It immediately became clear that I would have to cosplay at one more convention in order to test this, and decided to reprise my role as [Sylvia Tilly](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sylvia_Tilly) from _Star Trek: Discovery_ (previously played at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018) at the next nearby con. There had been [a plot point in season 1 of _Discovery_](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Vaulting_Ambition_(episode)#Act_Four) that people in the mirror universe are more sensitive to light, which I had thought was lame and bizarre at the time, but now gave me a perfect excuse for why (someone who looks like) Tilly would be wearing sunglasses! (I was soon disappointed to learn that one-way glass isn't actually a real thing that you could make sunglasses out of; what's real are [_half-silvered_ mirrors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_mirror) that are deployed with one side in darkness.) For good measure, I also added of a pair of [padded panties](https://thebreastformstore.com/gold-seal-padded-panty/) from the Breast Form Store to my outfit, another solid buy.
-So Friday night, I threw my [2250-era Starfleet uniform](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(late_2230s-2250s)) in my backpack, put my breastforms and wig and mask in a box, and got on the train to San Francisco. (My ticket to the con was Saturday only, but it's nice to get a hotel room for the night before, and get dressed up in the morning within walking distance of the event, rather than taking the train in costume the day of.) Carrying the box around was slightly awkward, and the thought briefly occured to me that I could summon an internet taxi rather than take the train, but it was already decadent enough that I was getting a hotel room for a local event, and I had recently learned that my part-time contract with my dayjob (which started in April as a Pareto improvement over me just quitting outright) isn't getting renewed at the end of the year, so I need to learn to be careful with money (at least until dayjob IPOs and my shares become liquid) instead of being a YOLO spendthrift.
+So Friday night, I threw my [2250s-era Starfleet uniform](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(late_2230s-2250s)) in my backpack, put my breastforms and wig and mask in a box, and got on the train to San Francisco. (My ticket to the con was Saturday only, but it's nice to get a hotel room for the night before, and get dressed up in the morning within walking distance of the event, rather than taking the train in costume the day of.) Carrying the box around was slightly awkward, and the thought briefly occured to me that I could summon an internet taxi rather than take the train, but it was already decadent enough that I was getting a hotel room for a local event, and I had recently learned that my part-time contract with my dayjob (which started in April as a Pareto improvement over me just quitting outright) isn't getting renewed at the end of the year, so I need to learn to be careful with money (at least until dayjob IPOs and my shares become liquid) instead of being a YOLO spendthrift.
Saturday morning, I got myself masked and padded in all the right places, and suited up to walk from my hotel room to Moscone West for the convention! They had a weirdly cumbersome check-in system (wait in line to get your QR code scanned, then receive a badge, then _activate_ the badge by typing a code printed on it into a website on your phone, then scan the badge to enter the con), and I dropped my phone while I was in line and cracked the screen a bit. But then I was in! Hello, Fan Expo!
-And—didn't immediately have anything to do, because conventions are boring. I had gone through the schedule the previous night and written down possibly non-boring events on a page in my pocket Moleskine notebook, but the first (a nostalgic showing of Saturday morning cartoons from the '90s) didn't even start until 1100, and the only ones I really cared about were the _Star Trek_ cosplay meetup at 1315, and a photo-op with Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden at 1520 that I had pre-paid $120 for. I checked out the vendor hall first. Nothing really caught my eye ...
+And—didn't immediately have anything to do, because conventions are boring. I had gone through the schedule the previous night and written down possibly non-boring events on a page in my pocket Moleskine notebook, but the first (a nostalgic showing of Saturday morning cartoons from the '90s) didn't even start until 1100, and the only ones I really cared about were the _Star Trek_ cosplay rendezvous at 1315, and a photo-op with Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden at 1520 that I had pre-paid $120 for. I checked out the vendor hall first. Nothing really caught my eye ...
Until I came across a comics table hawking [_Transcat_](http://transcatcomics.blogspot.com/), the "first" (self-aware scare quotes included) transgender superhero. I had to stop and look: just the catchphrase promised an exemplar of everything [I'm fighting](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/)—not out of hatred, but out of a [shared love](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) that [I think I have](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) the more [faithful interpretation](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) of. I opened the cover of one of the displayed issues to peek inside. The art quality was ... not good. "There's so much I could say that doesn't fit in this context," I said to the proprietor, whose appearance I will not describe. "Probably not what you're thinking," I added. "Oh no," [she](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) said.
(When I played Ens. Tilly in 2018, I got an autograph and [photo with Jonathan Frakes](/images/tilly_cosplay.png), and got to talk to him for half a minute: I told him that we had covered his work in art history class at the Academy, and that I loved his portrayal of—[David Xanatos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Xanatos).)
-I had recently read Spiner's pseudo-autobiographical crime novel [_Fan Fiction_](https://www.npr.org/2021/10/17/1046397441/brent-spiner-data-fan-fiction-review) about him getting stalked by a deranged fan, and wanted to say something intelligent about it, and so, my heart pounding, I went over to Spiner's table, and paid the $60 autograph fee to the attendant. (If Gates McFadden had written a book, then I hadn't read it, so I didn't have anything intelligent to say to her.)
+I had recently read Spiner's pseudo-autobiographical crime novel [_Fan Fiction_](https://www.npr.org/2021/10/17/1046397441/brent-spiner-data-fan-fiction-review) about him getting stalked by a deranged fan and wanted to say something intelligent about it, so (my heart pounding) I went over to Spiner's table and paid the $60 autograph fee to the attendant. (If Gates McFadden had written a book, then I hadn't read it, so I didn't have anything intelligent to say to her.)
I told him that I thought the forward to _Fan Fiction_ should have been more specific about which parts were based on a true story. He said, that's the point, that you don't know what's real. I said that I was enjoying it as a decent crime novel, but kept having a reaction to some parts of the form, No way, no _way_ did that actually happen. He asked which parts. I said, you know, the way that the woman hired to be your bodyguard just happens to have a twin sister, and you get romantically involved with _both_ of them, and end up killing the stalker yourself in a dramatic confrontation—
No, he admitted, but the part about getting sent a pig penis was real.
-I gave my name as "Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. _Discovery_", and he signed a page I ripped out of my Moleskin: "To Sylvia", it says, "A fine human!"
+I gave my name as "Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. _Discovery_", and he signed a page I ripped out of my Moleskine: "To Sylvia", it says, "A fine human!"
-As far as my hope of the mask helping me pass as female to others, I didn't really get a sense that I fooled anyone? I guess it's not obvious how I would tell. A woman wearing a Wonder Woman costume recognized me as Tilly and wanted to get a photo of us.
+As far as my hope of the mask helping me pass as female to others, I didn't really get a sense that I fooled anyone? (Looking at the photographs afterwards, that doesn't feel surprising. _Proportions!_)
+I guess it's not entirely obvious how I would tell in every case. A woman wearing a Wonder Woman costume recognized me as Tilly, enthusiastically complimented me, asked to get a photo of us. She asked where I got my costume from, and I murmured ["Amazon."](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07C1LCMSB/) Her friend took the photo, and accepted my phone to take one for me as well. Would that interaction have gone any differently, if I had actually been a woman (just wearing a Starfleet uniform and maybe a wig, with no mask or breastforms or hip pads)?
-/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/
+People at the _Star Trek_ cosplay rendezvous were nice. (The schedule called it a cosplay "meetup", but I'm going with _rendezvous_, a word that I'm sure I learned from watching _The Next Generation_ as a child.) A middle aged-woman in a [2380s-era sciences division uniform](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(early_2380s)) asked me my name. "Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. _Discovery_," I said. No, I meant, your alter-ego, she said, and I hesitated—I wanted to stay in character (that is, I didn't want to give my (male) name), but I later changed my mind and introduced myself with my real name, and she gave me a card.
+<a href="/images/fan_expo_star_trek_meet.jpg"><img src="/images/fan_expo_star_trek_meet.jpg" width="575" style="margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
+My wig was coming off at the beginning of the photo shoot, so I went to the bathroom to fix it. (The men's room; I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, _&c._) The man who was also in a _Discovery_-era uniform also wanted a photo, and I ended up explaining the rationalization for my sunglasses to him ("definitely not her analogue from a parallel universe where people are more sensitive to light"—but Doylistically because I'm wearing a mask instead of makeup this year), which he thought was clever.
+Maybe I should have tried harder to make friends, instead of mostly just exchanging pleasantries and being in photos? There was a ready-made conversation topic in the form of all the new shows! Would it have been witty and ironic to confess that I don't even like _Discovery_? I guess I was feeling shy?
+
+<a href="/images/photo_op_with_spiner_and_mcfadden.jpg"><img src="/images/photo_op_with_spiner_and_mcfadden.jpg" width="350" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
+
+The photo op with Spiner and McFadden was the assembly-line affair I expected. They had a bit of COVID theater going, in the form of the photo being taken with a transparent barrier between fan and stars. Spiner said, "Sylvia, right?" and I said "yeah". Pose, click—next fan.
+
+I did get "ma'am"ed on my way out, so that's something.
+
+At this point, I was kind of tired and bored and wanted to go back to my hotel room and masturbate. But there was one last thing left to do. I went to the vendor hall, stopped by a side table and wrote "unremediatedgender.space" on a scrap of paper from my Moleskine, then went back to the _Transcat_ table.
+
+I changed my mind, I said, where does the story start? The proprietor said Issue 1 was sold out, but that the book Vol. 1 was available for $25. I'll take it, I said.
- * I don't think I fooled anyone—not up close
- * a woman in a Wonder Woman costume wanted a photo with me, rapport at the Star Trek meet; I feel like I got "Man Pearl Is Best Pearl" vibes?
- * I explained the mask choice to a fellow Star Trek Discovery cosplayer
- * wig was falling off at Star Trek meet
- * the photo up was assembly-line as expected, Spiner said, "Sylvia, right?"; COVID theater
- * I did get "ma'am'ed" on my way out
-<a href="/images/photo_op_with_spiner_and_mcfadden.jpg"><img src="/images/photo_op_with_spiner_and_mcfadden.jpg" width="320" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
* I was tired and wanted to go back to my hotel room and masturbate, but I decided to stop by the vendor hall and buy Transcat; I wrote "unremediatedgender.space" on a scrap of Moleskine paper, as I bought Vol. 1 (issue 1 $5 was sold out, and I said I'd take it for $25 when Vol. 1 was pointed out); I said I was disappointed that our Society has settled on a "trans women are women" narrative; author said there was more enthusiasm in 2016, but stopped going to conventions because of COVID, and public opinions seems colder now, and she's worried; I asked if she'd heard of the concept of autogynephilia, and she hadn't (!); I said I had some heterodox opinions, but that I had a blog, and handed her the slip (as if implicitly proposing a trade; I'm reading your stuff, you read mine?)
* when the author asked my name, I hesisitated, sensing my discomfort, she asked, Who should I make it out to; I said, "Ens. Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. Discovery"
* a slight tear in the mouth of the mask, the nostrils look kind of ragged?
+ * if Crea FX could make a female alien mask
Side life things to note—
- * need to be more careful with money because contract ending soon; buying a hotel room was arguably unnecessary extravagance
- * memoir progress
+
+* memoir progress
last time: ; art history class at the academy—David Xanatos
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff
