I'm Trans. Definitely.

[CAD97]

This is a "one year later" update to [my original "announcement"] last year. CW: some allusions to trans politics.

I am me, and I am proud 🏳️‍⚧️

Hi, I'm Crystal Durham! My pronouns are she/her (preferred) or they/them (accepted). You can also find me by one of my screen names: CAD/@CAD97/CAD1997 (any capitalization, more professional, without numbers preferred) or demicrystal/demicrystalline (much more personal and unfiltered¹). Just don't use my deadname, please. I know I said it was still acceptable a year ago... but you keep learning as time goes on, and I'm much more trans than I could ever have realized a year ago. If you already have a channel to so, please feel free to privately message me if you find anywhere still in my deadname, so I can go about fixing that.

I am a transwoman. In fact, I managed to get access to and onto HRT rather quickly, all things considered, and have been hormonally transitioning for almost eight months now. I feel so much more myself now, and so much more alive! I already knew that gender affirming care is life saving healthcare, but that's now a very concrete knowledge for me. At the same time, gender is so much richer than just male/female, man/woman. I proudly label myself as a sapphic transfem demigirl for those who care to dive into deeper levels of terminology, as well as both demiromantic and demisexual (with a very strong sapphic lean).

What you can do

• Do your best to respect my and others' chosen names and pronouns. As long as you are putting in a genuine effort to do the right thing, you're doing so much more than much of the internet at large, and I thoroughly appreciate you for it. Help correct others politely when they make legitimate mistakes, and normalize providing pronouns, especially in digital spaces; it's been shown that people are no better than randomness at guessing gender from username, despite significant confidence in doing so accurately.

• Advocate for trans empathy in your community, and do your best to try to educate where you can. The various transphobic movements want to paint transgender people as "other" and therefor "safe" to hate and push blame onto, but at the end of the night, we're just people trying to live a reasonably happy life, just like any other person, and we deserve an equitable chance at success.

• Perhaps, if your representative(s) are in open support of transphobic rhetoric and/or legislation, call them², tell them that you can no longer support them while they're supporting that position and why, and then follow through on that threat. I understand not wanting to be a single-issue voter, or not wanting to cut out a party due to one policy among many... but for me³ and many other trans people, this can quickly escalate into whether we're allowed to live our life peacefully or not. And it doesn't only hurt trans people, but all gender non-conforming people, by whatever the angry person with power's personal ideas of gender ideals are.

• For existing immutable git history, I'd appreciate a mailmap entry of Crystal Durham <cad97@cad97.com> so git and git tooling will show my proper name. You don't have to set up a mailmap on my behalf, but I think you should. History may be immutable, but people aren't. Here's the update to rust-lang/rust's, as an example.

• Unionize, and do what you can to do your part and pull some of the power hoarded by the ultra-wealthy back to the people at large.

• Maybe, recommend me as a potential hire to your employer? I've been trying and failing to find employment since earning my master's-level professional certificate in 2023, my savings (from student loans) have fully run out, and along with them, my hope of finding employment despite my lack of "proper" paid employment experience without a networking "in" is rapidly dwindling... and even if I did have any previously, they must've expired by now. My professional inbox is open for help and/or offers for almost any remote paid development position (contract, employee, freelance, whatever) or even just to help refine my portfolio site and/or resume (PDF) to be more amenable to hiring. I'm also available on GitHub Sponsors.

Footnotes

1. She is horny now and making up for lost time 😅 ↩

2. Calling, and not just emailing or contacting online, is an important factor. Digital communication can be filtered, logged, and responded to automatically and at near zero cost. Answering calls directly costs them money. ↩

3. Thankfully, the only discrimination I've seen so far is invisible discrimination (e.g. hiring?) and being kicked out of my church's music department. As a private religious community, I support their right to cultivate who is allowed into that community... but it still stings. What shouldn't be allowed is the public government discriminating against trans people⁴ or rolling back existing protections against discrimination based on gender and sexuality to not cover trans identities, let alone legislating that businesses must discriminate⁵ against trans people. ↩

4. Any legitimate reason to select against trans individuals (example: a military might not want to have a service member who requires regular medication for their life, as that can be a meaningful additional hassle to provide during the course of their regular duties) should select against that underlying reason, not the trans identity itself. Discrimination can be warranted, but discrimination based on identity is never warranted. ↩

5. This sounds hyperbolic, but proposed legislation that requires the labels of "men's" and "women's" to refer exclusively to gender assigned at birth is discriminatory towards trans and more generally GNC individuals, and forces any business using those labels to enforce that discrimination. Let people join the groups that they feel are correct for them, and, if necessary, let those groups remove people who abuse the system on an individual basis. People "transitioning" to get a leg up in competition or to "sneak" into the opposite restroom is a practice made up by "thought leaders" who don't bother to understand any reason to transition other than for some nefarious scheme along those lines. And even then, the physical and hormonal split between the genders is a bimodal distribution with significant overlap, not a binary categorization like those bigots would have you believe. ↩