mei 🌒& @ckie@pixie.town

girls in shorts... boys in shorts... enbies in shorts..? honestly, i think i'd prefer if youtube used the regular player to show me these people

Happy international women's day.

About half the #women I interact with in an average week are #trans. Trans women make my life and the spaces I hang out in online immeasurably better. They've rounded sharp corners and added a sense of emotional availability that men just tend not to do. They bring an air of femininity to a space that helps me feel like I don't need to do extra social work to balance things out myself.

It's really wonderful.

Last week, at the local hackerspace, I had a great chat about ethical alternative clothing shops with knowledge and nuance. These conversations rarely happen when I talk to men-- not because they don't care, but just because the topic is more complicated for feminine clothing than masculine. There's deeper changes to manufacturing processes than men's clothing silhouettes seem to feel, so less nuance (and digging) is necessary to achieve a pretty reasonable effect in comparison. Anyways, it was great, and it just felt very 'normal'. But I've also never had such a good fashion conversation in a technical space before, which is interesting because fashion is a highly technical art. This was, in a small way, revolutionary.

When spaces make femininity a comfortable thing to bring, they make everyone else feel more comfortable being a wider breadth of themselves. You see wider ranges of expression from everyone. Making women feel more comfortable often helps everyone feel more comfortable.

When spaces restrict those energies, everyone feels it. When I'd been in technical spaces without women, I used the phrase "caustic culture" a lot. The feeling of this pervasive, inescapable, slow ooze that just eats away at you little by little. Since then, I've spent a lot more time in spaces without that energy. I can't think of a single online technical space that doesn't feel caustic that hasn't had trans women in it. As a professor of mine once said, correlationdoes not imply causation, but it does often waggle its eyebrows at it.

So, happy international women's day to all the women everywhere, and especially to the trans women that've helped make the spaces I've been in so comfy. So many of you are leaders, and you are all wonderful and beautiful beings capable of immense gentility and soft strength. Celebrate yourself a bit today. 💙