with your presentation and guidance during our learning and discussion. Thank you for providing such important and current information. We appreciate you and what you do.”
May Snowden, Senior Fellow & Program Director, Human Capital Practice, The Conference Board
“Thank you Stephanie for joining us today during FMC Corporation Pride Month celebration. Your personal story was educational, informative and inspiring.”
-Subarna Malakar, Director and Global Diversity & Inclusion Officer, FMC Corporation
“I have had the pleasure of working with Stephanie on an enrichment event at our company and got to know her further at the following Out & Equal Workplace Summit. I’ve found her honesty and heartfelt way she tells her story to be very meaningful to me. She played a large role in introducing me t – and our entire company – to transgender issues and what I believe is the next frontier in creating diverse and accepting workplaces. I now proudly count myself among the allies for the transgender community.”
-Heather Gill, Diversity & Inclusion Lead, Land O’Lakes
“I would like to extend a most sincere thank you for your inspiration, and for joining our company’s’ diversity efforts in support of the LGBTQ community. I have received several messages from executives who were present and had great feedback to share!
-Juan Camilo Romero, Manager, Diversity & Inclusion Strategies, Macy’s, Inc.
“It is with great pride that Deena and I announce the formal launch of the Trans Toolkit project that you so generously collaborated on with us this past Spring. We truly would not have been able to do this project without each and every one of your thoughtful contributions. We thank you for your time, your passion and your contribution to this project.”
-Beck Bailey, Director of Employee Engagement, Workplace Equality Program, Human Rights Campaign (HRC)
“The feedback from the Commissioner and the entire Executive staff has been overwhelmingly positive! Everyone here is excited about the possibilities of doing more to develop the Agency’s Transgender Rights and Inclusion competence. There is no doubt that the Executives would love to have Stephanie back to train the entire 5,400 person workforce if it were possible and practical. I would not be surprised if they started a petition for Stephanie to present full-time, but I digress.”
-James L. Hallman, Chief Diversity & EEO Officer, New York City Department of transportation
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