Newtowner @danielle@octodon.social
Sydneysider. Scientist. Parent. Trans. Femme. Middle-aged. Grumpy.
Is there a name for the phenomenon where you only need to do 5 minutes of work to finish off a 3 year old project and finally get the paper accepted but it's just too hard to care any more?
Idle thought: As my presentation becomes more feminine, people don't usually change pronoun (understandably), but other things do shift: tone of voice, phrasing, familiarity, all imply an "assumed femininity". It's occasionally frustrating, but mostly reassuring? Even the bad stuff shows a recognition that something is feminine about me, and a willingness to adapt to it, I suppose. It's not everything I've ever wanted, but anything is better than dysphoria so I'll take what I can get!
sour grapes, venting Show more
sour grapes, venting Show more
This is what social scientists have to listen to, regularly, online (cough*reddit*cough) or in multidisciplinary symposia.
Cross-disciplinary perspectives have sometimes led to amazing insights, but hard problems are just hard.
So, engineers, physical scientists, and computer scientists: if you can _actually_ solve our biggest conundrums with the tools of your trade, come to my office and we'll collaborate on some pubs.
@ElectricMink Thank you. Much appreciated!
Okay. My professional webpage now refers to my gender identity, albeit indirectly and in the most timid way possible. Trying to convince myself not to take it down before anyone sees. Seriously why am I so scared? I have tenure. I've presented femme at the last two conferences. Half my subfield already uses the feminine form of my name. No-one is even slightly bothered. Yet I am still terrified. Sigh. Too many bad memories to believe the world has really changed I suppose.
The Sydney climate is making me pathetic. 10°C is not that cold. So why am I wearing four layers with the heating on and still complaining bitterly about the chill?
In the distant pages of the Celestial Emporium of Child Knowledge it is written that the animals my daughter can transform into can be classified as (a) goats, (b) dragons, (c) people (d) all the ones that are babies, (e) the girl ones, (f) frogs, and (g) a potato.
I have an abusive polyamorous relationship going on with R, git and LaTeX. I hate them all and they make me cry on a regular basis, but I can't live without any of them.
Apparently I gave a "thumbs up" to some Iron Maiden songs a while back and Google is now telling me all about it. Which actually feels like a pretty good use of machine learning? If a support vector machine can remind me that I really liked Aces High, that's probably keeping me out of mischief in some other way?
Tiny trans joy: growing up south of the Barassi line they taught me the boy rules so fucking well that whenever a rugby-state dude tries to explain AFL to me I get to ask his opinion as to what the Rules of the Game folks should count as prior opportunity when the ball carrier is tackled. I mean, it's not like I know what the right interpretation for holding the ball should be ... But I do love watching the boys squirm when they realise that the girlyboy knows the game better than they do
@clstal Thank you. I feel odd in saying this, but using the men's room feels safer. In theory it ought to be the other way round, but where I live most cis men are totally chill about sharing with trans women even though they feel awkward about "mistakenly" gendering me correctly, but I get weird vibes off cis women and don't feel safe around the women's room. So I guess I stay with the dudes for now. It's awkward but they're cool with it.
I am genuinely loving the 500 character constraint in a public microblogging context. It's just long enough to say a thing worth saying (with appropriate hedges) and just public enough to stop me from being a jerk, but not so long that I'm inclined to digress too far when making a point, nor visible enough that I'm afraid to talk about myself.
I genuinely don't care if anyone reads or follows or cares - I just really like trying to write about my life given that these are the rules.
Academic dilemma #2345: if someone who hasn't read much history cites your 10 year old paper and gives you credit for a 50 year old finding, how embarrassed should you be when reviewing their paper and correcting their misconception?
Transgender dilemma #7883: an inevitable consequence of visual statistical learning and expertise is that men are better judges of masculinity and women are better judges of femininity. The corollary is that there is an inevitable point in transition where men judge you to be a woman and women judge you to be a man, especially around the bathroom, where category boundaries matter. If your goal is to minimise everyone's discomfort, which bathroom do you use? Any suggestions, Miss Manners?
Sometimes I wish I knew other boring middle aged middle class trans women who just want a quiet life. I'm not sure I'm cut out for the political shitfight I seem to be caught up in. Sigh.
In retrospect though, I was always caught up in this. Regardless of what labels we use, the moment amab folks start performing femininity we become a target for transmisogyny by both cis men and cis women. It's just taken me a long time to realise what everyone around me has been doing all along. Oh well.
This is the tale of the times. Forget the power of an evening with friends, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of sleep or serenity, for in the grim dark present there is only lice. There is no peace amongst the unwashed dishes, only an eternity of foodscraps and laundry, and the indifferent laughter of thirsty toddlers. #parenthammer40k
"If we want more than has been found to be present we are no longer tempted to harass the statistician to work miracles... To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of."
- Sir Ronald Fisher
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40383882
I'm guessing that Fisher didn't have a big teaching load at the Rothamsted Experimental Station.
A generational oddness: gender identity nomenclature has changed in a way that creates communicative barriers. My older (70s) trans friends refer to themselves as "transsexuals", "transvestites" and "transgenders" and my younger friends (20s) call themselves "trans women", "genderqueer" or "nonbinary". I feel awkward about it, so I'm thinking of following my four year old daughter's suggestion and identifying as a "boygirl". That way everyone can be offended by my choices.
