Explained.

It’s the twenty-first century. Never mind flying cars, where’s my sex-change-o-matic?

I went into a supermarket and noticed a board with four photos on a wall, some “employees of the month” thing. The third photo got my attention – it had a female name but a face I’d identify as male.

I barely resisted the temptation to point at it and ask a guard, “Is that really a woman? Doesn’t look much like one to me.”

“When you have a low self image, which many transwomen do, you tend to automatically try to please people and live up to their expectations.” ~ someone on #tss

Making this post motivated me to make it possible to link RSS feeds that exclude a certain tag, just as it was already possible to make RSS feeds for tags. This blog is now crossposted to Facebook, and I don’t really want posts with the “gender” tag to end up on my Facebook page.

It has become difficult for me to associate myself with my old pictures. Even my old crossdressing pictures, thanks to the short hair and obvious shaving trails that I now can at least partially hide.

When I look at them, I think, “That man is dead, and I’d prefer him to stay that way.”

Today in the barbershop, I made an offhand remark about hating my beard trails and wanting a clean smooth face.

The barber’s response was along the lines of, “Get female hormones. You know how there are men who transform into women, and women into men? Body hair is hormonal. There is another option, of course — to have been born a girl.”

I “jokingly” replied, “Damn, you saw right through me.” We laughed it off, and I doubt she assumed much from it, but I still wonder if I make some people see through my male presentation.

Not posting this on Planet Ubuntu — they already know about this.

Anyway, this wiki is about, well, women in the geek society, and the hardships they face. The articles there heavily echo my own observations — which is hardly a surprise, given that the wiki is primarily edited by female geeks in the first place.

It’s an interesting and insightful read for everyone concerned, and I hope it answers the questions like “Why are there so few women in open source?”, and “Why do they have to band together?”

Make Blizzard release an MMO without the gender binary. Then everyone will suddenly realize it’s superfluous.

winterwyn’s response: “Spore may have had some potential as that if they didn’t screw it up.”

(Disclaimer: I’m not serious.)

“Everyone knows” that female characters in WoW are constantly /kissed, /flirted and otherwise hit on by male characters. Right?

Depends — and I’ve seen that kind of separation noted by at least two testimonies, one of which I’m quoting below.

I’m a female who plays mostly female characters. Whether or not you get attention from male players who want to shower you with “gifts” depends, like rl, on if you act like a tramp or not. The sexier, flirtier, more helpless you act, the more you will attract that sort of organ-driven male player to give you things. I’ve been gaming since the early days of table-top and at 44 have been, or am in, almost every major game in the market and its the same in each and every single one.

Playing a female who does not need to be rescued, does not flirt, does not act all coquettish gets you precisely nothing and thats fine with me. So before you assume that every female character gets more stuff because of the sex of the character, know that it has nothing to do with the sexual representation of the toon, but on the flirty, slutty way males play those females.

I will also tell you that most women can tell which females are being played by males after hanging out with them even a short time because they play women the way their little pubescent little dreams WANT their women to act. Most women, women of any quality at all, do not act in RL the way most males play their female characters.

Source

Hot!

I like the feel of it. Skin-tight, exciting to wear, and giving the appearance of bigger buttocks.

I think that this particular item of clothing clicks in me more for fetish than practicality reasons.

I was walking around the Trade Center, staring at female clothing departments like hypnotized. After that, there was some weird stuff with trains that doesn’t really need to be described.

The happenings, however, led me to the thought that voice-controlled window insulation can be a source of useful amusement. I commanded the insulation on my window to unwrap and form geometric figures. Then I heard about a creepy young Japanese professor using it to create a pet loli (definite Excel Saga influence here). So I went to the kitchen and said, “I want this insulation to unwrap and coalesce into the girl of my dreams!”

Nothing happened in the kitchen, so, disappointed, I was returning to my room, but took a peek into my brother’s room, which, in the dream, was strangely devoid of furniture. By one of the walls stood a black-haired girl about a head shorter than me.

“What’s your name?” I asked, hugging her. “Maia,” she replied. At this point, I found myself dropping out of the dream, since I could feel thinking for her. And naturally, I woke up immediately afterwards.

<Zelse> Sikon: The finding yourself hot thing is due to a hardwired thing
<Sikon> “a hardwired thing”?
<Zelse> it’s actually a weird combo of evolution and your trapness
<winterwyn> A human trait.
<Zelse> Normally humans look for their own traits in an individual of the sex they’re programmed to go for – this is an evolved trait to select for health (if you survived to breeding age, one like you is also likely to be healthy, the logic goes)
<Zelse> however, since you like women but also suffer from the ol gender dysphoria, the wires cross and you find the feminine idealization of yourself to be the perfect mate
<winterwyn> :3
<Sikon> Hmm, that explains a lot.
<Zelse> to use a computer metaphor, the program is attempting to run but with a slightly different dataset, so it gives what /looks like/ weird data

That’s supposed to be a test?

Hahaha! HAHAHAHA! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

(Okay, but some of the non-loaded questions do show insight. Such as the genderless society one, or the one about the opportunity to become cis.)

More specifically on that one question:

35. A doctor offers you a painless, absolutely effective means to be completely masculine. All feminine desires and traits would be eliminated, and you would be happy and content to be a man. You would never need to dress, and you would never want to be feminine in any way again. You are assured that after the treatment you would be completely content. Would you take the treatment?

I can see why someone would answer yes, but I picked the “it would feel like death” option. Seriously, it would mean the end of almost everything I am, and the creation of a different person. Metaphorical suicide. I wonder if it’s out of sheer defiance…

And the very thought of such a “treatment” being invented scares me. Would it displace transition? Maybe not, but there would be political factions advocating its forced use on traps. (“You want to be a woman? Don’t worry! We’ll make you proud of being a man, and you’ll never have such silly thoughts again!”) They would like to demolish this wonderful world and replace it with the plain old—

Wait, that sounds eerily familiar.

I hate these.

Some pet peeves:

• Urinals. Their existence bugs me to begin with. I understand why someone would want to flash his man-bits in plain sight, but that doesn’t mean I particularly enjoy viewing them, even in peripheral vision, when passing by.
• For that matter, leaving the cabin door half open behind you. How else am I supposed to know if someone’s in there if the door isn’t locked?
• For that matter, leaving the entrance door open while you’re in. Because women passing by obviously so much enjoy seeing you with their peripheral vision…
• Pools of urine around toilets, from those who, um, missed.
• Not flushing. I never got this one. The button is right there. Press it, for the love of whatever you believe in, make an effort and bend and press it. It’s going to make life slightly easier for those who come after you, because it will make the place literally stink less.

Obviously I don’t know (yet) what things are like on the other side — it might be a “grass is greener” belief for all I know. But if I were to guess, I’d say that the restrictions that female anatomy inherently places on urination help enforce an unwritten social code of dignity.

If gender-related posts have become rarer here, it’s because I have someone to discuss them with on a regular basis now.

I’ve overcome my anxiety about entering a makeup shop. Haven’t bought anything, just looked. winterwyn advised me to hide facial hair trails under foundation, and although I have no idea if it will work, I might give it a try. I’m kind of afraid to actually ask for it, though. At least I had an excuse to be there, since it also had men’s shaving appliances for sale. Maybe I should try a shaving cream instead of a shaving gel to reduce skin irritation?

Although I’ve had to cut down on shaving because of one acne spot on my left cheek. I was disgusted to see how long the stubble had grown after just two days of not shaving. Yesterday I had to shave very carefully around the spot. Perhaps I’ll have to repeat it tomorrow if it doesn’t heal by then.

I’m also experimenting with hairstyle now. Thanks to winterwyn’s advice, I’m done with the male-looking parting on the left side of my head for good — I’ve always noted that pictures taken from this side looked wrong and the right side has always registered as more girly. I wasn’t not too keen on my appearance with a loose fringe (it looks kind of… butch and provincial), so I’ve tried combing the hair from the middle to the sides. Even with wet, freshly washed hair it was very hard to do, because the hair on the left side just refuses to comb “the wrong way”. Apparently the years of having that parting have taken its toll, and it will take a while for the hair to readjust.

We really think alike in many aspects. Including arguments we use for defanging our fears… it varies how convincing they are, though. I thought about this one — no wonder it clicked.

<winterwyn> Hee, this is something I told my mother. I don’t worry about what a Real Woman does because I already know.
<winterwyn> It’s whatever I do.

I always noted that none of this pile of insecurities are in effect when roleplaying in WoW. I could think of a number of reasons why I don’t feel any anxiety about presentation when basically roleplaying myself as a quirky culture alien. But that’s a game, “my character is not me”, and the Stormwind City Watch is basically a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits anyway. On IRC, especially in an environment as culturally diverse as the Ubuntu channels, things like tact and politeness restrict my policy of “saying what I think rather than what’s appropriate”.

Today, for the first time, I noticed that the Russian localization of Quassel used gender-specific language in its IRC log views. It was jarring to see the nickname of a known female user followed by the masculine form of the verb “changed”. I’ve made a patch for the .ts file in git and sent it upstream, but I noticed that Gajim was also an offender at least with the “Away” status — not sure about Pidgin, I’ll need to check it.

Now, Russian is a highly gender-specific language — verbs in past tense singular are always gender-specific, for instance. Translators need to dance around these issues. Yes, it’s hard, but it pays off.

I’m not on a political correctness crusade, I just have an issue with the very concept of “default gender” that most Russians seem to accept without question. In these days of rising gender awareness in FOSS (if the recent posts on Planet Ubuntu are anything to go by), presuming that online users are male by default is simply unacceptable. I’d like to see users recognize the ways choice of language affects human interaction and report questionable uses, and upstreams be cooperative in fixing their localized UIs correspondingly.

The blue waves dance, they dance and tremble,
The sun’s bright rays caress the seas.
And yet for storm it begs, the rebel,
As if in storm lurked calm and peace!..

~ M. Lermontov. “The Sail”

After trying on some of my mother’s clothes for not much clicking effect, I found her thin, sleeveless black dress — knee-long for me, presumably longer for her.

Even though it was meant for a different build, I went really excited upon seeing how much it clicked. This was the first time I looked into a mirror and actually thought I was seeing a woman, as opposed to a “special exception gender-combined entity”. Of course, in a dimly-lit mirror, my standards got lowered. Pictures look worse, so I’m not posting them.

Still, compared to my earlier crossdressing attempts, it’s a major step forward. I need to try it again sometime with chest and hip padding, and makeup to hide facial hair trails.

“…be conservative in what you send.” A lot of software works by that principle, and I like it. It makes sense: while you have no control over what you receive, you have control over what you send. My ideal data converter would be one that takes all kinds of weird malformed inputs and produces (e.g.) valid standardized XML.

This is why I find myself writing constructs like:

public static SortedSet<TimeSpan> intersectWithDisjointSet(Collection<? extends TimeSpan> spans) { … }

I apply this principle to human relations as well. I give people a lot of leeway in what they are and how they act, as long as they stick to two basic principles: (a) assume good faith, and (b) don’t be a pillock. It isn’t easy to shock me. While on the other hand, I have a strict code of what I allow and disallow myself (even though sometimes I fail at following it). That’s how most people probably act, but hey.

And to raise the Mandatory Gender Topic™: this is how I treat gender identity. I see other people the way they want to be seen, as long as I don’t see any evidence that they act in bad faith, that it’s a prank or trolling attempt. However, I hold myself to higher standards. This is why I didn’t assume the Maia identity and bombarded it with doubt until I felt completely, absolutely confident that it’s not just roleplaying, and I won’t regret it later.

On an amusing note, elky thinks that transgender people and “veg*ns” [sic] are naturally predisposed towards open source by their tradition-challenging mindset, which explains the unusual concentration of both there. “Most of the women who really participate in open source are feminist leaning too; it’s the strong ones that stick through though, and their involvement has short lifespans since the burnout rate is phenomenal.”

Maia is walking through her FOSS participation — confident, triumphant. I’ve switched completely in Ubuntu, got a patch for AUTHORS merged into Arora, changed the name in two of my three Debian packages (the third is pending a cosmetic lintian-cleanliness upload), and I’m considering updating gtkpod as well.

Perhaps this is part of a psychological campaign to distance from my past self, and to give the new identity a semblance of reality. The more people know me as Maia, the more natural and right it feels.

Still, in the domain of abstract thoughts, I found myself musing over this line from my latest Debian upload for smplayer. When a sponsor pointed out that I used three different name-email pairs in the old package, new package, and RFS email (I since configured Maia to be my default sender name in Thunderbird and the Gmail web interface), I inserted this line into debian/changelog:

- Changed maintainer name (still the same person and GPG key).

That got me thinking: what am I to the Debian and Ubuntu developers, at large? What identity matters the most? Maia, sikon@ubuntu.com, launchpad.net/~sikon, or FB21C80A?

One of the points I’m going to make in That Twoform Story™ is how Internet patterns bleed into the real world there, and people start referring to each other by online nicknames, even in person. Some fellow Polymex users actually call me LucidFox in real life. But what if we went even further, and displaced conventional names by some kind of “hard” identity, like the aforementioned GPG keys?

…I need sleep.