📚First Chapter Reveal: REFLECTIONS FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE GLASS CEILING by Stephanie Battaglino

Title: REFLECTIONS FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE GLASS CEILING: FINDING MY TRUE SELF IN CORPORATE AMERICA
Author: Stephanie Battaglino
Publisher: L’Oste Vineyard Press
Pages: 286
Genre: Memoir

BOOK BLURB

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.

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About the Author

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

WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://stephaniebattaglino.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/StephanieFYH

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