A little bit of confusion seems to exist around what gender identity disorder (GID) is. As label-avoidant as I am, this is one that seems to be here to stay.

Recently, a few people have (accidentally?) made clear how they feel about it—or at least, what they think it is—which has been an interesting experience.

One person (who’s known about me identifying as at least gender dysphoric since I was 8 years old¹ or so) said, “but so what does [your wife] think about all this?”, and it turned out that the assumption was that, seeing as I married a girl, and am now a father, it means that I must have acceded to the role as a husband² and father by taking on my biologically conferred masculinity with open arms and .. I don’t know, doing something very manly with it. Crushing it under my bicep? Or something.

Another was encouraging of my writing web log³ posts on the topic if it helped me fix the problem sooner; this again seemed an interesting way to view the “issue”.

I guess my point in writing this now is to say that I don’t think this is something that necessarily will have a close. I wrote a letter to my mother to tell her about my feelings in ’05 or ’06:

I am a girl.

Here is the severity of what I feel: just writing that gives me an inner release, something that I could never have felt before. Just seeing that which I have written, right there, displaying it so plainly for anyone to see; it gives me a feeling of inner peace. Here’s Chloe⁴ on my lap; I’ll whisper it into her ear: Chloe, I’m a girl like you.

I feel gender dysphoria: like the (physical) sex assigned to me does not correspond to my (mental) gender. I can’t think of how many times people have told me that I’m effeminate, but that’s exactly the way that I feel on the inside, if not much, much stronger. It makes me feel uncomfortable to have this mismatch, and it’s been getting much, much worse.

That bit above about seven years wasn’t exactly true; a white lie. The first time I thought about girls in this way; not the way that pubescent boys think about them, or the ways that most typical teenagers, either; the way that I wanted to actually be one, and mingle with them, and be accepted as a peer, was ten years ago; 1996, prep. I can recall not much from my early days of school; but the strong feeling that something wasn’t right is something I can.

In 1999, in grade four, all of seven years ago, I distinctly remember thinking to myself; I wish I was a girl … The way I want to act around other people is the opposite of how I’m supposed to, and (almost) every day feels jarring as a result.

Yay, teenaged me! This was right in the middle of a long-ish letter I wrote to my mother (after a lot of text trying to outline that I was being serious), and I suppose that was a turning point: for the first time I actually discussed gender issues with.. anyone, really, and happily, it was with someone who would take the time to understand me and help me with it.

Twice, I nearly went down the road of actually transitioning physically. To date, I’m still not sure if I regret not following through. Had I done so, I’m sure I’d probably have the same lack of certainty about what I’d done. Damned if I do; damned if I don’t. All I can do is cater one way, or cater another. More ambiguity? Maybe.

So. More of that.

Perchance this will help someone.

I had fun (no, I didn’t) getting wpa_supplicant working on Arch Linux. I kept getting “deauthenticated from c0:50:8a:99:d6:40 (Reason: 6)”.

The answer was that netcfg was defaulting to giving wpa_supplicant the nl80211 driver as well as wext (-D nl80221,wext).

Adding WPA_DRIVER=“wext” to /etc/network.d/interfaces/wlan0 fixed the issue.

Note to self: keep on truckin’.

Some “aha” moments reading s.e. smith’s “Beyond the Binary: What to Wear, What to Wear”. Quoting:

One way to degender clothing is to see more inclusion of femme nonbinary people on sites dedicated to nonbinary fashion and identity. To celebrate femme transgender people and to showcase us in all our glory instead of hiding us away and telling us we don’t belong. For masculine genderqueer people to wear dresses when they feel like it instead of being afraid to do so because they worry about the messages it might send. To see more people who might be read on the surface as ‘male’ in skirts and dresses, heels and pearls, with fabulous hair, this would be a good thing that would break people out of the belief that the only way to do nonbinary ‘right’ is to do it in a masculine way, with men’s clothing, with breasts bound.

Clothing is such a complicated thing, and it is so coded and layered with meaning, that we can become quite snarled and tangled in it. Every now and then I convince myself that I should be wearing more clothes designed for men and I go and try some on and look dreadful, because they aren’t cut for my body, and I end up resenting my body, instead of the society that makes me feel like my body is wrong. Or the clothing manufacturers who cut clothing in very specific and limited ways. Or the community that makes it impossible for tailored clothing for queer folks to really be an option; there are places I could go in San Francisco to find clothing that will fit mybody, but I can’t find that clothing here because the stores that might be willing to stock it couldn’t sell enough of it to justify the expense.

I’m not too sure where I can say I fit into the gender spectrum; part of the reason, I suspect, is that I’m a bit shy to the terms “transgender” and more specifically, “transsexual.” It’s not a lack of willingness to accede to what it means to be TS, but instead underlying feelings of doubt and .. shame? I had a chance to start a transition in earnest years ago, and I gave it up! I’m married (to a cissexual woman) in a traditional nuclear family! How could I possibly be a girl? You’re kidding right?

In turn, I say: “oh, boy, i guess you’re right.” And then I sulk away and try to forget it all ’til I next find myself sliding off into despair somewhere and realise I can’t just ignore this.

Short on time, but in closing: how nice to wear a dress!

Firstly: golly, GNOME software can be bad sometimes. Like, bad. Surely there’s some curses-based WordPress client that’s not so bad? Usability is not simple, but it ain’t rocket science either. Guess you can’t use Linux and want usability too, though, because this talk inevitably cues the “if you want it, make (or pay for) it!” debate. Sadface!

I just tried a terminal (no curses!) program, and it sucked too. Well, that’s life.

Now for a quote to sum up the last week.

I experience gender dysphoria. I experience, often, active hatred of my body. I look at it in the mirror and I sneer at it and want to tear it apart; I spend much of my time, actually, avoiding mirrors, glancing only to make sure that no tags are sticking out and my tie is on straight. I do not recognise the person in the mirror, the face that stares back at me. It looks wrong because it doesn’t feel like my body, and because people tell me over and over again that this body is wrong.

Source: Beyond the Binary: Body Image — this ain’t livin’.

I’m still trying to negotiate “calm acceptance of what is” with “persistent emotional response”. Part of me tells me that this is something that can be overcome; but is it the feeling of dysphoria that needs to be overcome, or the inertia against setting (my) reality in line with my mind?

Is it a matter of creativity?

Self-imposed limitations?

Wait, this definitely deserves a “wordpress is not livejournal” tag!

とは？

今日、同僚（あるいは友達）のブログを一飲みで読んでる。この人も私も性同一性障害にどうにか煩う。それで少なくともこの痛みは私だけの問題だわけじゃないかわかるのはできる。

g.i.d.について書こう。

私は男で生まれた。このようで生めれたいと私に言われなかったけどそう起こった。

八歳の時、それが違うと始めてわかってた。その日からずっと一緒に歩いてきた。

一回以上一口で（女に）トランスしたがってたけど、やっぱりしてしまうのはいやだ。女じゃないから。だが女と及ばないから男と及ぶわけは全然全然ない。ほんとうはもう少しニュアンスあり。

オフィスで、開発者の同僚は二人で男の人。最近ムービーやゲームとかのモデルが持ってきた。机以上にした。多数ははやっぱり女のモデル。おっぱい大きすぎて、気持ちわるいもん。しょうがないね。

オーダない考えなんだったわ。これからもアンネリと申します。よろしく。

… is?

I’m reading a friend’s blog in a single go today; we both suffer from gender identity disorder in one way or another. With this, at least I can know that this pain isn’t just my problem.

I’ll write about G.I.D.

I was born (physically) male. I didn’t say I wanted to be born this way; it just happened. At 8 years old, I started to realise that it wasn’t right, and since that day I’ve walked hand in hand with that knowledge ’til today.

More than once I’ve wanted to transition (to being female), but in the end I’ve not carried through with the process. Maybe it’s because I’m not female, but not being able to be addressed as female doesn’t mean that I’m male, at all. The truth is a bit more nuanced than that.

At my office, I’ve two male coworkers. Lately they’ve come into some models from movies and games, placing them on their desks, the majority of which are female models; big-breasted and in bad taste. Can’t be helped, right?

These have been unordered thoughts. I’m Anneli from hereon. Nice to meet you.

.. best kept to oneself until after achieved. amirite?

I spent most of today reading 75 pages of the muse’s¹ tumble log², and it left me with a variety of feelings.

Anything consciousness-raising is good, and that it certainly did. As with any reading of large quantities of “good stuff”, I have the distinct feeling that I wasn’t being vigilant enough; surely reading so much of this type of material should have a transformational effect on a person, leaving me pumped and ready to fight injustice, love myself and be who I want to be. Yada yada.

Alternatively, perhaps not! What it did leave with me was a renewed sense of wanting to improve³, and a vague feeling that the way there is not only knowable, but more and more in the direction I’m headed, so long as I apply myself, bare myself, defend myself …

The steps I’ve taken towards being right with myself over gender have been rewarding so far; I’m “out” as makes sense at work, and while I don’t think I’ve heard anyone call me by (new) name yet⁴, that will be pretty special.

In the grand scheme of things a name (I suppose) doesn’t seem too special—you’d think with all my complaining about my own use of labels that I wouldn’t accord names so much. But while a label is something one uses to reduce the effort that needs to be expended in working out how to pigeon-hole me⁵, a name is the identifier that wrests control away from the labeller; it embodies ultimate identity, personality, agency, responsibility.

Whereas any label one can apply to someone is necessarily partial, often or eventually wrong, and usually poorly defined anyway⁶, a name embodies your imperfections, your divergences from the pigeon-holes: label-centric identification renders them as annoying impurities (“Ashley is a Buddhist, though not one who meditates.”); names just concentrate on the person (“Ashley.”), and let real communication, real learning, real experience take on the rest of the relationship. You can’t have a relationship with someone who’s defined purely in terms of the adjectives you can apply to them.

Being Anneli is empowering. I think partly I exhausted my (birth) name. Arlen is this. Arlen was this. Now Arlen is that. Uh-oh, Arlen was that. Now Arlen is something else. Et cetera. I’m trying to move on from that, though that is in no way necessary or sufficient to decide that I no longer feel the name represents me. There’s a deeper question in there.

My only explanation is that there’s some fighting somewhere inside me⁷ that rails against the notion of me being “male.” Part of the in-fighting I have (with myself) is that this seems to play into heteronormativity; after all, how can I say “I don’t feel so male, I feel female lots too!” without acknowledging what defines those terms? And frankly that hurts me a bit too; almost like I should be “better than that”⁸. There’s an alot⁹ wound up, just in that. Harbinger of heteronormativity’s end by day; reluctant customer by night. Or something.

So dressing ambiguously, wearing hair ambiguously, being named ambiguously¹⁰, acting ambiguously; they give me some life. Trans has never been a label¹¹ I’ve been fully comfortable applying to myself for some reason, though I feel more and more that it’s appropriate (… even if I don’t plan on transitioning¹²). I hate the hair all over my body, and only the futility of fighting it lets me leave it grow out. And when it does, people¹³ comment on how masculine I look. That kinda kills me.

It’s those kind of experiences that lead me to think that I need to do more in order to broadcast that it’s actually not nice for me to hear things like that; that is, the more work I put into appearing effeminate, the more obvious it will be that I don’t want those comments.

At times like these, I tend to think back to how this plays into heteronormativity¹⁴. I’m a bit lost. But I’m finding my way.

Or not.

I use a Kinesis Advantage at work. They’re great for RSI-like symptoms, and they’re also programmable. You can remap keys on the fly, and put together macros. This suits me great.

Recently I realised that I never used capslock, and that I used Ctrl-A a lot (in GNU screen), so the obvious solution was to map capslock onto Ctrl-A, consistently saving me a keystroke. I could do this fine with a macro on the keyboard itself—but as it turns out, as long as you have at least one keyboard macro defined, the entire keyboard becomes sluggish and drops keys(!) at high typing speeds.

So, despite the promise of amazing programmability, the keyboard lets itself down here. I figured this shouldn’t be too hard to change in screen itself. Of course, I was wrong.

Capslock is a very special key in X, and it doesn’t appear to have any termcap-like name which I could bind to using bindkey in screen. Instead, you have to remap Capslock to something else entirely.

xmodmap lets you change key mappings—but you can only map one key onto another, not several. I’ll skip the entire story of how I got there, and give the solution instead:

xmodmap -e 'keysym Caps_Lock = Super_L'

Put this in your .bashrc or somewhere else where it’ll get executed on startup. Here we change Caps_Lock to instead behave as Super_L. If you actually use Super_L (winkey?), you’ll be in trouble.

XTerm*vt100.translations: #override \n\
    <Key>Super_L: string(0x1b) string("z")

Add this in your .Xresources file. This causes Super_L to instead emit an escape key followed by ‘z’ in xterm. I picked that pretty much at random, but no existing VT100/ANSI escape codes seem to use that. We could just use Caps_Lock here (and skip the xmodmap), but that would result in the shiftlock still being toggled (in addition to our desired action).

If you don’t use xterm, add it to the appropriate resource.

bindkey -d "^[z" command

This goes in .screenrc, and causes the emitted escape sequence on Super_L (Caps_Lock) to act as the command sequence for screen.

Back before I had a clue what I was doing with OCaml, I read an article on Jane Street Capital’s OCaml blog about using phantom types for static access control—read: totally awesome. I stumbled across a situation that lead me to wonder if I could apply part of that knowledge here.

The short answer is: you can. What am I using it for? Storing the saved status of a record (namely, whether or not it has an id/given primary key associated with it) as a phantom type. I also use the type used for attaching the phantom types to store the primary key itself, which has an associated overhead (and makes the attachee type decidedly not phantom).

The relevant code follows. In my case, the primary keys are of type int32, so they’re what’s buried in the type.

(* pK.ml *)
type none
type some

type ('con,'a) t = int32 option * 'a

let none t = (None,t)
let some k t = (Some k,t)
let get = snd

let pk t = Option.get (fst t)
(* equiv to: match fst t with | Some n -> n | None -> raise Option.No_value *)

let pk_opt = fst

So far, this looks like a pretty standard way to attach a given piece of data to any other piece of data, except for those strange, phantom (not abstract, because there’s no underlying definition) types at the top which never seem to be used, and the similarly unused 'con type variable on t.

The magic happens, of course, in the .mli:

(* pK.mli *)
type none
type some

type ('con,'a) t

val none : 'a -> (none,'a) t
val some : int32 -> 'a -> (some,'a) t
val get : ('con,'a) t -> 'a
val pk : (some,'a) t -> int32
val pk_opt : ('con,'a) t -> int32 option

So, as we recall, the definition of none is let none t = (None,t). The right-hand side matches the definition of t faithfully, as it’s a int32 option * 'a, but we’ve also filled in the 'con type variable, by saying its type is none.

At compile-time, this gets optimised away, because there is no value for the none type. But during compile-time, the type is known.

some is defined as let some k t = (Some k,t), so we know the value k is being stored safely in the int32 option. But the 'con type variable is also specified as some.

Let’s skip ahead and look at pk. It takes a (some,'a) t and yields an int32. That means that, for example, PK.pk (PK.none 42) doesn’t typecheck:

Error: This expression has type (PK.none, int) PK.t
       but an expression was expected of type (PK.some, 'a) PK.t

If we omitted the .mli file, we’d get an exception at run-time instead.

It’s important to remember that this technique has nothing to do with the actual bundling of data and subsequent hiding—that’s a perfectly normal thing to do. The benefit here is in making certain assertions about whether or not that data is actually present; we can be sure that PK.pk will never throw an exception, because the object passed to it could only have been created by PK.some.

Note that we do experience some some additional runtime slowness due to the use of an int32 option (and subsequently Option.get or matching on that to retrieve its value). If you’re happy to sacrifice PK.pk_opt, you can do something like this instead:

(* pK.ml *)
type none
type some

type ('con,'a) t = int32 * 'a

let none t = (0l,t)
let some k t = (k,t)
let get = snd
let pk = fst

The .mli is the same, except with pk_opt removed.

This is much more concise, as the boolean status of “is the primary key present?” is not stored at all at runtime. The upshot is that you also have no way to tell at runtime. This isn’t a “problem” in and of itself, because the type-checking means you’ll never accidentally see the 0l value stored with the none type (we just need to put something there, without an option type)—but it means that there’s no way to do anything at runtime that differentiates between the two.

If you don’t need to, then this is great, too, because it’s exactly how you can achieve the static access control, as described in Yaron Minsky’s post referred above—you can also attach additional data if you want to drag information along with the typing data!

So, how am I using this? Here’s an example interface for a record type which has an associated database table:

(* world.mli *)
type base_t = { name: string;
                width: int; height: int;
                defaultTileId: int32;
                placements: placement_t array }
           
type 'con t = ('con,base_t) PK.t

val empty : PK.none t

val of_id : int32 -> PK.some t
val save : 'con t -> PK.some t

We can ignore the details of this—the base type, 'con t, will either have PK.none or PK.some filled in for 'con.

As an example, there’s a default “empty” record, empty. In the .ml, it’s defined like so:

let empty = PK.none { name="";
                      width=0; height=0;
                      defaultTileId=0l;
                      placements=[||] }

This means that we can’t accidentally treat this as a record that actually has a corresponding row in the database. This has already caught a bug in my application—as soon as I implemented this, the type-checker alerted me where I was allowing users to belong in unsaved worlds, which would cause a problem as soon as I tried to save the user out to the database (and serialise the database ID as zero).

There’s also a certain elegance in the type statement val save : 'con t -> PK.some t, in my opinion.