Megan Wallent, the newly female executive at Microsoft who formerly went by the name "Michael," reports that her return to the office yesterday was mostly uneventful. The women's restrooms have pink tile, she discovered. (No "trannie restrooms" for her.) "Microsoft Pink," she says, as opposed to the usual Microsoft-logo blue one encounters so much on the Redmond campus. Telling her story to Valleywag and then starting her own blog helped, she believes: "I thought just about everyone who would interact with me knew. Surprising people with a cool new set of 38Cs — not a good idea."

Near the end of her first day back, she had a meeting with one of her team members who, it seems, hadn't gotten the memo about Michael becoming Megan. Over the last month, the corporate address book still had her email account listed as "Michael," but she'd been signing emails "Megan." The colleague's initial assumption? That someone in finance had administrative access to Wallent's account, and was sending emails on the executive's behalf.

Wallent believes this was her mistake, not his, saying she was mostly embarrassed that she hadn't succeeded in getting the word out to everyone. But I was more struck by this: The gut reaction that an unknown colleague with a female name must work in a support function, not engineering or management. (Photo courtesy of Megan Wallent)

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