> What we think, how we feel?
> Must there be a secret me I'm forced to hide?_
>
-> —"Reflection", from _Mulan_
+> —"Reflection", _Mulan_ (as performed by Christina Aguilera)
-I took half a week of vacation from my dayjob recently to crash with a friend in another city and attend the conference associated with an open-source technology I've been pretty involved with lately! It was really fun and inspiring, getting to hear all the talks and putting faces to usernames! I thought I'd write a blog post about all the exciting technical things I learned.
+_(Attention conservation notice: rambling Diary-like post that I felt like writing anyway for psychological reasons; likely not worth your time.)_
+
+I took half a week of vacation from my dayjob recently to crash with a friend in another city and attend the conference associated with an open-source technology I've been pretty involved with lately! It was really fun and inspiring, getting to hear all the talks and putting faces to usernames! I thought I might write a blog post about the experience and all the exciting technical things I learned!
This is not that post. By cowardice and convention, this is someone else's story on someone else's blog, about "Taylor Saotome-Westlake" visiting his friend "Jerrica" in "San Francisco" to attend the conference about this software called "[Blerp](https://xkcd.com/1692/)-d9aa89fd".
-Again, the conference was great, and I had a lot of fun, but—I don't know. Some aspects of it induced me to feel a bit stressed and a little bit sad, even though that's entirely my own fault and entirely my own problem.
+Again, the conference was great, and I had a lot of fun, but—I don't know. Some aspects of it induced me to feel a little bit stressed and a little bit sad, even though that's entirely my own fault and entirely my own problem.
<a href="/images/blerp-d9aa89fd_pronoun_stickers.jpg"><img src="/images/blerp-d9aa89fd_pronoun_stickers.jpg" width="300" style="float: right;"></a>
It started with the pronoun stickers.
+This year, there were pronoun stickers in everyone's conference swag bags ("[...] so we can all help each other get things right. Wear them in solidarity with others too. Help us make [the conference] welcoming and inclusive for all"). Leaving aside [philosophical objections](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#anchor-pronoun-sticker-discourse) for a moment, I want you to consider [the stress and awkwardness this inflicts](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/172800552516/so-i-havent-posted-about-this-since-college) on people who have [_some_ form](https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/using-gender-neutral-pronouns-could-actually-misgender-people.html) of gender-related problems but who have chosen some [set of mitigating interventions](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) other than transitioning.
+
+Which sticker am I supposed to put on if I am to show solidarity? The _he/him/his_ sticker would be the obvious, straightforward choice. After all, that is, in fact, the third-person pronoun people use for me. But in a context where I'm being offered a _choice_, I _don't want_ to choose the male option, because that makes it look like I "identify" with my maleness—as if I were _cis_ in the strong sense of having a "gender identity" matching one's "assigned sex at birth", rather than in the [weaker sense](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/cis-by-default/) of being a reactionary coward whose pathological need for a backwards-compatible social identity is preventing her from becoming her best self.
+
+
[...]
<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>
Opal guy said trans people are delusional
-
+"It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole and they're showing you the door"
think I'm an asshole and are showing me the door https://xkcd.com/1357/
the Uber driver who picked me up from the airport was named Omar and was from Mexico
he did not know any nonbinary people
+
+"peering through reverent fingers"
+"but the situation is fraught"
+
+My Little Pony convention was more ideologically tolerant
+
+https://meteuphoric.com/2017/08/30/what-you-cant-say-to-a-sympathetic-ear/
+
+
+"There are views we have decided are unacceptable and we will ostracize you for having them." https://twitter.com/seldo/status/714272018976284672
+
+find the contributor covenant PR where someone wanted to carve out a personal Twitter exemption, and the counterargument mentioned naming the project in the profile
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff