Mastodawn

on the occasion of Trans Day of Visibility, here is an excerpt from The Joy of Linux: A Gourmet Guide to Open Source (Michael Hall & Brian Proffitt, 2001) in which a couple of cisgender authors respectfully (with the language of 2001, mind you!) give the reader a two-paragraph primer on gender transition concepts... in order to use it as a metaphor for why you might take steps to treat your OS dysphoria by installing Cygwin, Xming, GnuWin32, et al in a professional world of compulsory-Win32ness that discriminates against Linux.

Cis people: Learning about trans people's experiences (from trans people!) can often have the surprise benefit of helping you better understand yourself and how to navigate the dynamics in your life in ways you don't yet even realize or have words for.

But always remember, trans people are more than a metaphor, and more than a political wedge issue, and more than an opportunity to be charitable. Trans people have always been here. Trans people invented loads of the load-bearing parts of the computer you're using, and made tons of the video games you grew up playing, influenced so much the music you love, and are full human beings deserving of full human rights, self-determination, and recognition.

And none of us are free-as-in-software unless all of us are free-as-in-software.

Hazel Quantock 3d ago

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liffy 💜

Authoritarians hate trans people because trans people demonstrate to the world that it's possible to question and reject anything about life, even the things that feel inevitable and nigh-impossible to resist. They hate it when trans people can sit around being visible evidence that a different life is possible in every possible way, including the ways that challenge the underpinnings of their claims to authority. There are fundamental reasons as to why it is so politicized, all of which are the fault of the oppressors.

If you're cis, perhaps you can give the trans folks out there a hand by visibly resisting whichever forces of hegemony are suppressing fundamental pieces of you.

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liffy 💜2d ago

(Also, lemme tell ya, I went hard on getting Windows XP to act like Linux in the aughts. I spent any particularly boring college lectures with my laptop out getting gnome-panel and xfdesktop and so on to compile and run in Xming, and installing uxtheme.dll themes that looked like contemporary Clearlooks GTK. Then, in my first full-time job where we were issued Apple laptops, I went similarly hard getting everything I could from MacPorts and pkgsrc to cobble together a familiar environment under XQuartz. But sure, "there weren't any signs")