Job searching is hard. Wow look at me, I’m so brave for saying it. I genuinely didn’t think I was going to make it. I accepted my offer the week unemployment ran out. Much of this screed (and a past coworker turned friend HAS told me this reads as distinctly manifesto-y) was written before I got hired. There is a tonal dissonance in all of this I cannot quite resolve. I feel like both truths I will attempt to express are… well… true.
In my job search I’ve futzed over exactly how to present myself. You can’t not.
In one of the few ways that being a trans person is a blessing, I’ve gotten to name myself. I’m named after my two favorite queer horror characters. I usually go by my distinctly feminine last name, but thought at one point to take advantage of my gender neutral first name and omit pictures of myself on my LinkedIn and rely on assumptions. I wanted to see if I can skate in under the gaydar as it were.
This, I had thought, did lead to perhaps the best interview I’ve ever had.
I started my career as a trans woman, in contrast to many of the trans women I know who started in tech being perceived as men. I’ve been visibly queer my whole life, transitioned at 18, and never had that privilege.
But in this interview I was taken at face value. I wasn’t doubted. I was assumed to have knowledge far beyond what I actually have and was met amicably. Genuinely the best I’d ever been treated in security.
I still did not get this job. I figured that the reality is eventually I have to come on camera and the facade falls and suddenly everyone is aware that I’m Not Conventional.
Similarly, when I had to take my bridge piercing out a few months ago for an MRI I decided to leave it un-pierced hoping that maybe softening my alternative look would grant me more credibility in interviews.
I remained unemployed.
I can contort myself into knots and minimize myself and still remain equally disadvantaged.
There’s an irony here though.
No, I didn’t get that job, but something strange happened. They kept in touch. They didn’t SAY they’d keep in touch, they actually did. Something resonated. Both ways, they were genuinely nice people. I felt heard and seen, in the same way I was saying I hadn’t been earlier.
When I interviewed again for a different role, I ran into similar experiences. I fully choked on some of the interviews, but altogether I felt largely seen.
I’m not doing corporate dick sucking when I say that it’s the culture. I don’t mean culture in the way that executives will say it in a “self actualization cult” neurolinguistic programming-esque way that short circuits our poor overachiever brains into caving to our baser instincts of desperately needing to be patted on the head, and throwing parts of ourselves into the furnace to serve as fuel to make that happen. I mean genuine culture in the way that Seattle was different when I moved here from Texas.
In the AI boom (and subsequent employment bust), I feel the water rising, along with the skill floor so to speak. Only seniors and up are being hired. But with it, I see a ceiling on alternative presentation being lowered.
When I lived in Austin TX, one day I was leaving the studio that was my go to for anything body mod related. Everyone there was super skilled and had the local representation (Shaman Modifications and Pineapple shout out), so there was a wide variety of demographics. People like me with sub-dermal implants and a split tongue occupying the same place as moms taking their teen daughters to get their ears pierced.
So one mom stops me on my way out, all but says to her 13 year old son “watch this” and then proceeds to ask me what I do for a living. Presumably to prove a point about people like that. I felt so full of pride that I got to subvert expectations and say “oh! I do cyber security for an airline company”.
To those in the know, though, that isn’t necessarily subverting expectations in the field. It’s a practice built on subculture.
But likewise, to those in the know, the practice as a whole is losing its counter-culture roots. Corporate demagogues have skinned what was once a culture of punks and now wear around its flesh like a meat-puppet.
Community knowledge of esoterica to subvert the corporate consolidation of powerful infrastructure away from the masses, has given way to scare tactics employed by suits to sell theater to companies who want to pretend they’re the next Microsoft.
We’re not phone phreaking. We’re not the cipher-punk movement. We’re business majors on LinkedIn pretending to be thought leaders.
We’re boots doing The Least, patting ourselves on the back for being able to install Kali and run Metasploit.
The script kiddies grew up to sell each other pieces of paper to get through HR filters.
We’re college students who got internships because our parents paid top dollar for universities that can charge what they do because they promise internships. Internships that guarantee employment because the monetary agreements between the colleges and the companies have to meet a certain level of employment outcomes to justify their continued partnership.
(I’m not bitter, you’re bitter.)
In my cyber security fundamentals class at community college (Go river bats) I was made to read a textbook on well… cyber security fundamentals.
It was interspersed with a narrative about an exec at a company who revolutionized their cyber initiative after a major breach. Part of this arc was him paying a Real Life Hacker to test their network perimeter so he could prove a point to the board. He met this character who was described as having face piercings and tattoos in a clandestine meeting at a park, and then he passes off this guy’s work as his own, doesn’t offer him a job, and reaps the benefit. The book touts this as innovation. This act is genuine cultural appropriation, and skill theft. It’s innovation, guys. Promise.
I was floored by the way this was relayed with zero self awareness. The corporatization of cyber security is actively disdainful of the old guard.
This is the portrayal.
Whereas I would argue that companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter et al. are the ones actively disdainful of the law. Actively disdainful of the rights of others. Disdainful of loyalty beyond capital. Lacking in morality.
Palantir and Anduril, Microsoft included. Actively participant in genocide.
And MITRE, an industry standard, posts ads and promotional material advertising the need for ‘innovative solutions to emerging problems’ amidst b-roll footage of ambiguously law enforcement pickup trucks at militarized barbed wire and chain link fences in the middle of a distinctly american southwest biome. Evoking images of border control.
“Smarter.”
I expect to make no friends with this. I expect to make no network connections with this. I’m not vying for the attention of the algorithm of LinkedIn, a company that proudly sends me ads about applying to work for ICE. (Who by the way auto-rejects my content moderation reports of these ads as inciting violence.)
This has only become more horrifyingly poignant. I was writing this and reporting these ads well before ICE’s presence in Minnesota.
To get back on track. I think you can guess what camp I find myself in. To that end, I’d like to support my point by telling you about a fun project me and my partner embarked upon. I waffled back and forth over if I should or shouldn’t share this project.
However, I think that everything I just laid out is exactly why I should. It took me far too long to carve out this space for myself. It took me far too long to find my community. I could have done so faster if everyone was more loudly weird.
So. To be loudly weird. My project with my partner-
She microchipped me (like a ouppy!). Herself too, but I took pics. Check this out. This is the NExT-V2.
I won’t get terribly into specifics. There already exists a guide for that.
The steps are summarized as follows
- Prep the site. Disinfect thoroughly. We used Hibiclens instead of the included ChloraPrep. Skin needs at least 60 seconds of washing for full effectiveness and will be dry and tacky after.
- Mark the placement. Using a sterile skin marking pen, mark the desired resting position of the transponder over the index metacarpal. The incision point should be at least 15mm away. The device migrates back toward the wound during healing.
- Tent and insert. Grip the skin beside the metacarpal and pull it up to tent it away from muscle. Insert the needle into the fascia layer between dermis and muscle, parallel to the bone, about 18mm deep.
- Retract and deposit. Pull the needle back about 13mm to create a pocket, then depress the plunger fully until you hear a click. Remove the needle.
- Wound care. Gauze, pressure for 2–5 minutes until bleeding stops, bandage.
Now I’m sure you have a lot of questions. There’s the FAQ!
Long story short-
- Yes they can break
- They’re unlikely to
- An MRI won’t rip it out of your body
- Yes it hurts to put it in but not prohibitively so.
So to be more grounded in experience: My partner did this for herself a few months before mine… To herself. Yeah I had the same thought you just did. It’s funny. My tongue is split, I have a sub-dermal silicone implant on the side of my hand for a biomechanical looking ridge, and multiple piercings, but the fact that she just did this herself is wild. Love that girl.
I begged her to do mine for like a week. She was on the fence obviously. Trusting yourself is one thing, but it’s another when someone else is trusting YOU.
Once she’d read up enough and I psyched myself up for it, we got ready.
We washed with Hibiclens, dried, then went downstairs to my coffee table which I had cleared off and wiped down.
JFC it hurt. First a little then a lot. I was swearing a lot, and eager for it to be done. Once the needle was out I was begging her to put the bandage on ASAP because all I wanted to do was lay down.
You can’t tell this about me just by looking but I’m actually a huge baby about pain.
“Yeah it was really difficult to focus with you freaking out about it.”
- My loving and lovely girlfriend.
It was genuinely very sweet. Her being less “modded” than me, there’s some degree of mystery around it. Surely I must have an Iron Will, able to withstand anything.
LOL WRONG. I nearly pass out every time.
I just laid on the couch laughing while the endorphins hit, only able to repeatedly say “lol you’re awesome, I love you dork.”
The point is capital eats everything it touches. Conformity is demanded, and the culture that built this field is being strip-mined by the people who now gate keep it.
All we have is each other, and being weird. Carving out communities of weirdos who adore each other and can continue to inspire each other.
There are some kids at this youth center I volunteer at (19 year olds are children to me my goodness I’m getting old), and I see them carrying preemptive defeat.
For me tech was a way out. It got me agency, put me around educated people, and gave me the means to ultimately leave rural Texas. These kids grew up in Seattle though. They watched tech eat their city. They grew up being told in school to go to UW for comp-sci degrees. Their parents have tech jobs. Where my advice to any young trans girl would have been “you’re on the computer all day anyway, you wanna move out of your un-supportive household? Computers are an easy way to do that.” That just doesn’t resonate anymore.
There’s this one girl who this is particularly a curse for. She’s profoundly skilled. Constantly resurrecting 30yo technology, solving niche driver issues, finding the exact package format this Nokia phone running some quirked up custom Debian distro needs (pre AOSP) because she wanted to install something unique. I know she could do literally anything she decided to do, but I can tell she also carries this deep trepidation about what the future holds for her.
She’s trans in a nation that’s in a death spiral towards fascism, watching the AI boom fully subsume a field of study she loves, and just not being able to foresee her place in it. Confused about what it means for her place in the world.
I can write my manifesto-y screeds on my stupid website and post them to LinkedIn. I can loudly say fuck the government and fuck corporations. I can say I’m being weird out of this inbuilt capacity for rebellion, and that’s all true but it’s not WHY it’s true to me anymore.
It’s no longer why I do any of this. I’m talking loudly about the ways I’m weird so that the kids who are also weird see that there’s a place for them in the world.
I can’t change the world. I can’t change the way capital makes every decision or the way the invisible hand chokes us all out little by little every day.
But I can be a little freak. And that’s about it.
Here I am at the beginning or end of the world and I in my sumptuous flesh am the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Knowledge had made me, I am a man-made masterpiece of skin and bone. The technological Eve in person. I saw myself and I delighted in me.
-Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (1977)