Well, this is embarrassing for LWN readership

I am working in a corner of the free software world that has some pretty good rules and processes -- I came out as trans, and in a day KDE's sysadmins had changed everything except for my mailing list subs, Libera's people had helped me change my irc presence, and I was basically good to go and tell my team. Yay!

Within my team, most people were fine with version 2.0 of me, though some people were worried I was going to poison myself, and also that there would be a huge on-line backlash on vKontakte, which didn't happen, but for which they made contingency plans.

And KDE is good: we have at least five trans project maintainers, that I know of. I'm just the newest one.

But then... Yes, discussions like this one. When I saw the title of the post, I knew the direction the discussion would take. I've also gotten explained the nature and purpose of Krita, the project I maintain, at me. Casual misgendering, casual "we were friends for so long, can't I just deadname you, having to rightname you is so distressing to me". On the KDE e.V. internal mailing list, I've had to stay silent when a member talked about "why are people okay with casual genital mutilation of kids, but can't accept..." -- fill in the blanks, not a discussion for right now, but I still get worked up about it because I couldn't answer.

Then again, even without me being me or me being about me, going back a bit... I always made sure that anyone who wanted to work on Krita got welcomed. This caught attention at LGM in Saarbruecken. I was literally interviewed by Heise journalist about "why come there so many women in Krita, and none in any of the other projects" -- and that was before I came out, even. We had three women and one man present (me...).

I got told off by maintainers of other libre graphics projects for having so many women -- surely that was just me being a perve and looking for them, for it was clear that women weren't really interested in free and open source software, otherwise they would hang around and contribute, right?

You're so right about it being so exhausting. Thank you for saying that.