Alexis @alexis@tilde.zone

It's probably about time for an #introduction, isn't it?

So, hi, I'm Alexis. At my day job, I'm a fullstack engineer for a company you've heard of. If that interests you, it shouldn't, and I won't, and that's really best.

When I'm doing what I choose to, I'm an sf/weirdtales writer, a wildlife photographer, and a doer of helpful stuff for people.

I've never said this out loud before: I'm intersex and genderqueer. I don't know how I feel about saying it now, but I guess I know how to find out.

#AmWriting: Voortrekker (https://cosmic.voyage/ships/Voortrekker), a gay as hell solarpunk space opera love story that updates every Wednesday and Sunday.

Voortrekker is part of #cosmicvoyage, a semicollaborative sf ‘verse invented by @tomasino, open to all, and currently the playground of over a dozen writers including myself. Lots of good #FreeFiction there; come and see!

Think about the effect you might have on people who trust you. Think *hard*.

The world hurts us all enough already, through indifference and malice. Let’s take care not to hurt each other by mistake. 5/5

It’s a hell of a thing, the effect words can have. Especially when they come from someone you trust, who you think of as like yourself. Such a person once told me, back when I was just a boy, that I wasn’t *really* gay. Just the one time, but I took them at their word and made the worst mistake of my life because of it.

That’s the kind of effect a few ill-considered words can have, when they come from the right person. 4/

Not planning on saying anything else about this, except: I bet I’m not the only one who gets that lovely “am I real? do I count?” feeling in the pit of their belly for a while when they see this meme.

Maybe no one else has said anything about it. I almost didn’t, but I’m old and cross and it takes a lot to really hurt me. Someone younger, more vulnerable? Might well suffer in silence. The way the world is at such pains to see we do. 3/

Yeah, yeah, I’m not the target, etc. I get that. But I’m also literally a woman in a male body, and the fact that I happen to share that body with a man and we haven’t decided yet what, if anything, we want to do about that does not, to either of us, seem to suggest that I should come in for this kind of treatment, and indeed I understand that I’m not actually at whom it’s directed. But here I am getting it anyway. So thanks for that. 2/

Yeah, as a matter of fact, she did! It’s the name we’d have had from the start if we’d been AFAB, and it’s a good name and I’m proud of it, and I get what you’re doing and why, which is why this is a subtoot and not me starting a fight. But we’ve been deliberately invalidated enough times to have zero patience for that shit even when it’s totally by accident, so we aren’t just going to shut up and take our misdirected (cisdirected?) licks about it, either. 1/