Apr 3

My Femme Identity

If feminism is the radical idea that women are people, then femme is the radical idea that femininity is not weak.

From my perspective as a trans* woman, my identity has been policed by society since birth. Femininity in any person is seen in wider society as submissive and a way to remove agency. Those assigned male at birth who show any feminine behaviour are targets for the patriarchy in similar ways to women in general; saying you want to reject a masculine body is almost unthinkable.

As a child I was already trying to reject this. They told me pink was “for girls” and so for many years pink was my “favourite” colour. They eventually beat that out of me, but I tried to resist as best I could through my teenage years. For my school ball, I refused to wear a boring masculine black suit and instead sewed my own jacket in vibrant colours with the help of my long suffering mother.

Finally coming out as trans* and lesbian a year ago has finally allowed me to fully embrace my femme identity. But how do I define that identity?

To me, femme is reclaiming femininity from its subservient role in society. It’s the stiletto heel standing triumphantly on the back of defeated misogyny. It’s using makeup and my face as a canvas for my moods and whims, not as a way to appeal to anyone other than myself. When a straight guy tells me my lipstick is too “gaudy” I laugh in his face and wear it more often. It’s wearing heels even if you’re “tall enough” because it makes the street harassers the intimidated and not the intimidators. It’s saying it’s OK to be sexy for yourself and not just to match society’s beauty standards.

Medical gatekeepers have often used femininity as a weapon against my more butch trans* sisters. I turn that weapon back on them. Women don’t wear pants? I wear floral print jeans to my appointments. Women don’t ride motorbikes? My floral jeans are accompanied with a bright red woman’s leather motorcycle jacket and my helmet under my arm.

Femme can be hard or soft, fierce or serene and is different for all people but it is never weak.

Dec 17
butterfly nails
Monarch Butterfly Nails

This design was done about a month ago but I forgot to put it up till now. The base colour is Wet n Wild — Wild Shine in Sunny Side Up. I’ve then used a nail art brush set to do a French manicure and some lines and a border with China Glaze’s Liquid Leather, finally adding some dots of China Glaze’s White Out with a dotting tool.

The Sunny Side Up required three coats to get to a sufficient opacity which was a bit frustrating, I’d probably try and find a more opaque orange in the future. I could also use a bit more practice at the lines but overall I’m pretty happy with this design. It’s actually quite simple to do with a steady hand.

Dec 16

On Software Startup Culture

Software startups are pretty great right? Some of the greatest financial success stories of the last 30 years have been from people starting off in their garages, with purely the sweat of their own brow dragging them in to the rich list.

Almost universally though, these success stories and the public faces of startups today continue to be single/unmarried, white, able-bodied, cis men. This goes beyond a simple reflection of the demographics of the software industry. A study by CB Insights in 2010 showed that only 8% of startup founders in the US are women while they make up 27-29% of the general computing workforce. 1% of startup founders in the US are black compared to 12.4% of computer science graduates in 2006 (I’ve not been able to find racial employment demographics for the software industry in the US).

So how do startups come to be even more white and male than even the general software industry? And should they be as celebrated and glorified as they are in software culture? Continue reading »

Nov 9

An open letter to Fairfax Media and Stuff.co.nz

To Whom it May Concern,

I was shocked and angered to read the article entitled “Killed chopper pilot had passion for flying” (found at http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/7926126/Killed-chopper-pilot-had-passion-for-flying) today. Never did I expect to see such a fundamental lack of respect for the identity of a deceased woman.

It is one of my greatest fears as a transsexual woman for something like this to happen. To be forever remembered as a man with my birth name, not who I really am. Society may think I’m a deluded person who wants to mutilate themselves but the opinions of the professional medical community trump those of the uninformed. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health all agree that I am not deluded and am in fact a woman. They would say the same thing about Ms. Kramer.

The misgendering in the article and the insistence on using Ms. Kramer’s assigned name rather than the one she chose and identified by shows a gross lack of empathy and an implicit support for those who denied her identity in life and continue to do so after her death.

Lack of family acceptance is one of the leading causes of suicide among gender, sexual and romantic minorities (GSRM) and your support for this attitude is dangerous and worrying. Using family requests as an excuse for your actions and dismissing the outrage this has generated as mere “concerns” leads me to believe that your staff fundamentally doesn’t get how harmful this is to the trans* community. The commonly accepted professional style guidelines for journalism side against you on this and I am left wondering why you think you are above them and have the right to dismiss the anger of an extremely marginalised population.

I would request that the article be edited to fit with the Associated Press Stylebook’s guidelines on reporting on trans* people and that your staff receive training on trans* issues.

Thank you for your time,

Megan

Sep 29

How Git shows the patriarchal nature of the software industry

Git is a Distributed Source Control Manager (DSCM), a piece of software that enables software developers to keep track of the code changes in a project progressively over time without relying on a centralised database. It was created by Linus Torvalds, more famous for his other major creation, Linux. It was a novel Open Source alternative to the existing SCMs, allowing developers from all over the world to collaborate in a new, dynamic fashion; even when they were unable to access the internet. As a result, it and other DSCMs have become the dominant tools of this nature in Open Source projects.

Continue reading »

Jun 30
Trans* pride nails
Nail Art – Trans* Pride

After last week being over ambitious and trying to do this design with tape, I went freestyle.

This is inspired by the transgender pride flag. Not an exact colour match but it gets the point across.

The colours used are (from the outside in) China Glaze’s Bahamian Blue, China Glaze’s Exceptionally Gifted and China Glaze’s White Out.

Exceptionally Gifted is quite a sheer pink but that makes the blending between the colours work well I feel. Neither gender nor sex is a binary and having the colours flow into each other gets that across.