‘she’ related to them." Also, Lisa
discovered the aggressiveness of inebriated men.

Lisa
sat at the bar of a Hamden restaurant and a small, thin man in
his 30s began making conversation. After some superficial
smalltalk, the guy made a pass. Lisa thwarted the advance only
by allowing the man to walk "her" to her car.

Lisa’s
official launch was Sept. 22, 2001. In the first few days,
Reynolds visited stores, shops and restaurants, applied for
jobs at Yale, the Shubert Theater, the Peabody Museum and
Southern Connecticut State University and attended a suburban
job fair.

He also noticed how long it took him to do
his makeup, how often he ran out the door late and how
difficult it was to deal with a purse.

"It turned out
to be this completely liberating, emotional roller-coaster
ride," Reynolds says. "There’s no emotional middle ground when
people arebreasts and others who automatically
steered Lisa toward jobs below her qualifications. Lisa
attended a networking event at New Haven’s Zinc restaurant and
made the rounds of every arts organization in the Audubon
Street neighborhood.

In all, Lisa completed 47 job
applications and had 30 interviews. Lisa’s only success was
finding a part-time gig selling ads for a non-profit
journal.

Although Reynolds can’t prove there was
discrimination, he notes that he later got an assignment as
himself from an area advertising firm that had turned him down
as Lisa.

As for Lisa’s social life, one of the most
intense aspects of the experiment was a singles dance at the
North Haven Holiday Inn.

That night, Lisa shared
flirting strategies with a group of women at the event, and
one of the men at the dance took a shine to Lisa. They danced
several times before Reynolds decided