Okay, so today was jury orientation. I had some trepidation about this… I was 98% sure that I would be just another number and a face in the crowd, but it’s the 2% that I always have to worry about. Of course I don’t know that it’s actually 2%, but that’s part of what’s worrying about it.

The short version is that it went well. My appearance was not challenged and my identity not questioned. We were assured that the court does not ever refer to jurors by anything other than our numbers (I had assumed this would be the case, but when I Googled it before I found that different jurisdictions do this to differing degrees). I was not the only (or the most) visible queer person in the room, of the few hundred people who were receiving their orientation. There was a moment where I was glancing around the room and for faces that look like “family” and I saw a person doing the same thing, and stopping on me.

Jack (who was waiting outside on a bench) later described the same person as having excitedly told her partner “I’m not the only lesbian there!” At that point, there weren’t a lot of other people she could have meant. It’s not quite accurate, but it’s always nice to be clocked as queer without necessarily being clocked as trans.

I do have to go back in later in the week for my first day of actual service, which could be over very quickly or last all day. It’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility it could last more than a day, but that seems unlikely.