than someone that I was pretending to be for a long time.”
Step forward as your authentic self at Johnson Controls
Saoirse got the ball rolling with HR and discussed the surprisingly painless process of changing her name across platforms. The following week she opened up to her manager. “He was enthusiastically supportive. It’s a strange feeling where you’re basically 100% certain that this is going to be taken positively. But it’s still a little scary!” When Saoirse emailed the news to the rest of her team – approximately 75-80 people – she was met with an “overwhelmingly positive” response. “I think something like over half of the Tech Comms department came up to personally say ‘congratulations, I’m so happy for you,’ or they sent me an email or Teams message. It has really been overt acceptance, which is really nice. “I think that Johnson Controls does work to establish quite an open and accepting environment. Like I said in the email to the team, ‘thank you for making this the kind of place where we can be the truest and happiest versions of ourselves.’ So I knew it would be okay.”
Chryssa Dislis Johnson Controls strives to create a safe space for all - LGBTQIA+ folks and their allies. Chryssa Dislis is a proud ally to the community and mother to her transgender son. With her son’s permission, Chryssa is open about her parenting experience with her colleagues and receives only support in return, with a touch of curiosity at times. There’s such an appetite for this information in the workplace that she spoke to the Johnson Controls Business Resource Group JC4E about parenting a transgender child. “I think it’s important. Here we are doing everyday work, and we’ve all sorts of families. I find that if people read critical press articles that essentially say, ‘kids are suddenly becoming trans’ they think it’s terrible! But then you meet somebody whose child has done all that, and they’re happy and living their life. My son has just graduated, and he’s got a girlfriend and they’re off to Portugal for a week. And it’s all fine, actually. I would much rather have a happy son than an unhappy daughter.”
And of course, we cannot forget the question at hand; what does Pride mean to Saoirse?
Every year we ask our team what Pride means to them. This year, one employee raised her hand to tell us what it’s like to transition while working at Johnson Controls. Here’s Saoirse’s story.
“Johnson Controls gets enthusiastically involved in Cork Pride every year and I want to highlight how important that is for us. It took me almost 34 years to be able to look at myself truthfully and to become the person that I’d always wanted to be. I think that pride is so much more than a parade and a celebration. It’s an act of joyous defiance. It’s a commemoration of how far we’ve come in a few short decades, but I think it should also be taken as a reminder that Pride is an eternal project. We need to create community, and that is something that exists here in Johnson Controls.”
Saoirse Birmingham was born and raised as Ian in San Francisco in the US and moved to Ireland to attend university in 2011. Two weeks into the semester she met the woman who would become her wife and never looked back, settling right here in Cork! There was one aspect of her identity that it took her almost a lifetime to come to terms with, and that was that she’s a woman, and not the man she presented
to the world. Confiding in friends and family proved to be emotional but positive. And so Saoirse began the process of bringing her authentic self to the office. “I started HRT in January, and it’s been just kind of a very small circle of people who knew in my life, like my wife and my family, my wife’s family and some of our close friends. That cocoon really helped me build some confidence and I am now at a point where I do feel ready to experience the world as the real me rather
Article: Pam Ryan, Global Creative, Johnson Controls
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