+But none of this really matters: if you don't want to wear a sticker, you can just not wear one, with no discernible social consequences. (At least, not this year!)
+
+I did get asked for my pronouns once (the first day, by someone who I think was not yet aware of the stickers)—the only time I've been asked for
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+-------
+
+and get on with enjoying the conference and meeting all sorts of interesting people with exciting technical things to say!
+
+On the first day, between training sessions, I sat down at the table of someone who was eloquently denouncing the hideously overcomplicated code they encountered in the "Quux-f1deb75f" community—which made sense, they explained, because the people who wrote those libraries were Trump supporters and Nazis and libertarians.
+
+Oh, that's interesting, I said. Do you think there's a big correlation between political views and code quality? With a good linter to operationalize _quality_, this is potentially amenable to empirical study ...
+
+At some point, the conversation paused to introduce ourselves. I gave my name as "Mark" ... and then the person asked, "What are your pronouns?"
+
+[...]
+
+Obviously, I would have no objection if the presentation had _harshly criticized_ Eric Raymond for some specific bad thing that he said, or if the authors had chosen to quote some author they liked rather than an author they didn't like, or if they had decided that the "itch-scratching" metaphor was sufficiently widespread as to be part of the commons and not worth attributing to anyone. But to verbatim quote
+
+[...]
+
+It is humbling to contemplate the possibility that the only reason I haven't suffered any consequences for my writing is simply because I'm _not important enough_ to be a target—in either direction. (That is: no one hates this blog enough to bother reversing the pseudonym and making trouble for me in real life, and, conversely, my open-source and professional work isn't notable enough for anyone to bother digging to see if I have a secret gender-heresy blog.)