Meghan Stabler is a business executive, national LGBT activist, transsexual woman, and transgender advocate. She has served on the Human Rights Campaign’s Board of Directors since 2008 and is currently Senior Director and Executive Advisor at CA Technologies, a New York-based multi-billion-dollar IT management software and solutions company. Stabler shares with dot429 her journey of transition, its impact on her career, and the work she has done towards establishing equality in the corporate workplace. “Transitioning gender in the workplace is like playing a chess game while spinning plates and herding cats,” says Stabler, who made her public male-female transition several years ago after much deliberation. “The business climate is not overly accepting, so you are already laying out multiple game plans based on the expected results and things that are currently happening. You have to think to yourself, ‘I want this down the road, and to make that happen, I need to have these conversations with these people and this policy in place.'" Stabler believes that policies accommodating transgender employees are necessary due to the lack of employee equality in corporate America.
The decision to transition was not simple for Stabler who, as a young boy living an otherwise happy childhood in England, had always felt trapped in the wrong body. “I always felt there was something different about me. It wasn’t until I was 10 or 11 and I saw a newspaper article about a tennis player called Renee Richards [who had transitioned from male to female] when the proverbial light bulb went off over my head.” Puberty was even more difficult for Stabler, who felt her body changing in ways her mind could not agree with. “I was going to bed at night praying for three things: I would wake up a girl, my parents would still love me, and my wardrobe would change.”
Unable to understand what she considered genetic bad luck, Stabler focused on her career and maintained a busy work schedule to avoid confronting her misgivings. “I moved up the corporate ladder to a senior vice president position and used the momentum to hide the true me,” she says. “The only time I thought about the true me was, sadly, when I saw myself in the mirror getting dressed in the morning. I continued to use work to suppress things…but the more I used my energy towards work, the more the real me was fighting to come out.”
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