The Future That Arrived Politely

A personal recollection of how one profession quietly became a woman’s world—and how close I came to crossing its final, unspoken line.

On Friday, I posted a fictional story about men working as women in order to be employed in a near-future woman’s world. Most readers dismissed it outright. It will never happen, they said. Or, it certainly isn’t happening now.

I understand the reaction. I once would have agreed with them.

I spent more than forty years working as a technical writer in the data communications industry. At the same time, I freelanced as a writer for a national organization representing amateur radio operators. Writing, technical or otherwise, was my professional life.

When I started, the field was unmistakably male. Every technical writer I worked with was a man. So were my supervisors. So were the managers above them. It wasn’t something anyone commented on; it was simply the way things were.

Over time, without fanfare or announcement, that changed.

By the time I retired in 2007, nearly all of my fellow technical writers were women. My supervisors were women. My managers were women. New hires were women. No memo was ever issued declaring technical writing a woman’s profession, but by the end of my career, that was effectively what it had become.

Men were still there, of course. I was still there. Men presenting as men could still find and keep work. But the center of gravity had shifted, quietly and completely.

Somewhere along the way, Halloween became a small personal experiment.

On seven occasions, I went to work dressed in what I half-jokingly called “office girl drag.” The first two times, my employer encouraged costumes by sponsoring Halloween contests, which I won. The following five years, there were no contests, no encouragement, no particular reason to do it—except that I wanted to.

There was never any formal objection. At first, there was friendly ribbing, the kind meant to signal tolerance without engagement. But as I continued to show up en femme every October 31, the tone changed. People stopped joking. They adjusted. Eventually, I sensed that many coworkers had quietly concluded this wasn’t just a costume—that I was something else, something they didn’t fully understand but were willing to respect.

That realization lingered with me longer than the costumes did.

I began to consider what it would mean to go to work en femme on an ordinary day. Not as a statement. Not as a demand. Just as a continuation. I turned it over in my mind more than once.

Before I could act on it, my employer offered an early-retirement package—generous enough to close that door without regret. I accepted.

I never worked en femme full-time. Still, I attended my going-away dinner and two post-retirement company Christmas parties dressed as a woman. By then, it felt less like a performance and more like a quiet consistency.

Looking back now, my fictional woman’s world no longer feels quite so speculative. What I imagined in fiction was not a sudden upheaval but the removal of a final, unspoken assumption that men could remain comfortably within a woman-dominated professional space without ever being asked to adapt themselves to it. My own experience suggests the groundwork was already laid. The transition didn’t arrive with rules or ultimatums. It arrived gradually, politely, and almost invisibly.

And so it goes.

Wearing Shein

Mariusz Ostrowski femulating Shazza on Polish television's Twoja Twarz Brzmi Znajomo. Click here to view this femulation on YouTube.