Ever since I started visiting Denmark in March 2018, there was a lot of building work going on. Well, it's a city, I suppose there always is; but in particular, the city squares Rådhuspladsen and Kongens Nytorv were something like 75% closed off and behind building hoardings. And scattered around the city, 15 more building sites, all preparing the way for something that, for me at least, was rather exciting: the creation of a whole new Metro line, with 15 new stations, and two existing stations extended to provide interchange points.

A month or so before I first visited Copenhagen, I thought one evening "I know, let's find a map of the metro network – familiarise myself with it bit before I get there". And I looked it up, and found it, and thought: is that it?

I'd been working in London for the last ten years, and London's tube network looks like this:

In fact I was part-way through my effort to visit every single one of London's tube stations - all 270 of them - and find the labyrinth in each station. I didn't quite get to complete this before I left the UK to go and live in Denmark, in January 2019; but I have now visited all 270 of London's tube stations, and found / photographed / documented the labyrinth in 267 of them (the other 3 are currently absent).

So anyway, back to Copenhagen: two lines, 22 stations. This network opened in 2002, so it's all very modern, compared to London. The trains are small and driverless, the ride is smooth, the stations are small and efficient, and it just works. Though, I have to say ... they're rather dull. After having toured London's network, I loved seeing the variety of the stations: a huge variety of architecture and character and scale and flow and ... just brilliant, I'm so glad I've visited them all! But Copenhagen's ... well, it just doesn't have the history yet. And of the M1 and M2 line stations, 13 are on the surface, and 9 subterranean. And of those 9, they are uniformly dull, and grey. Sorry, but they are.

So, back that building work: a new metro line, "M3" Cityringen. I moved to live in Copenhagen in January 2019, and throughout the course of the year, gradually the two main building sites, Rådhuspladsen and Kongens Nytorv, became smaller and smaller, as the work neared completion. And finally, on Sunday 29th of September, 2019, the line opened!

With M3 Cityringen the network grew from 22 stations to 37; in 2020 we're expecting part of the M4 line to open, with two more stations (Nordhavn and Orientkaj), with the southern part of M4 coming in (I think) 2024.

I've finally got round to visiting all the new stations – trying every corridor, every stairwell, every escalator, and therefore I now have favourites and opinions and questions.

So, shall we get started?

Frederiksberg Allé

Heading down into the station, the first thing we notice (compared to the old M1 and M2 lines) is ... colour!

Most of Copenhagen's subsurface metro stations follow the same template, with a few variations; and Frederiksberg Allé almost does too. The stations are generally well-lit and spacious, with long lines of sight. This particular station's quirk is the entrance being offset slightly to the side.

One of the interesting things to look for in each station is the roof: some of them have genuine skylights; some of them are built to look a bit like skylights, but they're fake, because there's actually a building on top. Frederiksberg Allé has the latter:

Almost all (or maybe all?) the new stations have lots of space for bikes too. Almost uniformly across Cityringen, the bike area is orange:

Frederiksberg

Frederiksberg is one of the two stations which provide interchange to the old M1/M2 lines (the other being Kongens Nytorv). So here we can easily see the old and new lines if not quite side by side, then at least very close to each other.

Frederiksberg's paneling is grey, but a much prettier and more interesting kind of grey than the old M1/M2:

Here we see the old and new stations coming together:

There's also an exit directly into Frederiksberg Centrum shopping centre (just like the other interchange, Kongens Nytorv, actually: that has an entrance directly to/from Magasin):

There are also proper skylights here, and the lifts, and an extra exit to the shopping center car park.

Aksel Møllers Have

I rather like the texture of the wall paneling here. I think it's rather lovely:

I also rather like its imperfections:

Other than that we've got the usual sort of set-up: main entrance with elevator; side entrance for bikes, wrapping round the back of the station:

Here's a little detail I noticed here: where many older stations would have had a metal "groove" ramp next to the stairs, to slot your bike in, here it's kind of subtly built-in: a smooth, rounded edge to the stairway, so you can get your bike up and down:

And we have rather lovely skylights here too:

Nuuks Plads

Now it has to be said ... not all of these stations are amazingly different from each other. This one felt rather similar to the last:

I love how light these stations can be:

Nørrebros Runddel

I quite enjoyed the slight irregularities in the texture of the walls here:

Here there's no proper skylight, so the roof is light, but not open to actual daylight:

Nørrebro

At Nørrebro we're back to colour, but more bold than before: red!

Actual daylight, too, so that's nice:

There's still a bit of building work going on though, to make interchange between the M3 metro and S-tog easier:

Skjolds Plads

The walls are back to grey again here, but this time with an interesting "wave" texture, as they bow in and out:

Apart from that, it's kinda the usual: skylights, spacious, back entrance for bikes. Good stuff :-)

Vibenshus Runddel

So it turns out that Vibenshus Runddel has a surprising unique feature: colours. Not just colour, but colours, plural:

Here the wall panels tilt back slightly, so that the underside of each panel protrudes slightly, and there's where the colour is. It's rather nice actually!

This station is in the corner of Fælledparken, so here's the main entrance:

And on the surface, the skylights:

Sadly the bike area & entrance here were closed off when I visited.

Poul Henningens Plads

Another new feature on the walls here: an interesting horizontal/vertical rectangular pattern:

Apart from that it's the usual kind of layout, albeit with a slight kink in the corridor on the way out, if I remember correctly.

Trianglen

Light grey walls here, but they're shiny! What it lacks in colour, it makes up for in light:

No skylights here, though I'm not sure why, because there's loads of space on the surface, if I remember correctly. Weird.

Østerport

At Østerport we're back to BIG BOLD COLOUR:

The exit closest to Østerport main station is currently a rather temporary, rattly, noisy, and bouncy scaffolding staircase. It's actually quite disconcerting:

Hopefully before long they'll build a proper link between the two stations.

Meanwhile, a distraction: What are these? I keep seeing them but I don't know what they are:

Marmorkirken

On to Marmorkirken, which is well as being in perhaps the most spectacular setting of all the stations ...

... is also of a very different structure to all the other stations. I'm guessing they didn't have much space to work in here, squeezing the whole station between the church and Store Kongensgade, not just on the surface, but subsurface too. The result is a station with a very different feel indeed.

The only long sightline here is immediately below the surface, along the bike storage / ticket hall area:

Deeper than that, though, things are rather different from everything else. The escalators, instead of being formatted like this, as they are in most stations:

are, in Marmorkiren, more like this (excuse the quick sketch):

So the whole station has a very different feel: not so spacious, perhaps even a little claustrophobic.

The walls have this rather attractive marbled pattern, echoing the church above:

And down at platform level, the platform space is quite narrow, and not backing on to the other platform. This is platform 1, the higher platform; platform 2 is below this.

And right at the bottom, aaaaaaaall the way down, is platform 2:

Right. On we go.

Kongens Nytorv

Along with Frederiksberg, Kongens Nytorv is the other interchange point with M1/M2 – the difference here being, because it's so central, this station is built to handle much more traffic. It's big (compared to the rest of the network).

Straight away this feels bigger: the station is wider, there's more distance between the two platforms. The (fake) skylights are wider. The placement of the escalators is such that they don't take up as much space:

The corridor at one end of the M3 leads out, down a rather long corridor that doubles back on itself ...

... and then out to Det Kongelige Teater:

The other way, if we take the escalators up from the M3, we get to the ticket hall area ...

... which then leads into the impressively open interchange area:

Y'all know I like patterns, textures and geometry by this point:

The main exit, to where Strøget meets Kongens Nytorv:

Meanwhile of course the old M1/M2 station is still there, though now with what I think are rebuilt entrances. It took me a while to figure out why there's a step up here, before you go down. I assume it's to stop too much rain flooding down the stairway:

Meanwhile the bike area here – you remember I said they're nearly all orange? This is the exception. It features an artwork called "Fra sted til sted" (From place to place), by Pernelle Maegaard:

I have to say, in contrast to M3, M1/M2 looks very drab:

Again we have the exit direct to shopping, this time to Magasin:

Last detail from Kongens Nytorv: another artwork. I've seen it before, but never realised it was an artwork:

Gammel Strand

Alright, only four to go. Gammel Strand: another interesting one, and again, perhaps because of its placement: it's deep, and built below the canal.

On the surface we've got the Fiskerkone statue back at last. Velkommen tilbage, fiskerkone:

The bike entrance is out of action still, so it's down the escalator, or the main steps...

... and into a very long (by Copenhagen Metro standards) escalator, which is, for some reason, lit blue. Perhaps echoing the fact that it's taking us below the waterline.

At the "ticket hall" level, we can stand and admire the engineering, deep below the canal (hence, no proper skylights here):

The curious thing here is ... when the bicycle area opens, is it meant to link in to the main station? I can't see where/how that might happen, if so.

Again the station has a rather unusual escalator layout, adding to the space available at the platform level:

Rådhuspladsen

When I first came to Copenhagen, probably about two-thirds of the city square was shut off, as a building site. Quite the revelation, when in September 2019, it finally opened up, and the square was suddenly bigger! :-)

Rådhuspladsen's colour scheme is a rather bold black, adding more than ever to the idea that this is actually a Death Star, and you should be humming the Imperial March tune:

Meanwhile at the surface, there's something funny afoot. There are two sets of steps in, as normal (main entrance, and bike entrance), and there are also two elevators ... but one of them is out of action:

Here's the main entrance, with that out-of-action elevator next to it:

and here's a little further down those same steps:

so now I want to know: where does that door on the left go, and where does that elevator go? (Probably to the same place). The door doesn't look like a regular service door – it's too fancy for that, and it doesn't have service-door-type-labelling (you know: code numbers, voltages, warning signs, etc). No, it's just a glass door, locked, and blacked out. What is going on there?

Little detail: at the entrance to every station, there's a door, which I've not yet seen shut (I don't know if it's only shut for emergencies, or maybe it shuts every night. No idea). The silver handrail, when necessary, clicks out of position to allow the door mechanism to shut:

Of course to fit the station in, they had to get space from somewhere, so they made city hall, Rådhuset, smaller. But at least they added an extra tower, so that's nice:

Københavns Hovedbanegård

Almost there. Two to go. At København H, we're back to red:

At the surface, there's still lots of building work going on:

and apparently in future we'll have a slightly slicker tunnel route between the main station and the metro:

Mostly, these stations are very new, and still in very good condition, and almost everything works. Very Danish. Therefore, this amused me:

Enghave Plads

So, finally, we complete our tour with Enghave Plads:

It's a familar style, but no worse for it.

The bicycle entrance here was, again, shut off, so hopefully that'll be open some time.

So that's basically it. I hope you enjoyed this little tour of M3 Cityringen! Now if you'll excuse me, I really need to get out more.

Sources for the two map images: Metroselskabet DK; Transport for London

So ... it's been a full six months since the last post, and I'll be honest: one of the main reasons it's been so long is that the scripts I was using to update the site suffered from a particularly aggressive form of bit rot. Which is another way of saying: I got lazy when I put the site up first time. Anyway, I've finally got round to resurrecting the site so that it's in a serviceable state again, so here we are: another post. So, what's new?

Last time I wrote about being "on the cusp", and that turned out very much to be true. I wrote that on the Tuesday before Easter, while still living in Gentofte in the flat that I hated, but having secured new accommodation, due to start on May 1st. Moving day was slightly stressful, because for some reason the moving company didn't understand how much stuff I had to move (even though I told them beforehand), so I ended up basically paying double the quote – but it got the job done. I moved into this flat in Frederiksberg, and its so much better than the other place. It's almost ten times bigger than the room I lived in for three months. The spare room, which I used just for boxes and laundry for the first few months, is slightly larger than my entire room back in Gentofte. I like it here.

I shan't ramble on too much longer, so let's just have the short version:

• Dating: on hold. It's just not that important to me right now.
• Job: going much better after I moved to Frederiksberg. I've taken various holidays of course, mostly back to the UK but also to Esbjerg and then Munich, and Barcelona. I'm looking forward to having paid holiday next year. (Danish law: in your first year of employment in Denmark, leave is unpaid).
• Danish: I still give myself a hard time, stressing over how little practice I get at the language and how rubbish I am at it, but back in September I passed the Module 4 Test without even realising I was taking it, so that's a good sign, eh?
• Friends: In terms of making friends in Denmark, it takes time of course, and there are various people who I've met, some of whom I'll meet again, and some I won't. In particular though I'm grateful for my friendship with Anja, and with the group of ladies I mentioned last time, and whom I have continued to meet ... I feel very lucky to have met them all, and to have been invited into their homes, and that we can open up to each other.

Bit of a rush of catching up, this post. Oh, and also I might start experimenting with writing posts in Danish. Anyway, it feels good to have resurrected this blog. Hopefully I'll have a lower barrier to entry now.

Last time, I wrote about the lying brainweasels who had led to me believe that everything was terrible and that I should just give up trying to settle in here. Stagnate, fail, and perhaps worse. I'm happy to say that quite a few good things have happened since then! But perhaps one also not so good, so let's take the rough with the smooth.

When I wrote the last article I'd just been to a viewing of a flat in Frederiksberg, and I was going to go to two more viewings the next day. Well, I did that, and the good news is, I said yes to one of them, and the contract is now all signed, and the deposit paid. So in a little over two weeks' time, I'll be moving in. And even though that means I'll be paying double-rent for a while, that's OK because (a) the new place is so much more expensive than the last, it's not really double-rent, in a sense, it's more like rent-plus-a-third; and (b) because DAMN, I still didn't realise just how much the old place was getting me down.

OK, so, I said there was a rough patch as well as good news, so here it is. All last week, I was away with a load of my colleagues, at a conference in Dublin. And the bad thing is: I let myself spiral into a terrible state of mind again on the Sunday when I travelled out, and I ended up saying some stuff, visible to the whole company, where I was just being really negative and criticising things. Ugh. The good news is that once this was pointed out to me, I pretty quickly managed to climb out of that hole that I was hiding in, and then enjoyed the rest of the week.

And why was I in such a terrible state of mind? (Someone asked me recently, "What are you stressed about?". I replied that it gets to a point where logic has flown out of the window, so I can't rationally saying that I'm stressed about anything; just that I'm stressed. However: something probably started it). Well, I think a good part of it was, you guessed it, my current living situation again. On the Sunday morning as I was getting ready, everything just seemed to be going wrong: there was no space to put anything down, my washing was in the way, the drier collapsed, nothing seemed to be where I expect to find it, I can't sit down and chill – all because of my too-small room. And then, after that, progressively, less and less reason was required for me to keep digging.

But. That's all in the past.

So where are we now? Well, half way through April, that's where; and that means I've got two more weeks left in my tiny room before I can FINALLY GET A PROPER PLACE, and also two more weeks left on probation before I get to find out whether depression kicked my arse so much it cost me that job. Fingers crossed.

Finally, a few tidbits:

• I went on my first ever date! With a Danish woman. We probably spoke something like 50/50 Danish/English. Well, maybe 30/70. A fair bit of Danish anyway.
• Straight after that, I had dinner with three other women I'd never met before – all Danish. This time it was almost all in Danish, but the downside was, most of it I couldn't follow. But some I could! A fun evening.
• And then when I got back from Dublin, I had a super hyggelig afternoon with eight other women that I'd never met before – again, all Danish. In fact ... I have quite a few thoughts on this, so I expect to do a separate post about this soon. :-)

Last month, I left the BBC, after 11 years and 11 weeks. Here are a few thoughts on my time there: the good, the bad, and the ugly. But I want to end on a positive note, so I'm going to talk about the Bad, the Ugly, then the Good. Also: this is my list. It's based on my biases, my experiences, my strengths, my interests, and my weaknesses.

For example: I offer no opinion whatsoever on the subject of the decisions taken by BBC management. This is basically because I didn't have enough of a “business head” to be able to form any kind of opinion as to whether what they'd decided was wise, or risky, or stuck in the past, or whatever. Does that mean that I think their decisions were brilliant? Terrible? No. Average? No. It just means “meh”, let's move on.

I spent my time in the BBC entirely within the field of technology. Now to be honest, you're taking a risk if you think that these thoughts represent anything like a balanced view even on BBC technology — and as for programme-making, studios, facilities, etc, forget it.

These are simply my experiences.

The Bad

Technology: probably one of the most frustrating technological aspects was the Reith Network. This is a staff network, spanning the BBC UK offices (as I understand it), providing 10.x.x.x IP addresses – but with no outbound NAT.

Yup, if you're in the office, using the office network, then basically, you can't reach the Internet. Unless you go via the HTTP / HTTPS proxies. Or the SOCKS proxy, if you want another protocol. Oh, except the SOCKS proxies refuse to proxy HTTP, because of course they do, and even if you manage to persuade all of your browsers, development environment, and other tooling to use the right combination of settings, then you still don't get Internet access, because you've got TCP only by that point.

I don't know, maybe there was some secret trick to setting up the proxies such that they Just Worked. I only tried for 11 years, what would I know.

Gradually, it seemed that services were moving away from Reith, an on to (hushed tones) The Internet, often with X509 client certificate authentication. But the progress seemed glacial, and so much stuff was only accessible on Reith. Gateway, I will not miss you. Sorry not sorry.

Oh, fun fact: one of the main internal DNS zones used on Reith accepted updates from anyone, without authentication, as long as you were on Reith. Perhaps this explains why DNS entries used to randomly go missing.

The meeting room screens / phones / videoconferencing facilities were another source of endless time-draining. Many a happy hour has been wasted, and many a meeting derailed, trying to get things to work.

The workplace: I mostly worked in one of the West London offices – Broadcast Centre, Wood Lane. Just up the road from what used to be Television Centre (RIP). I occasionally did have cause to visit some other sites – Salford, Broadcasting House – and of course I sometimes visited other companies' offices, for example to give presentations, or to go to an evening meetup. And every time I went to any office other than my own, I got toilet jealousy.

Seriously: the toilets in Broadcast Centre are a bloody disgrace. Often blocked and out of service; poorly lit and ventilated; paper towel dispensers over-stuffed, so that you can't actually get any towels out; flat surfaces surrounding the basins, such that they don't drain, and just flood; and the taps that were so meaningless in their indication of Hot / Cold, that not even the plumbers knew which way round was which – half were plumbed in one way, and half the other. You just had to try it and see, every time.

Oh, and then the toilet doors: many of which were far too heavily sprung (I measured one once: it needed 15lbs of force to open the cubicle door. I could literally lean on it with my bodyweight, and it still wouldn't open), and many of which the vacant/engaged colour indicator was broken, so that it would display the opposite of whatever was true. And again, this was often about 50/50 working/broken – meaning that, to find a vacant loo, you just have to go along and push every door – hard – to see if one opens.

Because the BBC isn't exactly rolling in cash, and it's always being squeezed for money, it does of course make sense that they need to be careful with the purse strings. However, being on the receiving end wasn't always fun: around 2010-2015 (if memory serves), money was being saved by getting rid of some entire buildings: and that meant that all those displaced people had to go somewhere. Broadcast Centre is a large open-plan office, and as more and more people were squeezed in, the noise levels did sometimes cause a problem.

The ugly

It gives me absolutely no pleasure to write this section. In fact, I think it'll be quite painful. But I hope, ultimately cathartic for me, and constructive for my former employer. I want them to do better.

Transphobia: I came out as trans at the end of 2011, and spent the next few years making various changes in my life, to become someone I was much happier being. And in general, in the workplace, I found the BBC to be a very supportive employer in this context. However: the BBC is also a broadcaster. And especially with the rise of anti-trans rhetoric in the UK media from 2015-2018, it pained me greatly to see my own employer providing a platform to blatantly transphobic viewpoints. For example, many an article on Radio 4's flagship News & Current Affairs programme, "Today"; for example, many an article on "Woman's Hour"; for example, many an article on BBC Two's "Newsnight". For example, the outrageously skewed "Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?" hit piece, aired on BBC Two in January 2017.

In fact, this one aired while I was off sick for 3 months for surgery. So there I was, at home, being supported by employer (the BBC), while simultaneously being attacked and undermined by a major national broadcaster (also the BBC). I vented, in the form of this piece that I wrote for The Queerness.

The upbeat ending: I'm very cautiously optimistic that things might have started to improve. John Humphrys is leaving Today, so that sounds like a good start.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Sexual violence and psychological abuse. Scroll down to the cute kitten.

Assault: August 2012. I came out as trans not quite a year ago, and I've been making good transition-progress, yay. And everyone in our area at work is on a bit of a high, because we've just had the London 2012 Olympics, for which we were the host broadcaster, and yes, we built some cool stuff and were proud of it. Go us. :-)

And then, at someone's leaving drinks after work, at a nearby pub ... a colleague from a nearby team indecently assaulted me.

The next day, I couldn't go to work. I couldn't leave the house. I was too upset. Then after the weekend, I did go back to work, and I reported what had happened. I filed a grievance. The grievance process took 2 or 3 months, but eventually it concluded, and my grievance was upheld. And in response, the BBC did ... basically nothing. I kept working on my team, he kept working on his team. And to be honest, I was OK with that.

Until things changed.

Over the next few years, his team and my team got merged – so now we work on the same team. One time our team was moving desks, and when the plan was published, it turned out that my abuser was going to be sitting directly opposite me, facing me. Not fucking cool: so I raised it with my manager, who "joked" that he was going to sit the two of us right next to each other. Some fucking support. And then, maybe a year or two later, he got promoted to the same grade as me, so now my abuser and I are peers, in the same team. And once the grievance process ended, at no point over those years was I ever asked how I was doing, in the context of the assault; how I felt about working nearby to my abuser. I just kept my mouth shut, kept his secret, and bottled it all up.

Well obviously that wasn't going to work in the long run. Eventually I couldn't take it any more, and I insisted that he go. Only then to be told that they couldn't make him go, because it was too long since the original grievance. FML. It took a few months, but eventually he was gone.

The upbeat ending: I think the lesson here is that, in cases of assault and the like, the onus should not be on the survivor to state what support they need: the support should be there by default. I am hopeful that this lesson will perhaps start to take hold soon enough.

Bullying: I've had various line managers in my time at the BBC – perhaps 9 or 10 different line managers in 11 years. But unquestionably the worst line manager I've had – at the BBC or elsewhere – was the one I endured from September 2017 to October 2018.

To cut a long story short, she was a deeply cruel and aggressive person, almost completely lacking empathy, but by no means short of hypocrisy, vindictiveness, and lies. Around May 2018, she started pursuing a campaign against me, accusing me of bad conduct. Now initially, she might have had a point: I was trying to come out of depression (though she wasn't helping), and the depression was making me perform at rather less than my best. But then, it just became ridiculous.

• I was accused of slowing down the team, because I had not done released some software in a particular way – even though literally nobody had ever asked me to do that.
• I was accused of not accepting technical decisions that the team had agreed – when in fact what happened was, I had realised that we hadn't actually reached agreement at all, we just thought we had, and all I did was point that out.
• I was accused of causing trouble when I disagreed with the team lead. Fundamentally, the question was: in cases of disagreement on technical matters, who wins – the team leader (him), or the principal software engineer (me)? His job role had only recently been created – and nobody had ever defined how his role and my role were meant to interact.

And so it went on.

In my last post I mentioned that "my boss at work had massively pissed me off", so I started applying for jobs in Denmark. Yeah. That would be about this time.

I pointed out these problems to her manager, and declared that I had no confidence in her any more as a manager. The abuse continued. I went off sick with stress and anxiety, twice. The second time I returned to work, in the "how can we support you for a successful return to work?" meeting, my manager decided that instead of supporting me, she'd use that meeting to abuse and attack me again. That was the last straw.

I left that team, and moved to another. Then immediately filed a grievance against her. And then two interesting things happened: (1) The more I talked to my colleagues, the more I heard horror stories about what she'd done. And (2) the same week that my manager was due to face the grievance hearing, it was announced that she was leaving the BBC.

Good riddance.

The upbeat ending:

1. JOIN YOUR TRADE UNION. I happened to join mine a few years earlier, and at the time, I then sort of wondered why I did. But when all this happened to me, I was so grateful for their help.
2. Speak up, fight back. Abusers get away with what they do to a large extent because those that they abuse, keep silent. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
3. Be open about your failures, as well as your successes. I sincerely hope that in hindsight, hiring her and then keeping her on for all that time, will be recognised as a mistake; furthermore, I sincerely hope that that mistake will be admitted, and talked about, and learned from.

To be fair, that section wasn't as painful to write as I feared. But that's probably because I left out the grim details.

So! Let's move on to the BIG FINALE!

The good

What was good about working at the BBC? Lots! Here's just a taste:

The people (in tech, anyway): Almost all really lovely people. Out of however many hundreds of people I must have met and worked with, I can only recall maybe 4 people who left a distinctly bad taste in the mouth – two of whom I have discussed above. Those are really good odds!

Support for transition: Like many trans people, when I came out, it was because I was broken and terrified and at my wit's end. I received a lot of support at work. I am very grateful for that.

The development culture: it can be really good. Not always – usually it's just "good". But every now and then – like for the 2012 Olympics, and like for the project we did in 2013 to rebuild the video engine behind iPlayer – it's just an absolute joy to see so many people working together to one goal, and getting cool, innovative, world-leading stuff done, and done well, and (tbh) on a pretty small budget. Love it.

The buildings. In summary, "weird and brilliant". Television Centre was fantastic, because of its weird layout, and all the history, and the fact that sometimes it seemed like there wasn't a right-angle in the entire place. Elstree, where you could go for a training course, and walk past bits of Holby City to do so.

And Broadcasting House is just amazing – 12 floors (3 below, ground, and 8 above) of fantastic quirkiness. TV and radio studios; The News floor; lots of office space; one or two TARDISes, and the odd Dalek; the Radio Theatre; meeting rooms themed after famous BBC presenters and programmes; a sound studio; almost 90 years of history; two buildings grafted together; a lift where the two sides don't line up; paintings of Directors General on the walls of the Council Chamber; 1930s art deco; Radio 1 Xtra and the Asian Network; the One Show; and on and on and on. If you ever get the chance to go take a look around, give it a go. :-)

Easy to tell people what you do: perhaps a daft one, but when someone asks what you do for a living, it's nice that you can just point to something as well-known as BBC iPlayer, and say "I helped make that".

The history, and the sense of purpose: I grew up in very much "a BBC family" (as opposed to "an ITV family") – by which I mean that my parents, and therefore we also, mainly watched BBC. And of course listened – Radio 4, mostly. So the BBC always felt like a very special place, to me, and I was very lucky to be able to work there.

So long, Auntie

My previous job, before the BBC, I was at for almost 7 years, at that was by far my longest job. And then I got made redundant.

I liked my time at the BBC — mostly. After a bit of glitch two years in, when I handed in my notice but was then persuaded to stay, I then settled in. After maybe 5 years or so, I did occasionally wonder how long I would be there. “One day”, I often thought, “I'll leave this place”. But I didn't know when.

Taking 13 weeks off for surgery does have the effect (assuming you are otherwise in a position of stable employment) of unsettling you. Giving you lots of time to think. And even when you return to work, of then feeling like the place you rejoined isn't quite the one you left.

After my return to work, it took me a long time to get settled again. Then add in some trouble from my personal life, and I got depressed. I started counseling. My best friend Aimee talked about leaving the BBC, and the UK — and then did so, moving to Denmark. My boss started bullying me. Denmark started looking more and more attractive. I got a job, escaped from my bullying boss, worked out my notice, and left.

No, it's not quite the way that perhaps I would have wanted to leave. But it's good enough, and once I was away from the bully's influence, I started to regain some self-worth.

And so, finally, I can wave a fond farewell to Auntie. And for all of the bad and ugly things I've included in here, it's all because I want things to get better.

Improve your workplaces. Talk to, and listen to, your employees. Treat them with empathy.

On my last day, I sent the customary email to my colleagues, saying my goodbyes.

It ended like this:

I shall leave you with this thought: Vi skal altid forsøge at være så venlig og gavmild til hinanden som mulig. Hvis ikke, hvorfor er vi alle her? Selv hvis vores software m.m. virker godt, uden venlighed, er vi mistet.

which translates as:

We must always try to be as kind and generous to each other as possible. If not, why are we all here? Even if our software etc. works well, without kindness, we are lost.

Be good to each other.
x

Kitten picture: source unknown

Yes, this is a bit late – I've been here over a month now. Whatever!!

So, what am I doing here? (No, seriously: what the hell am I doing here??)

I was born in the Midlands area of England, and moved south, to a little bit north of London, when I was 2 years old. At school, I learned French, up to the age of 16 – and then stopped. Went to university, met a girl, moved in together, got married. My parents weren't ones for taking my sister and I on exotic holidays when I was young – a few trips over to northern France with the caravan, and that was it. And my partner wasn't keen on the idea of foreign travel at all, and so ... we didn't. So I settled in to a life of living and working in Britain, and taking holidays in Britain, and speaking only English.

And that's the way it was, for almost 30 years. But now: Denmark.

So what changed?

A reasonably short version of the story is: my friend Aimee, who used to work on the same team as me at the BBC in London, had the idea, the dream, of moving to Denmark. And she made it happen. But also, along the way, I got suckered into the dream too. But whereas she felt more convinced that she wanted to move, and could move, I wasn't so sure.

Around the same time Aimee shared her Danish dream with me, my wife and I started separating. So during the first half of 2018, as Aimee made more and more progress towards Denmark (visiting, finding a possible job, getting the job, setting a date to move), I was getting divorced; moving out of the town I'd always lived in, and instead to London; and just generally working out what I wanted to do with my life. Stay in London, working at the BBC? London, but working elsewhere? Move out of London again, but commute in? Move to the south coast? The north? Scotland? Denmark? Somewhere else?

Fast forward a little to August: Aimee had left the BBC, but not yet moved to Denmark; and I was by now pretty convinced that I wanted to do the same, but hadn't made any steps in that direction. Until one day when my boss at work had massively pissed me off, and that night (about 2am, if I remember correctly), I started applying for jobs in Copenhagen.

So, here I am. My divorce is almost complete – I think we're just in the queue at the courts for the decree absolute. My ex and I have disentangled our lives, but we're still really good friends, which is great. I left the BBC on January 11th, flew over to Denmark on January 17th, and started my new job on February 1st.

I've survived quite a lot of change and challenge over the last 7 years or so, and now I find myself in a new country, learning a new language, doing a new job, and trying to build up my circle of friends here to be more than 1. It hasn't always been easy, and of course there will be more challenges ahead.

But what am I doing here? Actually, grinning quite a lot!

I live in Denmark now, and am not too bad at Danish. How cool is that??

Can you remember the names of the kids in your class when you were at school? How far back? Even the ones who were neither your friends, nor your bullies?

I can't claim to remember all of them, but I've got quite a few stashed away in my head still, from age 5. Mark, Daniel, Tony, Sarah, Melanie, Karen (though at about age 8, she got moved to the year above the rest of us), Nina, Gary, Justin with the double-barrelled surname. I remember all their surnames, by the way — I'm just declining to publish them. Ah, and the twin girls who lived in the next street — now what were their names? Susannah and something, I think. Don't tell me, it'll come to me.

My point is that names stick. Almost 30 years since I last saw most of them, I can still remember almost all of their names, if not much else. Other than a bit of a personal blind spot some years ago for confusing Carolines with Catherines, I will often remember people's names with a high degree of accuracy, and for a long period of time. Ah, but what did they look like? Here, things are far more hazy.

As trans folk, many of us have old names that are associated purely with the past; and during transition, our appearances often change over time in a way that most other people's doesn't. Those memories of the past are often powerful and painful, a place we want to avoid being taken — or at least not go there unprepared. An unexpected reminder of a previous name, an inopportune sighting of a photo from the wrong part of our history, can be enough to seriously dampen the spirits for the rest of the day.

On mutability

Society teaches us that some things about a person are fixed, and some are mutable. Jobs, careers, where we live, having kids – all things in which society teaches us to expect changes. Partners, too (and that's more fluid now than it would have been 30, 40, 50 years ago). Even general life circumstance, such as bankruptcy or homelessness, we understand can happen, even if we don't expect it. Surnames? Women change their names when they marry, society used to teach us, though that's less true now than it used to be. For men, surname changes continue to be uncommon. Forenames? Nah, they're fixed, we're told. And gender — you what, now? You're having a laugh, ain't you?

Appearance, too, is subject to some odd and arbitrary rules. We expect people to get bigger as they grow from birth to adulthood. We expect that their appearance, in body and face shape, will change significantly around puberty. We allow for people to put on weight, and to lose weight – or neither. We expect that people's skin will look more aged over time, for their general posture to drop, for their youth to leave them. (But have you noticed how much younger a happily-transitioned person looks, compared to how they looked before?)

Words

It always surprises me when, on meeting a trans person for the first time, some people will almost immediately disclose their old name, even though as far as I can tell they don't have to. Even if they've not used that name for months. It's so directly opposed to my own approach, I honestly don't know what to make of it.

Society is wrong, of course, but it's hard to escape its influence. Deeply ingrained in the mind, is still that rule, the one that says: “forenames are forever”. As if the name your parents chose for you shortly after your birth is some kind of Universal Immutable Truth, just as inarguable as gravity making things fall downwards, or Christmas happening each winter. As if your True Name was written in the destiny of the heavens when you were born, and by some process that science still can't explain, your parents just happened somehow to know Your Name Of Eternal Truth.

Whatever.

But that ingrained rule, it causes damage. It is damage. It teaches us that, if someone's name was previously “A”, and now they're saying it's “B”, then they are lying and really “A” is still true. This is a very damaging lie, and I HATE THE FACT THAT IT HAS BEEN BURNED INTO MY HEAD. For now, the main defence I have against this perversion, this corruption in my head placed there by other people, is that I must never know someone's old name. Once known, it's almost impossible to un-know, and thus I must never find out in the first place.

I hate that this is true. I long for the day when that corrupt rule in my head is weakened, is gone. One day.

This is why I hate knowing people's old names — there's no value in knowing it, and once known, I find the old name almost impossible to forget.

But maybe there is value: not for the person being told, but for the person doing the telling: the power of deliberately releasing this supposedly-powerful thing, to demonstrate that in fact it has no power at all. For as long as the secret is held onto, there remains the anticipation – not always favourable – of disclosure. What will happen when people find out? How would that make me feel? Much like coming out in the first place, this is another secret that we each have to choose how to handle: whether to defend, to attempt to keep the secret; or whether to pre-empt what is perhaps inevitable, not to call it a secret. It's just a fact about our past like any other, with as much power over us as “where we used to live”, “what job we used to do”,  or “what TV shows we used to like”.

Pictures

In contrast to the difficulty of forgetting a word, appearances are much more indistinct. Sure, the human brain is evolved to be good at processing people's faces, and we can be very familiar with those that we see day-to-day. But it needs constant reinforcement. If I don't see someone for a while, the mental image I have of them will become progressively more elusive. I might think I remember what they look like, but the details of their faces slip away from me when I try to recall them, just as surely as if I'd tried to grab a handful of fog. Conversely, repeatedly seeing a contemporary image of someone reinforces that image; and absent of any continual reminder of what they used to look like, the past is allowed to fade, and the present remains strong.

We've all seen trans people posting before & after pictures, for various values of “before” and “after”. Before I came out, look at the dead eyes. The day I started taking HRT. First time I went out “as myself”. Twelve months on hormones, feeling good. Look how far I've come, I can't believe it. It's part self-validation (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that), part showing others what can be done, showing what's possible. A message of hope, a voice calling out from the twisting, unseen path ahead, showing that the way if perhaps is not clear, is worth exploring, and perhaps traveling. So there's definitely value in sharing these old images, both as self-love, and to support others.

My past, my choices

I've had the good fortune of finding almost all of my trans friends, my Twitterverse, since I changed my name. It's been pretty straightforward to keep my old name to myself, to keep it quiet. All I have to do is not tell people. After all, what good would it do you if I told you anyway? I could tell you literally any one of a hundred or so popular names that white middle-class southern-English baby boys were given in the 1970s, and they'd all be equally plausible, and they'd all tell you the same thing: precisely nothing.

Sharing my old name, and my old-me photos, has been something that I've declined to do, at least so far – with a couple of exceptions. Occasionally I've posted an old picture, somewhere on a part of the Internet visible only to friends, and then deleted it a little while later; and sometimes I've shown someone an old photo in person, waved my phone at them, so that I know that the image hasn't been copied, doesn't need to be “taken down”. As soon as I've got my phone back, closed that app, from that moment on, the memory of what I used to look like is already fading from their minds, and the conversation moves on.

Our old names and photos are usually associated with powerful emotional memories. Sometimes of specific things that were said, or particular things that happened; or perhaps more generally with the state of our lives, our state of mind, at the time. What we did, or didn't do; how that made us feel. So these words and images have a strong connection to these emotional states, they draw on our pasts, and in ways which we don't always appreciate. Therein lies their power. You can even feel just a trace of that power when looking at other people's pre-transition photos. If a post-transition friend shows you an old photo of theirs, it's still possible to feel just a fraction of their emotions yourself (hence the “dead eyes” comment from earlier) – but it's far more powerful for pictures of yourself.

My pre-transition and post-transition selves are at once both the same person, and yet very, very different. So that old name? In many senses, that's not me. It has less power over me with each passing day; with every day, with every interaction with other people on this planet, the image of new-me is reinforced, and that person that nobody's seen for a few years slips further and further away. Him? Oh, yeah ... no. No, we kind of stopped talking. He doesn't come round here any more.

Maybe one day, I will find myself deliberately revealing my old name to the public at large, via some tweet or post. Perhaps because it still has power, and so by stripping it of its secret status, I'll have robbed it of that power; I'll feel relieved that I don't have to guard it any longer. Or maybe I'll wait for it to lose its power first. But when will that happen? Today, this still feels like quite a distant prospect.

But photos? Well ... never say never.

Advertising saturation at tube stations: literally making me consider making eye contact with another passenger, instead of looking at ads.

Desperate times.

As a temporary intermediate measure I tend to stare at the arse of the person ahead of me on the escalator, instead of looking at the ads. (Whereas the first bit was mainly for comedy effect, this one is literally true).

Those parts of the network where they have the same ad EVERYWHERE are nightmarish. And I don't just mean “repetitive”.

In case you haven't seen them (if you're not a regular visitor to a major city), imagine a long escalator, with a roof. i.e. you're in a tube. Along the walls of the tube on both sides are TV screens every, I don't know, five feet or so. It's quite a long escalator so maybe there'll be (guessing) 25 screens per side. Two sides. 50 TV screens. That's all there is to look at, everything else is grey and featureless, whereas the TVs are animated and bright and colourful and attention-grabbing. They DEMAND your attention. You unwillingly give it, for a few seconds. You look away. Except YOU CAN'T, because as soon as you look away, you're just looking at another, identical TV showing THE SAME AD. All those TVs in sync showing the same ad. It's horrible. It feels too much akin to being strapped into a chair, head pinned in position, TV dead ahead. So all there is to see, for the duration of this escalator ride (which you can't speed up or slow down or cancel) is THE AD.

At least for now the screens are still silent. I give it another three years.

I didn't seriously think about my gender identity, actually really questioning my gender, until I was in my late 30s. I came out as gender non-conforming at age 39, and as trans at age 40. And because I realised I was a trans woman, that therefore made me lesbian too. So for the first 39 or so years of my life, I thought of myself as a cis-het male; and then from age 40-ish onwards, I've been a trans lesbian.

Basically, I'm still very new to all things LGBT, and I have no choice but to admit it, I'm ignorant of so much of LGBT history. To a large extent, LGBT history is really only learned by LGBT people – or perhaps those close to someone LGBT, a family member maybe. None of which was the case for me. I'm very much late to the party, so to speak.

Some of the bigger themes of history are easier to pick up on, of course – that sex between men was previously criminalised, and now isn't; the general advance of LGBT rights. But therein lies the trap: for those who've only recently started paying attention (such as myself), it's very easy not to see the wider historical context into which we fit. And it's all too easy to look at the last few years and think: We're increasingly visible, and representation and acceptance by society is improving. Life is good. And it is good, but let's not get complacent.

Recently, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, the BBC has been showing a series of programmes under the banner Gay Britannia (disclosure: I work for the BBC). While the content has been criticised has being too gay-centric instead of balanced LGBT – there's an interview there with the head of PinkNews, where he praises Little Britain, for crying out loud – I nevertheless gave some some of the programmes a watch.

Against The Law is a film about life as a gay man in the 1950s and early 1960s, when the law, the press and society persecuted anyone it suspected of being homosexual. Broadly speaking I suppose I was already aware of most of this, but seeing it dramatised brings it into sharp focus; and in particular I wasn't aware of some of the ways in which they tried to “treat” homosexuality. Quite an eye-opener, actually.

The other programme I watched was Prejudice and Pride: The People's History of LGBTQ Britain, an assembled narrative using news archive, interviews, and highly personal artefacts and stories. After the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in the 60s, this programme goes on to tell stories of seeing lesbianism represented in fiction, of gay communes and nightclubs, of having a gay bar where, for the first time, the windows weren't blacked out, being visible, not being ashamed. And of HIV/AIDS, and of Section 28.

Some of the stories very much rang true for me – but two in particular, I'd like to talk about further.

1987; the UK government launched its AIDS awareness campaign via TV and cinema and a leaflet to every household in the land. The slogan: “Don't Die Of Ignorance”, with AIDS represented as terrifying grey monolith, like a headstone, slamming into the ground. I was 14, and went to a boys' school. I fancied girls, at least in theory – but I was way too socially withdrawn for sex with another person to be anything but a distant thought. Sex, and therefore HIV/AIDS, was something that happened to other people. So now, 30 years later, watching this programme as people relate tales of lost loved ones, of memorials, of a great coming-together of people in shared grief and solidarity – that was all new to me, something which I'd not really thought about before.

Likewise Section 28, wherein homophobia was once again enshrined in the law, banning the “promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities. Now this was very much during my lifetime (1988-2003; when I was ages 15-30). But still, it was something that affected other people, because I was “straight”, I wasn't gay. And I shudder to think what language I would have used at the time to describe what I would now call “cis”. Again, I found it quite an eye-opener to see how the government enacted this law, and the chilling effect it had on queer people, on teachers, on anyone working in local authorities. How LGBTQ people united to fight this threat, in many ways which I don't remember – and a couple which I do [1, 2]; and how this led to the formation of Stonewall.

I'd imagine it's very different for people who realised they were trans much sooner (even if they didn't come out, or perhaps didn't even fully understand or have the language), or for people who already identified as something other than heterosexual. If you already knew you were LGBT back when these events were occurring, you'd have a very different take on it, I assume – it'd be part of your life too.

If we weren't still fighting the same oppressions then perhaps there'd be less need to learn our history. I hated history at school; the last history test I ever took was at age 13, about Mussolini and Italian Fascism. I scored 3/25. To a large extent I saw history as an irrelevance, but knowledge of history is useful in that it helps us to interpret the events of the present, and to guide and shape the future. I'm struggling to think of ways in which what I learned about the Saxons and the structure of their settlements is particularly relevant to my daily life; but with the current struggles against nazism, fascism and the far-right, the Mussolini example, above, is perhaps apt.

Likewise, as minority groups LGBT people continue to have to fight back against oppression. Whether it's verbal or physical abuse by those around us; or discrimination in the school or workplace; or the publication and broadcast of homophobic and transphobic content; or the questioning, the promotion of fear, the othering of us by those in power; and of course all those fights and more faced by those overseas, including criminalisation, violence, imprisonment, and death.

Being more aware of our history helps us fight all this, not least by helping us to see the injustices in the first place – but also to be more aware of the very possibility of erosion, of regression of those hard-won rights. I wrote above about how it's easy to look at just the last few years and think that visibility is increasing, acceptance is improving, life is good – but the recent rise of the far-right and its resultant increase in hate crime shows that our gains are fragile, and can be lost, and by being more aware of our shared community history, we can be more aware of the threats against us today, and better placed to fight them.

The news these days isn't a barrel of laughs; it's depressing, it's wearing, is tiring. It's OK not to engage. It takes strength, which we can draw from each other, but do not feel obligated to take part. Do whatever's right for you. But if you do find yourself wanting to fight back, you could perhaps do worse than take time out to go and learn some more of our shared history.

The first LGBT event I ever went to was Summer 2014, a march in London. I didn't really have any friends who I could go with, so I went along on my own – and yes, I enjoyed the day, but it was an event that seemed oddly without purpose or direction, somewhat sparsely attended, and I made only fleeting connections to other people.

Then, later that year, something started to change: I started to find a group of people, on Twitter, who I became friends with. Like, really friends – in a way that I didn't even realise I was missing before. Then in June 2015, I met up with some of these people, face-to-face, for the first time.

Just a month later: my first Trans Pride Brighton. I went along, again travelling and staying alone, but at least this time I knew maybe three or four people, who I threatened to stick to like glue. And then I got there, and something remarkable happened: hundreds of trans and non-binary people, all gathered together, proudly declaring their existence, demanding their rights, colourfully, noisily, and peacefully. After spending years in shame, and unaware of the other people like me out there, this was simply a revelation. At the end of the weekend, when it was time to leave these people, my friends, and go home, I cried; and one of my friends hugged me. Another new thing.

If 2015 was a revelation; 2016 was simply bigger and better. We marched down to the seafront, and along the main road towards Hove, the road closed on one side. Thousands of us, this time. We were noisy, we waved flags, we chanted slogans, and the public waved at us, cheered us on, car horns loudly adding support. And afterwards, we chilled out in the park, in the sun, again surrounded by so many people, and again I was reminded of the wonderful diversity of the trans and non-binary spectrum.

It's worth recognising, though, that some people really would like to come to this sort of event – for the friends, for the connections – but really struggle with big crowds. I hope those people do come, and find a way to enjoy the weekend in a way that works for them. The march, and the park afterwards, are a significant part of the day, but by no means the only way to enjoy it.

For me, then, Trans Pride represents friendship; connection; visibility; declaration; demonstration; diversity; inclusion. Being part of the march, being part of the community, being part of a group of real, genuine friends.

Belonging.

As I write this I'm here in Manchester for Sparkle Weekend, 2017. It's only the second time I've been – I came last year too – and while it's not quite the ideal event for me personally, I have nevertheless returned. Why?

It's obvious to anyone who's been here, that although it bills itself as “the world's largest trans celebration”, the event itself is aimed far more at the part-time / cross-dressing end of the transgender spectrum than at people like me. And although I'm not a fan of the label “transsexual”, it's definitely at times like these when it feels like it might be useful to have labels to help us talk about these things – about the different ways of being trans, all of which are OK. Because being trans, or non-binary, is just who we are. We all experience some kind of mismatch or dissatisfaction with our assigned gender, but how we react to that and deal with those feelings varies from person to person.

We could use language as terse as “some of us transition, some don't” – but even then, that's treating “transition” as a yes/no option, as if it's a single thing, which we know that it isn't. So let's be more specific.

How we deal with our gender identity (or, to put it more simply, our gender) – varies along many axes. What, if anything, do we tell our partners, our friends, our families, our colleagues? How do we present ourselves to the world, in our clothing, our hair, our skin, our voices, our speech, our mannerisms, our actions? What do we ask people to call us – our names, our pronouns? Do these things vary depending on context, or day of the week, or how we feel? Then, there's the things which, while they can be changed, can't be switched into and out of at will (if that's your thing): hair removal, body mass, hormones, or various forms of surgery.

It's easy – and potentially even useful – to label people as “part time” or “full time” or “transitioning” or “transitioned”, but that greatly contracts and simplifies a complex picture which we would do well to recognise as actually containing far more nuance, complexity and detail.

So, I'm here at Sparkle not just to hang out on the edges of the event, to meet up with friends, and generally have fun, but also for another reason. Because after all of the changes that I've achieved with my transition – which I now regard as effectively “complete” – I recognise where I was, where I came from, what I've been through. Although I didn't come to Sparkle until I'd already changed a great many things about myself, I look around, and I still see in those around me an essence of how I used to be.

This lunchtime, Lisa Severn and I will be holding one of the workshop events here, because we hope to be able to give back, to help some of the people here deal with their own gender: to deal with “transition”, whatever that entails for them. We're not experts – we'll simply be telling our stories, and hoping to facilitate discussion with any who attend. With luck, those of us who have already been down a path, can make the way easier for any who choose to follow.

You know how the story begins. The bit about trying to get HRT, that magic wand to give puberty a second wind, to drive changes in one's body and mind in the desired direction, towards one's correct gender. To get you nearer to where you need to be. I'd first gone to my GP near the start of 2013; and then, near the start of 2015 (yes, I think I was lucky – I only had to wait 24 months), I was at last on a combination of a T-blocker injection, and oestrogen. Those sweet little magic pills, twice a day.

Of course, with a second puberty, just as with the first, you expect major changes to the body. It would, perhaps, be surprising if it were all plain sailing. So when the symptoms first started appearing, I didn't really think much of it. Raynaud's Phenomenon, I now know it to be called: for me, basically an inability to regulate the temperature in my hands, in my fingers. On a warm sunny day, my hands could feel as cold as if I was making snowballs in winter. And then, just as suddenly, they'd feel like they had a fever – just in my hands, you understand – and I would have to run them under ice-cold water to get them to feel anything like comfortable.

Thankfully, this didn't last long. Maybe 3 months or so. But then, it was replaced by something worse.

Just as I'm starting to enjoy the softer skin that oestrogen was giving me, my hands start doing almost the opposite: they develop patches of thicker, rougher skin that have never been there before. Small patches at first, then gradually covering most of my fingers and thumbs. Meanwhile, the palms of my hands, down to the wrists and up to the fingertips, have gone raw, shiny and red. That thick skin, especially at my fingertips, develops deep lines, that become cracks, that then open up and bleed. Generally only one open cut at a time, which then heals after a couple of weeks or so. But then, I'm looking with suspicion at those deep lines in my fingers, on my thumbs, wondering which one will give way next, which one will be the next to break open, the next source of my pain. And then one does split open, and round we go again.

I crave soft, pale, feminine hands; but instead I have bright red palms, my fingers bleed, and my rough skin catches on everything.

Summer, 2015. I suddenly realise that my hands aren't as flexible as they should be. I can no longer grip small-diameter objects (for example, to open a soft drink bottle top), or manipulate small objects (coins, keys), or make a fist. My hands no longer have the strength to hold and operate spray aerosols, such as deodorant. I realise that, at some point and without realising, I've also changed the way I hold my toothbrush, because I can no longer hold it the “right” way, the way I'd normally hold it. When the hell did that start? My fingers become puffy, my rings no longer fit. I get a lot of cramp, too, in my legs and hands. At one point, when I flexed my fingers, I could feel the creaking of the tendons within the palms of my hands. Eww. I'm glad to say, that particular symptom went away pretty quickly.

A few months earlier, just after starting HRT, I had allowed myself to be discharged from the Charing Cross GIC. Now, a few months later, I'm back at my GP, wanting to go back to the GIC again. I can't help but notice the connection: I start HRT; the problems with my hands start. Coincidence? I don't know. That's why I want to go back and ask them. But of course, this part of the story is one that you can guess: the GIC are not quick to respond.

September. My hands are getting worse. I'm also getting a lot of pain in my ankles and knees: for example, if I've been sat with my colleagues having lunch, it can be agony trying to stand up again afterwards. That's new, that's not cool. Oh, and my hands are curling inwards – I have to really fight to flatten my hands enough to touch palm-to-palm. Hands curling backwards slightly – as healthy hands can – is way beyond my abilities. So I'm trying to get in touch with the GIC to hurry things along, or to at least get confirmation that I'm back in the queue. But no, trying to get information out of them, between appointments, is like trying to get blood out of a stone. I chase them for a month, to no avail.

Late September: I have a cough. I just can't shake it. On and on it goes, and of course I go to my GP after the first few weeks, but they're no help. Mid-December, and the cough is a lot worse. One evening at home I have a coughing fit while on the stairs, and it's all I can do to stop myself falling back down the stairs to the hallway. I go back to my GP, again. I tell them all of these symptoms, and explain the difficulty being re-admitted to the GIC. I ask to be referred to a different GIC, but he refuses.

Late December 2015, and the doctor has suggested I go to see the asthma nurse. I use an inhaler for a while, but it makes no difference. And then, just as I'm about to leave, the nurse asks to look at my hands. Have I had trouble with very cold fingers, she asks? I tell her yes, I tell her all about that, and the cracking skin, and the redness, and the stiffness. She refers me to the local hospital.

Finally. We're getting somewhere.

I forget the exact order, but I'm sent for two CT scans, a lung biopsy, an echo cardiogram, several lung function tests, and probably others that I've forgotten. The chest clinic refers me to the rheumatism clinic. The doctor at the rheumatism clinic immediately suspects the problem, refers me to a specialist hospital, and at last I have a name for this condition (although it's unconfirmed at this stage): “Scleroderma”, from the Greek skleros, meaning "hard", and derma, "skin".

Whereas February and March 2016 were are blur of appointments, tests and consultations, suddenly, things went quiet. I waited. The only treatment I'd been given so far was a cough suppressant. Needless to say, this did nothing for my hands, which continued to crack open. I tried various moisturising creams, but nothing really worked. I slathered it on at night, and wore white gloves in bed, to keep the cream in place, next to my skin. I took baths, with added moisturising oils. It all barely helped, if any.

I found it hard to eat and swallow. Mealtimes became hard work, a slog just to try to get the food down. I'd often abandon part of my meal uneaten, not because the food wasn't fine (it was), and not because I was full (I wasn't), but simply because I was bored and tired of taking so damn long to eat anything. I choked a lot, too – several times during 2015 / 2016, my wife was seconds away from having to call 999. I got a lot of congestion and phlegm which refused to shift, and sometimes made it hard to talk.

At work, I struggled. I've got a desk job, but it still sometimes involves walking around the building from room to room, and if nothing else, the office is still a long way from home, two hours in each direction. To that extent, even just turning up for work was a physical challenge, and one that I was increasingly unable to meet: I'd get to work, and immediately I'd be exhausted, useless. Why am I doing this, again? I arranged to work from home 2 days a week, but even that wasn't enough. Surely this wasn't sustainable. Work referred me to Occupational Health, which was (from my point of view) basically a waste of time: no amount of workplace assessment, and getting me different chairs, or keyboards, or adjusting my monitors, is going to help me regain lung capacity. You know what would really help? Not having a two-hour commute.

For maybe 4 months or so, I start using the Priority Seats on trains. You know, the seats nearest the doorways, the ones that people often offer to pregnant women. I hate having to ask, because, well, I hate admitting to myself that I'm ill, and I hate disturbing people, and therefore possibly confronting them. Some people are really nice: they surrender the seats quickly, without question:

Me: “Excuse me, may I have the priority seat please?”

Man sat in seat: “Why?”

Me: “Because I need it.”

That worked. But sometimes, things aren't so smooth. Once, I've run for the train – but when I say “run”, my lungs really don't let me run very fast. My running is basically the same as other people's brisk walking.

Me (very much out of breath and ready to keel over): “Excuse me, may I have the priority seat please?”

Man sat in seat: “You can't just have a seat just because you're a bit out of breath”

I think of all of the hospital appointments I've been to, the CT scans, the echo cardiogram, and far more.

Me (between catching breath): “I'm not here to discuss my medical history”, and I repeat my request for the seat.

The man, very reluctantly, moves.

Or the one where the man in the priority seat asked if I was pregnant (well, correct gendering, so that's nice), but when I refused to answer on the basis that my medical details were none of his business, he in turn refused to vacate the seat.

Let me be quite clear: At this time, nothing would give me greater pleasure than being healthy enough not to require the priority seats. Before I was ill, I used to be quite happy sitting on the floor of the train, even if there were seats: someone more needy could sit there. But with this illness, my mobility was significantly impaired: sitting down on the floor, and getting up again afterwards, were hard now. I had to really think about how to do so. Standing up by myself would take time, and thought, and planning, and a lot of space. Often, I accepted the help of friends or strangers.

I'll admit it: I was worried. Where would all of this lead? Would I regain the full use of my hands? Could I become as mobile as I used to be, until only recently? Would I have to stop taking HRT? In mid-2015, I'd made the decision that I did want GRS – but would this illness be an impediment to me achieving that goal? HRT and GRS obviously meant a lot to me, and there seemed a very real possibility that they might be in danger.

Eventually, in late 2016, the appointment with the specialist comes through: the Royal Free Hospital, in north London. Yet another day off work, but, whatever it takes: I'm there for probably about 3 hours in all, various tests, and consultations, and so forth. They tell me that they're sure I have Scleroderma, but they're not yet sure what kind. It's an auto-immune condition, and in my case, it's causing thickening of the tissues in my ankles, knees, hands, and lungs. I have scarring at the base of my lung which I'm told will never get better; this has reduced my lung capacity. And additionally, the thicker lining of the lung means that oxygen is not absorbed as easily into the blood, and so even the capacity I do have isn't working as well as it should.

After I've seen one of the doctors, someone else more senior comes in to meet me: a professor. He's very excited. Scleroderma, he tells me, is a condition that affects around 1 in 5000 people, and it affects women five times more often than it affects men. He's very interested in the fact that I'm transgender, and that my symptoms started at the same time as I started HRT. I belong to two uncommon sets of people – transgender, and Scleroderma – and I lie at the even-rarer intersection of the two. I feel like a hard-to-find research data point.

This point in the story, by the way, is where my GRS happened. Fun thing about that: at the pre-op consultation, I said I had Scleroderma, and rheumatism in my hands, and the surgeon asked me if that was going to stop me being able to dilate. Of course, I said "no" – I didn't want to say anything that was going to jeopardise my transition! Truthfully, though, the answer should have been "I don't know", since by that point, I didn't really know exactly what GRS aftercare actually involved. As it turned out, yes, my condition did make a few things a bit harder – mainly getting into and out of the bath. But basically, practice makes perfect: I had to do it several times a day, and I quickly became quite good at it.

A few months later, early 2017, and I return to the Royal Free for more tests. And at last: now, two years after the problem started, I finally get to start medication to actually treat this condition. In fact, it's a cocktail of 4 different drugs and 3 vitamin supplements, all on top of the HRT.

So at last, to mid 2017, to the present day. Things are getting better now. The cracking open of the fingers – “digital ulcers”, they called it – went on for something like 15-18 months, then stopped. The redness on my hands has improved, but could still be better. My lungs aren't quite as good as they used to be, I think, but they're far better than they were at their worst. I can flatten my hands, and even bend them back slightly. And, small victories: I can now open soft drinks bottles on my own – I no longer have to ask friends and colleagues, or indeed strangers in the street, to open them for me. I still can't make fists, but that's getting closer.

So far, I've been on the medication for 3 or 4 months, and the signs are looking good. I think they're thinking this might take 3 years or so in total. There's a bit of a way to go yet.

The timeline of this illness has been entangled with the timeline of my GRS, and subsequent recovery. I've achieved most of what I wanted from my transition – second puberty is a work in progress of course – but those soft hands are still proving somewhat elusive. I keep taking the medication: the pills, the gels, the creams. And I keep moving towards the life I want to lead, one step at a time.

Read more about Scleroderma at NHS Choices or at Scleroderma & Raynaud's UK

Back in the very early '90s, Usenet was a popular way to communicate on the Internet. And, it being the early '90s, the Internet wasn't in people's homes, let alone in our hands wherever we went. The Internet was primarily used in academia. And so, in September at the start of every academic year, there'd be a fresh influx of people new to this Internet and Usenet thing, and it'd take them a while to learn what it was all about. There'd be lots of question, people learning the ropes and the rules and the etiquette. And then eventually, they'd get the hang of it (or, they'd log off and put this weird "Internet" thing back in its box to gather dust).

But then in September 1993, something different happened: AOL began sending everyone (and I mean, everyone) free AOL signup CDs. The number of people using the Internet started to climb as never before, and it wasn't just in annual bursts each Autumn. Rather, now there was a continual stream of new people on the Internet, and therefore there was a never-ending supply of people not knowing the rules, or how things worked. That yearly cycle of "people not knowing stuff" each September now became an every-day, never-ending phenomenon.

Thus began "The Eternal September".

There are, perhaps, interesting parallels with transgender people. While it's never been true (to my knowledge at least) that our comings-out and realisations came in yearly cycles, there is of course a continuous supply of newly-realised, freshly-out trans people.

Now, trans stuff aside: if you or I were to suddenly develop an interest in, oh, I don't know, bird-watching for example, we'd probably recognise that (a) there's lots to know about bird-watching, and (b) we're not the first people to ever get into bird-watching, and (c) there are lots of other bird-watchers already who know an awful lot more about bird-watching than we do. And thus, although we might enthuse to people at large about our new-found interest for this area, we'd no doubt recognise our own limitations, and hold back on proclaiming ourselves experts in our favourite new subject.

But this humility, this ability to recognise one's own limitations of expertise, often seems missing among trans people – or at least, the more vocal ones (and yes, there's some confirmation bias at work here). A person who, having reached adulthood, then realises they're trans, might (apparently) easily mistake this realisation of their own trans-ness for a wider understanding of trans issues – without recognising that they've only just started to see one tiny piece of the puzzle, from one individual viewpoint. And thus, unknowingly encumbered by this misunderstanding, they overestimate their own expertise in all matters transgender.

Why might it be that this problem affects trans people, but not bird-watchers (for example)? I can see two main reasons. Firstly, activism fatigue: speaking out, being an activist, being visible, continually working against a never-ending onslaught of transphobia in all its forms, can be exhausting. It is the nature, therefore, of exhausting work that those who have been doing it for a while – those who might be most experienced in the field – take a step back, drop out. And when that happens, they tend to become invisible, unavailable for other would-be activists to learn from. The second reason I see is that some trans people choose to go even more invisible than that: they go "stealth". They shed the label "trans", preferring instead to be re-assimilated into the binary cis world, blending back into the throng from which they had previously stepped forth. So again, this is another way that we lose experience and knowledge from our collective pool.

Generally, for most individuals that is, this is probably not a huge problem, as our individual spheres of influence are not large. But what happens in the case of the more high-profile, the celebrity transitioner? Firstly, the celebrity's sphere of influence is that much larger, so the potential for damage done by poorly-chosen words or ill-considered opinions is that much greater. (But note that they are allowed to just be plain wrong and have bad opinions – that's a separate problem entirely). But also, the celebrity might well see publicity, the act of broadcasting their message to an audience, as a goal of merit in and of itself: TV or radio appearances, newspaper columns, online articles, might all attract a fee. Or at least more publicity, which is the next best thing. And dare we dream (gasp) of awards ceremonies?

So there's gold in them thar opinions, however ill-formed they are.

Eventually, after enough foot-in-mouth incidents, enough of a backlash, the celebrity transitioner might start, like their non-celebrity counterparts, to learn more about the subject matter; to understand the wider context; and to gain a more thorough appreciation of their own (lack of) expertise in the field. And maybe, what they say starts to become more considered, more balanced. Less hurtful, and more helpful.

By that point though the fickle public has moved on to listen to a different, newer celebrity. Or one might cynically suggest that the media outlets sense that the celebrity's mellowing opinions don't sell as well as they used to, precisely because they're more considered. And they move on.

But never fear, there's always a fresh supply of the recently-enlightened-trans: those who've seen the light, and are ready to spread the good word – however little of the book they've actually read.

Welcome to the Eternal September of the transgender world.

Monday, 29th October 2007: the day I started work with my current employer. I've had the good fortune to be in a supportive, steady job now for getting on for a decade.

Monday, 30th January 2012: the day I came out to my boss as gender non-conforming (what I actually said was: "So..... the thing is ... I like wearing women's clothes!"). And so I spent the next five years transitioning: changing presentation, laser, HRT, changing name/title/gender/pronoun, electrolysis, roughly in that order. Lots of my current colleagues therefore knew me from before I transitioned; but increasingly, as people come and go, lots of them have never known me as anything other than ... well, me. Rachel. (Hi!).

The list of people I work with, who knew old-me, might be slowly dwindling, but my trans status is no big secret. Or at least, I don't think it is. It's not like when new people join the team I introduce myself with "Hi, I'm Rachel, software engineer, massive tran" – nah. Doesn't happen. But, having said that, I have just remembered what my laptop looks like:

Um, yeah: two "Trans Pride Brighton" stickers, and one from Trans-Code. So maybe a bit of a clue there, for the more observant. :-)

But sticker clues notwithstanding: if you spend a bit of time with me, I wouldn't blame you if you started to conclude, or wonder, that I might be trans. It's the voice, isn't it? And the face. And the occasional bit of facial hair (especially when I have to grow it out prior to an electro appointment, raaaaargh).

So at work, it's no big secret that I'm trans. If you haven't worked out yet, my guess is you probably will soon. And sometimes, I throw in the occasional extra clue, like wearing this:

Oh, and if you follow me on Twitter, then it's game over: a high proportion of my tweeting is trans stuff.

So what do I generally do for Trans Day Of Visibility? Answer: probably not a lot different from usual, at least in meatspace. Maybe I'll tweet or blog a bit more.

This year though, I'll be doing something a bit different. As it happens, I've unavoidably had to take a couple of days off work, and so for TDoV this year, I won't even be at work: I'll be even less visible than usual.

No, for this year, I get to hang out with some friends who are probably going to misgender me (they have form on this); and then for TDoV itself, I'll be swapping my usual town/city lifestyle for a day of visiting a few farms in the West Country, buying cider. And while I'm doing this, I won't be wearing my Stonewall tee-shirt, nor will I be waving my 5-foot Trans Pride flag. Call me a coward, but I have a suspicion that while wearing the slogan "Some people are trans – get over it!" may not get a second look in the city, out in the countryside, it's probably a rather different matter. And that's just attention that I could do without.

So alas this year, on 31st March, I'll be going against the flow, by blending in: Trans Day Off Visibility, if you will. Try again next year?

I'm a typical mid-life transitioner (and no, that's not me in the photo above.  I wish).

People start identifying as trans, and come out, and transition at all sorts of different ages. Whatever "transition" means, of course: it's not a single event, and everyone does it differently. This is completely non-scientific, for which I hope you'll forgive me, but let's say that most people's transitions last (very roughly) around three to five years, and the average age for trans women to have GRS (if they have GRS) is 42. Or at least it was, a few years ago. So a straight-down-the-middle "average" trans woman might start transitioning in her late thirties, and complete her transition (whatever "completing" means) in her early forties.

As the modern vernacular goes: "it me".

I came out when I was 38, and it took me the next five years to work out what I wanted, and how to get it, and then to actually get it. I'm now 43. This is why I called myself "typical".

I often find myself reflecting, thinking about how I got here. I transitioned for the same reason that any trans person does: to be happier. So obviously, for at least quite a few years leading up to age 38, I wasn't very happy. "Ah," says the lazy voice in my brain, "you should have come out sooner! If you'd have come out at, say, age 20, you could have enjoyed a good chunk of your twenties, and all of your thirties, properly! Without the man-suit."

I find that this is an easy trap to fall into.

A great many of my friends – which is to say, my trans friends, since that's what most of my friends are – I've met in the last couple of years, via Twitter, and Facebook, and then by going to events such as Trans Pride Brighton. These are people from across the whole of the UK, and quite a range of ages – some in their early twenties, and others still going strong at around 70. All of which leads me to ponder: did I do it right? I compare myself to them. It's inevitable.

Should I have transitioned earlier? Or perhaps later?

I see some really cool, very smart promising young people out there: some who already have transitioned, some who are doing so at the moment, still more who are really only just getting started. Such youth, such vigour. Transitioning earlier on in life can unlock your full potential so much sooner. (But hey: transition when you are ready, and at your own pace).

So with all of these thoughts, I keep finding myself thinking: I should have transitioned sooner, right? I could have enjoyed two more decades of life as me, as Rachel. Right?

Wrong.

At least, I think I'm wrong.

You can't just take one turning point in your life, rewrite your life with that key event happening sooner, and yet still expect everything else that happened afterwards to be the same or better.

See, the thing is, there's lots of other stuff that happened in my life that I'm just fine with (and yes: I've led a reasonably privileged life). I'm fine, in fact I'm more than fine, with the fact that I've been in a stable, loving relationship for almost the last quarter-century. I'm fine with having navigated almost all of my life without being the target of hate crimes, because I wasn't LGBT. I'm fine with my career working out how it has, and the financial security it has afforded me. I'm fine with being loved and welcomed by my family.

Would all those things have been true now, if I'd have come out two decades earlier? That would have meant having to go through the nineties and noughties as a trans lesbian. Heck, it only just feels like it's OK now: I can't even imagine how hard it must have been twenty years ago, with society's attitudes then. With Section 28 recently enacted and still in force, with homophobia commonplace – no, normal – in news, the media, in daily life – to say nothing of transphobia. My relationship would have at best suffered, and I certainly wouldn't have been married as long as I have been, since women couldn't marry women until 2013. My career in the male-dominated software industry would have been so much harder. My family would almost certainly have fought back against me and my "lifestyle" (eye roll) much, much harder.

I think I can safely say: it wouldn't all have been a bed of roses.

So, those cool trans people I see now? Maybe what I want is to actually be them. Well, maybe. But people's Facebook posts are their edited showreels, the best-ofs, the highlights and the Christmas specials. Of course I could do that part. But how about the stretching finances to afford rent, and food, and transition healthcare, could I do that? The finding your place in life, working out what you want to do, finding a good job and holding it down. How about the search for love and companionship? Basically, the constant struggle to secure happiness. That struggle, is that what I want? Really?

I've been there, done that: I'm in no hurry to go back. So no. I don't want to be those people, however cool they look, and however pretty they are.

No, what I really want, what I miss, is something much more fundamental, and really, it's nothing whatsoever to do with being trans.

I miss being younger.

But: no regrets. We each transition in the best way that we can, and make the best of each situation. I reckon I've got a few years ahead of me yet, and I intend to make good use of them.

Image sources: Talking Heads, Universal Pictures

You've recently interviewed for an exciting-sounding job at a new place. You can't wait to start there!

You rock up on day one, and your new boss, Jess, welcomes you and gets you settled in. They direct you to a web form for you to fill in with your personal details so they can get you added to HR and the other various systems – name, address, contact details and so forth.

You load up the form, and take a look at the first question:

Err, that doesn't look right. The "name" field is a drop-down. What's with that?

You take a look at the available options:

So the allowed options are "Jess" and "Steve". And that's it.

Your name's Steve (or perhaps it's Jess), so you select your name, complete the form, and move on.

Welcome to the company!

The end.

And now, the alternate ending

Alas, your name is neither Jess nor Steve, so this is going to be tricky.

You call Jess over.

"What's up with this?" you ask. "Why is 'name' a drop-down list?"

"Well, it's a really small company, and it turns out everyone who works here is called either Jess or Steve", says Jess. "Just fill in the form as best you can".

"But my name's neither Jess nor Steve", you say.

"Oh! Oh, I see. Don't worry. I'll get Steve to fix the form.

One coffee later, and Steve has fixed the form:

Well, it's definitely different: the form now allows for three choices for Given name: "Jess", "Steve", or "[other name preferred]".

You explain the problem to Jess: "My name's neither Jess nor Steve: it's Alex."

"Oh!", says Jess again. "Oh, I see! You prefer being called Alex."

"I don't prefer it", you say, starting to get frustrated. "Well I do, but I prefer it because it's my name. It's not my preferred name – it's just my name."

"Right-o", they say, and two more coffees later, Steve's come up with the goods again:

Now the final option is labelled just "[other name]".

When you arrive back at their desk again, they can tell you're not happy. "Well what's the problem now?", asks Jess.

"I still can't enter my name", you say. "All I get to choose is that it's not Jess, and it's not Steve. It's like you don't even care what my name actually is."

Jess mutters something about "special snowflakes" under their breath, and walks off.

Day one isn't even over, and that initial welcome is starting to feel a little hollow. Do you really belong here?

The end.

Transition isn't easy. None of us do this because it's a laugh, or on a whim, or because it's “fashionable”. There are tears, there are hard choices. It costs time, costs money; it's a huge emotional investment. It can cost people their jobs, homes, friends, families, and more.

On the whole, I would say I've been quite lucky: my friends, family and workplace have been accepting and supportive. When I first came out, I expected rejection – but instead, I found that everyone accepted me. As my transition progressed, with my change of presentation, then HRT, then when I changed my name and pronouns, I still did so with the support of those around me. At first, I knew that I did not want surgery; then I suspected that I might want it; then finally, I knew that I not only wanted it, but needed it. And so, that is the path that I now tread; all the preparation, the planning, all leading up to my surgery, in mid-December.

Recently, I decided to make an extra effort to go and visit friends – those same friends who accepted and supported me. A chance to catch up, a chance to see them, before I have my surgery and am out of action for a while. So I travelled to visit trans friends, had evenings out with friends at work, and visited friends that I've known since university. All this getting-out-and-about is also a good way of keeping me busy, of helping pass the time more quickly.

So it was that this weekend my wife and I visited some friends that we've known for many years – since well before I started transitioning. We met up, had a few drinks, had a laugh – and I got deadnamed. Ah. Well, that's disappointing. I took my friend (“D”) to one side and had a word, making it clear how much it hurt, how much it would mean to me if he could get it right from now on. I changed my name more than three years ago now – surely that's long enough?. He looked genuinely remorseful – I think he really did, and does, want to do the right thing.

I said to him: “You're literally the last person who gets it wrong”.

But I was wrong. I had challenged the wrong person.

No, the real problem was D's close friend, S (who was also there with us). While D wants to do the right thing, S essentially refuses to do so. S even has a cousin who transitioned many years ago, well before I did, so you would have thought that he would be well clued up on trans matters. But no, quite the opposite: he refers to his (trans male) cousin by his deadname, and old pronouns (“she”). Unless you catch him when he's really in full form, when he referred to his cousin as “it” – and when challenged on this, dismissed the problem as something that didn't matter: “whatever”.

And yet, apart from this one thing, both D and S are friendly, accepting, supportive. At the end of the evening, we hugged, and they wished me well for my surgery. So the evening ended, my wife and I returned to our room, and we called it a night. Until I awoke a few hours later, with all of the above preying on my mind.

Next time I see them, I don't expect that S (and therefore also D) will have stopped deadnaming me. Next time I see them, they'll hurt me again. So why would I go back? Why would I knowingly place myself in the way of harm? What possible payback is there, which would make such hurt worthwhile? And even if it was somehow “worth it” – why the hell should I put up with this?

What was meant to be a nice trip away to catch up with some old friends over a drink, has instead left me wondering whether I should ever see them again. So far, I haven't lost any friends or family as a result of transition – but maybe that's about to change.

I wish my deadname didn't have this power over me, and maybe one day it won't – but for now it still does. But even if the word, the name didn't cause pain, then I would nevertheless still be hurt due to the deliberate, wilful, cruel, stubborn refusal to accept me for who I am.

When a friend both knowingly causes such damage, and so casually dismisses the harm that they cause, then you have to question whether they're really a friend.

Warning: Mention of sexual assault, included with the survivor's consent

Recently I went to Trans Pride Brighton – the second time I've been, and it was bigger and better than the year before. On a misty but warm Saturday morning, we gathered to march; and unlike last year where we effectively just did a short loop around the block, this year the route took us down to the seafront, then a good mile or so along the main road before arriving at the park for the afternoon's event.

As we marched, we waved our flags, blew whistles, tooted horns, and chanted slogans about access to healthcare, the right to respect, and safety from attack, and more. We were noisy and colourful, and we were visible: out there, getting in the way, as the police closed one side of the road for us. We marched, with a generous crowd along the roadside, and with the oncoming traffic crawling along on the other side of the road. People in cars sounded their horns, cheered and waved, as did people from overlooking buildings. It was glorious.

At the end of the march, we arrived in the park for the afternoon event, and it felt welcoming, inclusive and safe. Surrounded by so many other trans and non-binary folk, as well as families and allies, we relaxed, we chatted, met up with old friends and made new ones. With a view of the sea and the mist finally clearing to reveal the sun, we ate, drank, played games, and were able to just be ourselves.

With the park event drawing to a close, we left, generally in small groups, with most of us walking back towards the city. Away from the march and the park, and back onto the streets of the real world, we were suddenly once again a tiny handful of trans people in an overwhelmingly cis-binary world. Now, once again, our guards had to be up: some of us received unwanted attention, "chasers"; unsolicited and inappropriate approaches.

Back in my room, I rested, freshened up, worked out what I had planned for the evening – and now realise that for the first time this weekend, I'm starting to feel anxious. My plan is simple enough: go the Marly (the pub that many of us congregate around), meet friends, go on from there later on. It's no more than a 15 minute walk for me, but I'm nervous in a way that I haven't been so far this weekend. Tense, on-edge, afraid of navigating the world alone, as a vulnerable person.

I realise that I used to feel that same anxiety before transition too; but back then, the labels I felt I had that made me vulnerable were different: to do with being not-very-tall, not-very-strong, shy, nerdy. Now it's (at best) because I'm female, and (if things go really wrong) because I'm trans.

Finally I make it to the Marly, and I haven't been that glad to reach safety for a very long time.

Later, the time comes to leave the pub and take the short walk to the club, and once again there's a requirement to navigate the cis binary world outside. This time I can feel the safety in numbers, as a group of us make the journey together. And then we're in the club, which once again feels like a safe space, and I can relax.

When it's time to leave and head back to my hotel room, I don't manage to find anyone to walk me home, so I have to brave it. Almost as soon as I've left the club, I overhear two men, perhaps in their fifties, who are heading towards almost exactly where my hotel is. I tag along. One of them is on his phone – it sounds like they're heading to meet with their wives, perhaps. I stay within a few yards of them the whole way, and as we get nearer to the turn for my hotel, it feels busier, more lively – and less safe. I have to turn off, and there's a walk of no more than a minute on my own, and finally I'm back in the hotel, in reception, in the lift, in my room. Safe again.

I relax, unwind, catch up with friends on social media.

And then I see it, an update from a friend: tonight, in the club, one of my friends was sexually assaulted. I'm angry, sad, I want to hug her, and of course I want it not to be true, but it is, it happened, nothing can ever undo that. There, in the after-Trans-Pride party, in an LGBT venue, in what was supposed to be a safe space, her safety, her personal space, her bodily autonomy had been violated. She writes that it's the first sexual assault she's suffered, and now she understands why her cis female friends talk the way they do about it, how it's so awful. I think of back when I was assaulted, how violated it made me feel too, how insecure, how afraid and alone I felt, how I couldn't leave the house the next day. It's gone 3am and I should be going to sleep but I'm too wound up over this. I want to hug my friend and be there for her, but it's way too late.

The rest of the weekend passed off without incident (as far as I know): on Sunday I met up with friends, we ate, drank laughed, enjoyed each other's company. Some of our group went home on Sunday; the rest of us finished off the evening with good cocktails and great conversation, and the next day, we all went back to our everyday lives.

Normally I don't think much about safe spaces, because I don't have to – or rather, I do think about it, but in a fairly automatic way.

Walk along the street, but maybe cross the road to avoid that group over there. This street's OK, but not after dark. This street is just never OK, whatever the time of day. Choose the part of the restaurant away from the loud group of men. Pick a route to the exit of the pub, through the crowd, but avoid the rowdy group at the bar if possible. It's automatic, it's part of what we do every day without necessarily even realising it. It shouldn't have to be that way, but it is.

We're doing the work to solve other people's problems: to work around their lack of consideration, their hate, their bigotry, their violence.

As the march had set off, around noon on Saturday, one of the slogans we chanted was an assertion of the right to feel safe in public places, about the right to participate in public life in the same way as everyone else. We marched, and we chanted: “Whose streets? Our streets!”.

By time I went to bed that night, the meaning of those words had been forcefully and unpleasantly hammered home.

When I came out to my wife, I didn't know where it would lead. I expected rejection; what I got was support. So then although my wife knew about this other side of me, it remained hidden from the rest of the world. Within a few days, this other side of me had a codename. If my wife and I were out clothes shopping together, instead of her saying “I think this dress would suit you”, it would be “Do you think Rachel would like this?”.

For the first year or so after coming out, I still called myself by my old name, still identified as male. But all this time, the way I presented myself to the world moved inexorably towards a stereotypically feminine presentation, and eventually, I felt that the name and the presentation didn't “match”, and I wasn't happy with that.

For a long time I said to myself that I would change my name, if only I thought I could get away with it. But I deferred actually doing so, for fear of rejection, of ridicule, of failing at whatever arbitrary goals and rules the world laid out for me – rules to which, for some reason, I felt that conformance was important. Ultimately, I feared that rejection, and the unhappiness it would instil in me. But, eventually, I decided that the time was right: I was going to change my name to something that I was happy with, something that I had chosen. Of course, there was really only one contender: what was previously a secret codename became my legal name. More importantly, it became what people called me in my day-to-day life, what I called myself, and my previous name rapidly fell into disuse.

Ah, but there's the rub: especially at work, people will still know my dead name, even if they don't use it. As I approached the time when I would change my name, I thought a lot about this. Would things be better if the people around me didn't know my dead name? If they didn't even know I was trans? Is that even possible, that people might not know that about me? Regardless of whether or not it's possible, is it desirable?

I also gave a lot of thought to the problem of managing identity in an online world. Before my name change, people know me as a certain name; I have email accounts, and Twitter, and Facebook, and various other forms of presence. Should I keep those accounts, but just update as much of the profile data as I could to reflect my new name? Should I set up new accounts under the new name, and refer people over from the old accounts to the new? Or should I set up new accounts, and keep the two as distinct as I possibly can, leaving no trail from old to new – or more to the point, from new back to old?

There is no right answer to any of these problems: it is for each of us, as we navigate our individual transitions, to ponder these questions, and to make the decisions that are right for us.

I've been with my current employer for a while now – about eight-and-a-half years. Assuming I change employers at some point before I retire, then when that happens, I'll almost certainly be working with an almost completely clean slate. My new colleagues will know neither who I am, nor who I was. How open will I be about being trans? Happy to mention it just a readily as I'd mention that I like a good pint? Happy to talk about it, but only if it comes up? Rather not talk about it? Will I go out of my way to avoid saying that I'm trans? Would I lie about it, deny being trans, rewrite history?

But what's so special about being trans? Why do we treat gender transition any differently from any other kind of change?

There is not a person alive on this planet, cis or trans, who does not change: none of us is immutable. As each person changes slowly, day to day, the memories of who they were fade away, enduring more strongly in those closest to them; whilst the image of them now is reinforced with each fresh meeting, and with each new conversation.

None of us is who we used to be.

My name's Rachel, and I'm a trans woman. And I'm far happier now than I was before I came out.

This is just a little anecdote. Don't expect it to be deep or meaningful. I don't know, maybe there's something in here about feedback loops or focussing development effort in the right place, whatever.

Way back when, when I was just about fresh out of university and in my first programming job (1996), I got a bit of a reputation at being quite good at making our database and its applications go fast, including SQL query optimisation. This was using Ingres databases, hosted on VMS.

One day I was asked to investigate this particular stock report (I even remember the report id, “AGR48”, though I confess I have no idea now what the report was actually for). The report was too slow, I was told.

So I dug.

The report consisted essentially of a sequence of 8 giant SQL statements, each of which was quite slow. Lots of creation of temporary tables and the like. I think I rewrote the report and did make it faster, but that's not the point.

The point is: the report took about 4 hours; but due to a bug in the eighth and final SQL statement, the report output was always empty.

This report was effectively a four-hour no-op.

Unsurprisingly, the users didn't use that report.

Last week I attended QCon London, a “Conference for Professional Software Developers” run by InfoQ. Three days of keynotes, presentations, facilitated discussion, and general open mingling with other delegates and and speakers.

It's the first time I've been to this conference. I went because last year my colleague Stephen went, and I could tell from his experience there, and from the online videos of the talks published later, that this was worth going to. So I signed up for this year at the earliest opportunity.

It's well known that the technology sector has a diversity problem. Go to almost any technology event in Europe / North America, and you'll see overwhelmingly white male faces.

Today is International Women's Day 2015: so what have I learnt of the diversity aspect of QCon, and about the inclusion of women in particular?

Do I expect I'll go again next year?

The speakers

For those used to technical conferences, you might be interested in taking a quick look at the diversity on show amongst the speakers at QCon London this week.

When I checked and did a rough count, there were 123 speakers listed, and quite a range of faces.

Or, so it might appear at first glance.

I very roughly counted males and females, white and non-white. By my count, this year's QCon speaker line-up included:

• 3 (2.4%) non-white women;
• 5 (4.1%) non-white men;
• 24 (19.5%) white women;
• 91 (74.0%) white men.

Only 74% white men? For the technology sector, that's actually pretty good! So, that's like, 26% of “doing diversity”!

Make no mistake: it's a lot better than most conferences, by which I mean that it's closer to being more representative of the population as a whole.

But that's still 78% male, and the world simply isn't like that. (In case it needs saying: it is, of course, 50% female, 50% male, give or take). And this lineup, while being more diverse than we've come to expect, is still 93.5% white, compared to 87% in the UK population as a whole.

Which doesn't sound so bad, but does mean that if you're attending QCon, and you're non-white, and hoping to see non-white speakers, then instead of the 16-ish speakers you should expect to see, you in fact see only 8; only half of what it should be.

78% male. 93.5% white.

In this sector, however, 22% female counts as so far above the norm that it won't have happened by accident, which implies that the organisers took deliberate steps to include more women, which implies that they care about diversity — which is great. But at the same time we all need to recognise that it's still not enough, and we should demand more.

The audience

The organisers don't collect the diversity profile of the audience, so that information is harder to assess quantitatively.

I tried two different (but similar) ways of measuring the audience diversity, and I admit, both methods are highly unscientific. Firstly, as I sat waiting for the keynote, I just looked around at the people sat nearest to me. Secondly, I took a photo of a larger area of the audience, and counted faces later.

Doing a quick sample of the 50 people sat around me while we waited for Friday's keynote, it looks like about 16% female, 84% male. Which again, is a long way away from 50/50, and it's notably even more skewed than the speaker line-up.

As for white / non-white: again, based on the people sat around me: roughly 88% white, 12% non-white. So actually, on this highly unscientific sample, this one's pretty much on-target, matching the figures for the UK population as a whole.

The count of faces in the photo came to 82 white male, 5 non-white male, 2 white female, 3 non-white female. That is, 95% male, 91% white.

On inclusion

I noticed before the conference started that QCon publishes a code of conduct, and it's nice and clear, concise, and good to see. And with one exception, I neither witnessed nor heard of any harassment or anything else that would violate the code of conduct.

We'll come to the exception later.

People with special mobility requirements were pretty well catered for (but it was hard to work out how to get to the 6th floor). Several people noted how the speakers would be using “she” or “her” more, to refer to actors in their stories (such as: “Your CTO says <x> and she knows what she's talking about…”), instead of just thoughtlessly going with male as the default. Speakers' slides would include little stick figures to represent people — and those stick figures were often women.

All in all, a huge step (compared to tech industry norms) in the right direction. Sadly, the free tee-shirts being given away by the sponsors were obviously not made for women.

And, then… the exception.

On-stage transphobia and its effects

Just before the keynote on the last day, one of the track hosts, John T Davies, made transphobic remarks whilst on stage. It only took a few seconds, but in that moment, much of the good work that QCon had done was very quickly undone: I no longer felt completely welcome, or safe, or included. I felt threatened. At risk.

During the next presentation, I saw the official twitter account post an apology.

In the mid-morning break, I went to speak to the organisers on a different matter, but ended up talking to them about the on-stage comment. I spoke to Silke D'Alessandro, and we were joined by Floyd and Roxanne, founders of InfoQ, and Nitin Bharti; and it was very reassuring to see their obvious concern over the incident, and to see their commitment to diversity and inclusion. They said that they'd spoken to Mr Davies about the incident, and that ahead of his own talk this afternoon, he'd make an on-stage apology.

This conversation was great to have, but at the same time, it's not why I came to QCon: I was here for the conference. So I felt frustrated that, because of what was said on stage, I felt unable to participate in this part of the conference, because of this unwanted distraction.

I joined the next session late (having missed the first half); had lunch, ate alone, my head still full of these distractions. I went for a walk outside, just to forget this, to be an anonymous tourist for half an hour.

Back at the conference for the afternoon, and the next two talks went well. For the third afternoon slot, I popped along to see Mr Davies give his on-stage apology (before I would then quickly switch rooms to go to the talk I actually wanted to hear). Unfortunately, for whatever reason, his apology came across as diminishing and insincere.

I went to talk to the organisers again, to point out that the apology was not good enough. In fact, the apology itself was harmful. And all credit to them: once again, Floyd, Roxanne and Silke said all the right things, completely understood the problem, and said that they'd be taking further action.

I thanked them, and left. But by this point I was furious. I went to hide, to vent, to calm down. As a result of just a few seconds of offensive content on stage this morning, I was missing a significant proportion of the conference.

I managed to catch to the last talk of the day, and then, there was just one more item on the schedule: “Meet the speakers”, where the conference hosts and speakers are encouraged to mingle with the other delegates, and chat, share ideas, be creative. And it occurs to me: one of those other speakers is Mr Davies. Am I ready for that?

I seriously consider just going home. After all, there are no more talks. I could just slip away: many other people are doing so. I could too.

But I shouldn't have to. I came for the conference. This is why I'm here.

Meeting the speakers — and more

So I went. I grabbed a beer. I mingled.

Unlike the other “networking opportunities” — the coffee breaks, lunch, and so forth — where the mingling seems quite random, here it seemed far from random.

A lovely lady named Vanessa came up to me, to talk about this morning's incident. We compared notes about this conference, and past conferences, and how women are treated in the industry.

Then Roy Rapoport (of Netflix; this morning's keynote speaker) found me, and again, we're talking about the transphobia, comparing notes. About how he heard the comments, just before he was due to go on stage, so has to choose: make reference to it on stage, or act as if nothing happened? (He chose the latter, and I don't blame him). About he felt offended by the remarks too.

Then Floyd Marinescu (InfoQ) again, this time asking if I'm prepared to meet with Mr Davies. I know it could well be constructive to do so; and I know it's also fine if I say no. Even as I weigh up the decision, right there and then, I can feel the emotion, the anger, the frustration, the fear welling up in me: I'm still far too emotional about it, and so I decline.

Then I do some proper mingling: back to what the conference is meant to be about. At last.

As things are thinning out, I met with someone — who I shan't name — involved with organising the conference, who offered an opinion on Mr Davies' prospects of being invited back again. Enough said.

Then, finally, just as I'm leaving, another lady (whose name I didn't get) comes up to me, and again, it's to ask about the incident this morning. So we chat, I do my best to explain what happened, and about some of the following chain of events.

And then, the conference is over. Finally, it's time to go home.

Fallout

InfoQ's commitment to diversity at QCon is clear, and is to be congratulated. I wish that more conferences and events were like this.

But, transphobia was on stage. On show.

Make no mistake: incidents like this are exactly why diversity struggles in STEM fields. It drives people away.

What frustrates me so much about this is the uneven effect that such incidents have: I'm assuming that of the 1400 or so people attending, approximately 1399 of them didn't then spend a significant proportion of the day not focusing on the conference because of this.

Straight White Male is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

The closer you are to being a cis straight white male — the more the existing biases of the technology sector pander to you — then the less likely you are to find something that offends you, the more likely you can just get on with your job.

So the transphobia, on the whole, won't have upset non-trans people, and they'd have been able to get on with their day as normal. In fact, they might not have even noticed that there was a problem.

In contrast, as a direct result of the incident on stage, I missed a huge chunk of two talks, was greatly distracted from the others, missed several of the breaks and other opportunities to network, and even the “meet the speakers” mostly consisted of people wanting to talk to me about the transphobia — not about technology, which is nominally what we're all there for.

What next?

The diversity at QCon, compared to the industry as a whole, was good, so it's clear that InfoQ are trying. At the same time, I believe they can try harder: 78% male is still too high, and they are in a position to change that.

I'll admit, I was disappointed to see so few people speak up about the transphobia. If you see it, call it out. Speak up. Take action. Even if the offence isn't directly at you, it affects you, because it negatively affects diversity, and we all know that diversity — that is, having the make-up of the people in the industry reflect the make-up of the population as a whole — is a good thing.

Will I go back to QCon in future? Probably. The conference was well-run, with good content, and InfoQ's commitment to diversity is clear to see, not only from the speaker line-up, but also from their reaction to the unfortunate event of Friday morning.

But in future, can we get women's tee-shirts too? That'd be just great :-)

Update, Monday 9th March: On Friday, Floyd sent me Mr Davies' written apology, asking for my thoughts. I'm sad to say that this written apology was deeply troubling in its tone — "completely unacceptable" is I think also accurate.

March 8th is International Women's Day, celebrating the achievements of all women and calling for greater equality. Together we can make it happen.

Source for the speaker list: the QCon web site

Recently I've been repaying some tech debt that I had built up at home. I've been sorting out old files, arranging automated off-site backups, committing uncommitted files to git (including finally getting myself some private git hosting), simplifying config, upgrading Debian, upgrading my Internet connection, and adding IPv6 support to my home network. It's been a fun few weeks, actually.

The last one is interesting: adding IPv6. What does “add IPv6” really mean, and why should we do it?

Say “AAAA”

Assuming you've already got a working IPv4 setup, then adding IPv6, at its simplest level, is:

• ensure each host or service has an IPv6 address;
• ensure those IPv6 addresses are discoverable via DNS, by adding “AAAA” records.

Back in January 2011, there was “World IPv6 Day”: some big names (Google, Facebook, and quite a few others) temporarily added IPv6 addresses to their systems, and added “AAAA” records to DNS: just for a day, to see what happened. In essence, it was successful: some of their visitor traffic was carried over IPv6, and nothing broke. Then, in June 2012, there was “World IPv6 Launch Day”: basically the same again, but with more participants (e.g. Wikipedia), and this time the configuration wasn't removed afterwards: it was left in for good.

Because I've recently been adding IPv6 to my little part of the Internet, I've been repeating the exercise myself. Once I'd got myself an IPv6 allocation, and my home network was handing out IPv6 addresses, I could “ping6 google.com”, for example. I'd solved the first part: adding addresses. Now for the second: discoverability in DNS.

Servers and Nameservers

First, the easy part: each of my servers has an “A” (IPv4) record in my DNS records, so that the server can be found without having to remember IPv4 addresses. So all I had to do was add corresponding “AAAA” (IPv6) records. One quick visit to my provider's DNS control panel later, and that's that job done: I can now resolve my server name to an IPv6 address, and thus connect to it. So, for example, “ssh -6 myserver.rachelevans.org.uk.” now works.

This is where things start to go downhill a bit.

What did we just do here? I allowed my server to be addressed via IPv6, and I added its IPv6 address to DNS.

Does that mean that, if had an IPv6 Internet connection and didn't have an IPv4 connection, I could connect to my server? No, it doesn't. At this point, I'm still dependent on IPv4.

To understand why, we need to understand a little more about how DNS works.

Zones and Referrals

To resolve a computer name to an IP address, we use DNS. It's a distributed system, whereby lookups start at the “root” zone, and each zone can delegate authority to sub-zones. For example, “.com” is a sub-zone of the root, and “example.com” is a sub-zone of “.com”. Each zone has a set of nameservers.

Fundamentally, the problem is this: for DNS lookups over IPv6 to be successful, each zone has to provide at least one nameserver with an IPv6 address, and those IPv6 addresses have to be in DNS — otherwise that zone will be inaccessible to the IPv6 Internet.

(Exactly the same thing is true of IPv4, by the way: if none of a zone's nameservers have IPv4 addresses, that zone won't be accessible to the IPv4 Internet. However, so far everyone seems to get it right for IPv4, so it's less interesting).

So for our web site to be reachable to clients purely via IPv6, what do we have to do?

Say our web site is www.example.com, and our DNS zone is example.com. So we have to:

• give our server an IPv6 address;
• add an entry mapping its name to its IPv6 address as an “AAAA” record, in our DNS zone;
• ensure our nameservers are reachable via IPv6.

How exactly do we do the last step? Simple: we repeat the whole process again. Say for example the nameservers of the example.com zone are ns1.big.hosting.co and ns2.big.hosting.co — we repeat the process for those two servers (or, more typically, we have to talk to the bighosting.co in question to check that they have already done this).

And then, in turn, bighosting.co itself has nameservers, and the whole process repeats.

An example

Back to what I was doing over Christmas: I was adding IPv6 support to my network, and then adding the IPv6 “AAAA” records to DNS. But, there's no point doing that unless the nameservers are also reachable via IPv6, which got me to thinking about this whole area.

So I wrote a tool I called “dns-dependency-walker”: it analyses the DNS hosting of a given domain, and finds its dependencies, and analyses, them, and so forth. It then draws a directed acyclic graph illustrating the relationships between the various zones and nameservers involved.

For example, here's the picture for rachelevans.org.uk:

(Nameservers or zones that are not reachable by IPv6 are shaded in grey. See my note to the side of the diagram for a detailed explanation.)

My domain is rachelevans.org.uk, so I depend upon the parent zones, org.uk, uk, and the root. The nameservers of my zone are in the domain buddyns.com, so I'm dependent upon that zone too. In turn, buddyns.com is dependent upon the .com zone. And so forth.

The moral of the story is: the success of your IPv6 support could depend on more than you might expect.

Let's do this!

So back to World IPv6 Launch Day. Their web site lists the companies that participated, adding support for IPv6.

Let's pick a few of the big names and see how they're doing.

Akamai

Not all of akamai.com's nameservers support IPv6, but overall, it's reachable. So far so good.

Microsoft

Slightly better for microsoft.com: all of that zone's nameservers support IPv6. It doesn't matter that some of the zones that they depend on have some IPv4-only nameservers, because they also have IPv6-capable nameservers. So again, the result is: it's reachable.

Facebook

Here's where it starts to go wrong. Although www.facebook.com does indeed have an IPv6 address, the facebook.com zone's nameservers don't. So if you, or more specifically your DNS resolver, don't have an an IPv4 address, then you can't find out what www.facebook.com's IPv6 address is — therefore you can't connect.

Google

Exactly the same situation at Google: www.google.com does indeed have an IPv6 address, but you can't find it without an IPv4 address, because none of the google.com nameservers have IPv6 addresses.

Cisco

At first glance, Cisco appears to have the same problem as Facebook and Google — lack of IPv6 addresses on the nameservers. But actually, it's a bit more complicated.

The nameservers do have IPv6 addresses, as we can see from this query:

rachel@dudley ~$ dig +short aaaa ns1.cisco.com
2001:420:1101:6::a
rachel@dudley ~$ dig +short aaaa ns2.cisco.com
2001:420:2041:5000::a

So what have Cisco got wrong, exactly?

The answer lies in DNS “glue” records: whenever the name of a DNS server (“ns1.cisco.com”) lies within the zone that that same server is trying to serve (“cisco.com”), you have to add the nameserver's IP addresses — the “A” and “AAAA” records — to the parent zone. These are called “glue” records.

Here's microsoft, getting it right (for the domain where their nameservers live, msft.net):

rachel@dudley ~$ dig @a.gtld-servers.net. a www.msft.net.

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.msft.net. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
msft.net. 172800 IN NS ns3.msft.net.
msft.net. 172800 IN NS ns1.msft.net.
msft.net. 172800 IN NS ns2.msft.net.
msft.net. 172800 IN NS ns4.msft.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns3.msft.net. 172800 IN A 193.221.113.53
ns3.msft.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2620:0:34::53
ns1.msft.net. 172800 IN A 208.84.0.53
ns1.msft.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2620:0:30::53
ns2.msft.net. 172800 IN A 208.84.2.53
ns2.msft.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2620:0:32::53
ns4.msft.net. 172800 IN A 208.76.45.53
ns4.msft.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2620:0:37::53

The response tells us which servers handle the zone msft.net, and then also tells us their IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

By way of contrast, here's Cisco getting it wrong:

rachel@dudley ~$ dig @a.gtld-servers.net. a www.cisco.com.

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.cisco.com. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
cisco.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.cisco.com.
cisco.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.cisco.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.cisco.com. 172800 IN A 72.163.5.201
ns2.cisco.com. 172800 IN A 64.102.255.44

The response includes the IPv4 addresses of the nameservers, but not the IPv6 addresses. (The cisco.com zone does contain the nameservers' IPv6 addresses, but that's no use unless you can find the nameservers in the first place).

Why have these big companies not got it right yet?

So with all of this — multiple dependencies between zones and nameservers, referrals, glue records — does that mean that adding IPv6 support in DNS is somehow hard? That is, harder than IPv4?

Not at all —when it comes to DNS, the rules for IPv6 are exactly the same as they are for IPv4.

So why do so many companies — even the ones who promoted World IPv6 Launch Day, back in 2012 — get it wrong? What exactly was the point of it all?

To answer that, let's consider the following scenarios:

If everyone on the Internet has an IPv4 address already, is there any benefit to me if I add IPv6? Well, a little: addressability without NAT, for example.

But, what if not everyone on the Internet has an IPv4 address — what if some only have an IPv6 address? Is the result just that they can't find a lot of sites (including Google, Facebook, etc) because they can't get the DNS lookups to work?

Maybe. But there is a mitigating factor.

Often, if your computer (PC/laptop/phone) needs to do a DNS lookup, it won't do the full lookup itself — rather, it'll ask another computer to do it. Internet Service Providers will often provide such a service, technically called a Recursive Resolver or Full Resolver (but often lazily, and confusingly, called just a DNS Server). As long as your computer can reach that one using IPv6, and as long the Resolver does have an IPv4 address, then that also works. In other words: your computer might be able to manage without an IPv4 address, as long as it can reach a Resolver that does have one. But that's a hack.

But what if even the DNS Resolver doesn't have an IPv4 address? Well, then you're out of luck: you'll only be able to find those servers whose DNS zones are reachable via IPv6; and additionally, you'll only be able to see those web sites where the web site itself also has IPv6.

If either piece of the puzzle is missing, you miss out.

Why IPv6?

So back to my original questions: What does “add IPv6” really mean, and why should we do it?

Adding IPv6 isn't just assigning an IPv6 address, then bunging that it DNS.

It is ensuring that you support IPv6 at least to parity with IPv4, and ensuring that all the services that you depend on (usually provided by other companies and vendors) do the same.

Adding IPv6 in parallel with IPv4 does add some value in and of itself; but as you'll probably have heard, one of the big selling points behind IPv6 is that IPv4 addresses have run out (or “will soon run out”, depending on your definition), and when we're out of IPv4 address, newcomers to the Internet will only get IPv6.

The key reason therefore to add IPv6 support is for the benefit of people in the future. Increasingly, the IPv6 Internet will be the Internet, and as more and more of the people that you want to talk to are on IPv6, you'll be cutting yourself out of the picture if you haven't joined the party yet.

Some of the efforts so far to encourage IPv6 adoption have, perhaps necessarily, omitted some of the technical details. Companies have declared “We're on IPv6,” without really telling us what they mean — perhaps because they themselves didn't know.

Testing, Testing, I P 6

As you add IPv6 support to your Internet presence — your web site, email systems, and so forth — it's highly advisable to check that it's reachable even to people without IPv4.

Set yourself up a test area, on its own Internet connection, only with IPv6. Make sure you don't use your ISP's (or corporate) DNS Resolver service – because if you do, you might accidentally be depending on IPv4 without realising it. Reboot all the devices in the test area, to clear any DNS caches.

Congratulations: you've weaned yourself off of IPv4. Now, can you still access your web site? Can you still communicate with your company via email?

If you can, you're way ahead of the curve. Welcome to the future.

Fancy going to a three-hour-long presentation which is in parts self-contradictory, and includes half a dozen product launches with no coherent target audience? I promise, you will find some of it boring.

No? Not tempted?

Me neither.

Last year I went to the Amazon Web Services “re:Invent” conference in Las Vegas. It's five days of a rather tightly packed mix of certification sessions, training, product launches, all sorts of “breakout” sessions (some by Amazon themselves, and some by guest speakers — i.e. customers), the vendor expo, and of course what I'll somewhat euphemistically call the “after-hours” events.

The breakout sessions cover a wide range of topics — individual AWS technologies, both at basic and advanced levels; and how customers are using AWS, in all sorts of diverse industry sectors. Each session is about 45 minutes long, and you can pick and choose which ones to go to. Great!

Keynotes

The “keynotes” though, are a very different affair. On two successive days, the keynotes (yes, plural: two different keynotes) are each 90 minutes long.

For me, a keynote should be a summary of the key themes, typically 30–45 minutes long (I'm sure I've seen a definition of the word, to this effect), so Amazon's keynotes immediately ring at least two alarm bells:

• Why are there two keynotes? It's not just two opportunities to see the same speech: it's two different presentations. Why are there two different summaries of the key themes?
• Why is each one so long? Each keynote seems to be two to three times longer than is typical, and if the keynotes are different then this means that in total it's effectively up to six times longer.

If your summary is three hours long, then you need to summarise your summary.

But the explanation of course is that AWS “keynotes” aren't keynotes. Yes, they include a summary of some themes; but then they also include some more in-depth look at those themes, and the launches of some new AWS products that tie in with those themes. They're really an all-in-one mega-presentation, split into two halves.

Information overload

Where Amazon get it right with the “breakout” sessions, they get it very wrong with their keynotes: they include a diverse range of subjects all in the same presentation (e.g. software deployment, and also financial accounting) so that it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to find the whole presentation interesting. And even if it was all interesting, ninety minutes is too damn long.

While they do at least break it into two halves, on successive days, that
doesn't go anything like far enough.

I'd love it if Amazon would have the keynotes and product launches follow the same model as the breakout sessions:

• The keynote (yes, one keynote), 45 minutes long, which can be a summary of the themes, and brief “teaser” announcements of the product launches;
• Product launch presentations, probably around three separate sessions, each around 45 minutes long, grouped by approximate theme.

Launching two separate products related to software development? That's one session. Two products related to finance? That's another. Two unrelated product launches left over? Well, lump 'em together in a third session. (Not ideal, but still way better than the current approach).

Then we'll be free to pick and choose which sessions we go to. Each session will be more focussed on one audience, who will therefore be more engaged. And the worst case is that you go to one of the “mixed” product launch sessions, and find one half interesting, and the other half not. Time wasted: 20 minutes (compared to an hour or two, currently).

Summing up

The keynote sessions are at odds with the style of the rest of AWS re:Invent. Whereas most of the week is dynamic, punchy, focussed, and fast-moving, the keynotes come across as over-long self-indulgent ramblings, which include what should be gems of interest, but hidden amongst far too much other content seemingly designed to help the attendees catch up on the sleep lost due to after-hours indulgences.

By restructuring the keynotes and product announcements into a series of separate sessions, the Amazon “big name” presenters can up their game, and reinvent themselves as the focus of something interesting — so that we might just be tempted enough to go along and listen.

Last month at the AWSUKUG meetup I talked about Video Factory, and there was a little section there where I spoke aboutthe tooling that we use to manage all of our components. One of the tools, “stack-fetcher”, generated quite a bit of interest from the audience, and there was interest in open-sourcing it. I definitely want to do this — but we're not quite there yet.

For now, though, I can talk about where stack-fetcher is right now, and what direction I want to take it in.

The problem space

“AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion,” says the documentation. As a developer, you do this by creating a template (JSON which defines one or more desired resources), then submitting that template to CloudFormation — either via the API, or via something which wraps the API (e.g. the web console). Then CloudFormation goes and creates or updates your stack to match your template.

As a developer who loves automation and consistency, this leaves you with several problems:

• How do I generate the template JSON?
• How do I generate the other JSON required by the stack (e.g. parameter values)?
• If I was to push that JSON to CloudFormation — i.e. apply the change — how do I know what changes I'm actually pushing?
• Can I push some changes but not others?
• Once I know what I want to push, how do I do so?

A little BBC Media Services history

To put all of the above into a specific story: in BBC Media Services, we found during the development of Video Factory that we were managing more and more stacks, and by the start of this year we had something like 100 stacks to manage in each of our three environments.

By January 2014, we had a system for generating the JSON, but different people ran the relevant tools in different ways, therefore sometimes yielding differing results. And once the JSON had been generated, we had no way of knowing in what way it was different from the stack's existing template, so we didn't know what we were actually changing. And finally, we had no consistent approach for actually updating the stacks with the new template — mostly we were using the web console, but not always in the same way. And even then: it's a web console, so that's just awful from a productivity and automation point of view.

Thus, stack-fetcher was created, to address all of the above problems.

The workflow

Once you've updated your source files, the workflow to update a stack consists of three steps:

• Run “stack-fetcher”. This generates a set of three files: current, generated, and next.
• Use your favourite diff/merge tool to compare the current, generated and next files, making whatever changes you wish to next.
• Run “stack-updater” to push next into CloudFormation.

The workflow in action

Here's a demo of a simple change, illustrating the basic workflow, and some of stack-fetcher's strengths.

Before running stack-fetcher, We have two stacks, “resource” and “component”. The first diff has already been applied: a queue was added to the resource stack. These screenshots show the second diff being applied: to modify the IAM policy defined in the “component” stack, such that access is granted to the queue in the resource stack.

We then run stack-fetcher (in this example, “int” is the environment in question — integration). stack-fetcher retrieves the existing stack, generates the desired template, and compares the two. The summary shows “resource: same” (all in sync), and “component: DIFFERENT (20 lines)” (there are 20 lines of differences).

stack-fetcher has generated three template files per stack: current, generated, and next. Here we see the three files compared, using vimdiff:

and the bottom half of the same files:

You can see that “generated” (in the middle column) has some sections that “current” doesn't — these is for the policy change we're trying to make. But you can also see that “current” has some lines that “generated” doesn't. This is because in this example, the stack in CloudFormation started off not in sync with our local copy (for example, maybe someone applied a change but neglected to commit the corresponding source).

So now we modify “next” (the right-hand file) to match whatever changes we want to apply. In this example we choose to pull in the new lines, but elect not to remove the extra, unexpected ones:

After saving these changes (remember, we didn't modify “current” or “generated” — only “next”), we run stack-updater:

stack-updater now warns us that it has detected a new parameter on the template (“MattressFailQueueArn” in this example): it adds this parameter, with the default value from the template, to the description file; then invites us to check this and edit the description file if we wish.

In this case the default is fine, so we just run stack-updater again:

Now stack-updater very clearly shows us the diffs between current and next: that is, if we elect to proceed, these are the changes that we're actually about to make.

After confirming that we're OK with this, stack-updater applies these changes, using the CloudFormation UpdateStack API:

stack-updater polls the stack's status, waiting for it to reach a terminal state (i.e. not “in progress”). The stack events are displayed as they occur.

In this case the stack update completes successfully, and stack-updater's work is done.

In more detail

stack-fetcher is a name given to a collection of scripts, one of which is itself called “stack-fetcher”. The other script that is intended to be manually invoked is “stack-updater”. There are other scripts, but one of the goals of stack-fetcher is to invoke and orchestrate those other scripts so that the user doesn't generally have to think about them.

stack-fetcher

stack-fetcher's job is to generate a set of three outputs:

• current is the existing stack, fetched from CloudFormation
• generated is the stack that you want, generated from your codebase
• next is what you're going to push back to CloudFormation using “stack-updater”

When stack-fetcher runs, next is generated simply as a copy of current — that is, if you don't edit the next file, then you won't push any changes.

To make generated, stack-fetcher runs a series of scripts. Currently, this step is rather BBC-specific: we invoke ./generate-templates with PYTHON_LIB set to point to part of the stack-fetcher codebase; if there's a transform script, then the json is then filtered through this; then there's a cosmos-cloudformation-postproc script which post-processes the json in various ways — primarily, providing defaults for the stack's parameters.

To make current, stack-fetcher needs to know what stack name it should work with — and again, currently calculating this stack name is fairly BBC-specific. Once entered, the stack name is remembered via the ./stack_names.json file, so you don't have to calculate or enter it again. Once the stack name is known, the existing stack template and descriptor are fetched, and saved as current.

After this, stack-fetcher normalises both current and generated. The purpose of the normalisation is partly to make the files more readable, but also to get rid of differences that are meaningless. As well as whitespace reformatting and sorting object keys, the normalisation also includes CloudFormation-specific elements, such as sorting parameters, tags and outputs; removing empty arrays, if that would mean the same thing; and even re-ordering statements within IAM Policies.

next always starts off as a copy of current, so that by default no changes are pushed.

Finally, stack-fetcher compares current and generated and shows a simple summary: they're either the “SAME” or “DIFFERENT” (or, if the stack doesn't exist yet, “NEW”); then shows some help text describing what to do next.

diff/merge

The help text displayed by stack-fetcher suggests using vimdiff to compare and edit the files, but of course you can use whatever tools you wish. The goal of this step is to update next to reflect what you want pushed back into CloudFormation (whilst leaving the current and generated files unchanged).

You may wish to simply review that generated is exactly what you want, then copy generated over next (this is probably what you want, ideally); or, you can cherry-pick, and perform more complex merges.

stack-updater

Once you've updated next to be as desired, you invoke stack-updater, with exactly the same arguments as you did for stack-fetcher.

If there are any differences between the set of parameters declared in the stack template, and the set of parameters passed in the stack descriptor, then stack-updater shows those differences (e.g. “You're passing a parameter called X but it doesn't exist”), automatically applies corrections (e.g. removing the no-longer-existent parameter), then stops, so that you can check its changes before re-running stack-updater.

Assuming the stack already exists, then stack-updater now diffs current against next — that is, it shows you the changes you're about to push. It also displays the differences between the stack's parameter defaults, and the actual parameter values you're passing, so you can check which ones you're overriding. (If the stack doesn't currently exist, then this step is skipped, and the confirmation step up next reminds you that you're about to create the stack).

It then asks for confirmation to proceed, and if you say yes, then the change is pushed using the CloudFormation “update stack” (or “create stack”) API, and then stack-updater polls the stack status, waiting for completion.

Finally there's another BBC-specific step, wherein the stack can be registered in Cosmos, our deployment manager.

Dependencies

stack-fetcher is written in ruby, and uses the aws-sdk gem.

Benefits

By using this tool, we have realised several benefits:

• speed: Using this tool is much quicker than using the other (several) tools that we used before. There are fewer commands to type, with fewer options to remember. And probably most importantly, you never have to leave your terminal.
• consistency: By automating more of the process, and by normalising the output, we now achieve more consistency: by which I mean between developers, between environments, and between components.
• understanding: This tool makes it very obvious what changes you're about to apply to live (or whatever environment you're updating) — no more blind pasting of a load of json and hoping for the best — which means fewer mistakes.

All of which means: this tool has helped us to be more productive.

Next steps

We need to separate out the BBC-specific parts from the rest, so that we can offer this tool out to a wider audience.

I'd like to make the “generation” phase more uniform: run a series of executables (bash, ruby, whatever — the tool should not care), where the first executable receives null input, and each subsequent tool filters the output of the previous one. So for example you might have filters which do: make the basic template; customise it for this environment; fill in parameter defaults.

I don't have any news yet of when this might happen, but I certainly want it to happen. Please drop me a line via a comment or on twitter if you have thoughts on this — I'd love to hear your feedback.

Yesterday I went to the Amazon Web Services Enterprise Summit, in London. I listened to this man first, then this man; then this guy, this one, and then after lunch these six men all spoke too. And throughout all of it, another man acted as compère.

Eleven. White. Males. (I couldn't find a picture of the other two, but trust me: the other two were white and male too). Not exactly a shining example of diversity, is it? And I fear that the speaker line-up at AWS re:Invent won't exactly be that much better.

This is is no way a criticism of the eleven men in question: it's a criticism of the industry in general, and Amazon Web Services in particular.

Diversity helps us all. It encourages everyone to participate. For example, having women on stage will help other women to feel like they're represented, welcome, and included. And with that inclusion comes a greater array of ideas and perspectives. Surely you want the best people, whatever their gender, race, sexuality? Lack of diversity means that you're risking excluding some of the best people who would otherwise feel included.

So, AWS: just how hard did you try to bring in non-white-male speakers? I find it hard to believe that you tried, but were unable, to find any speakers who were female and/or non-white. Call me cynical, but what I find much easier to believe is that either you couldn't be bothered, or that the concept of ensuring diversity in your speakers just didn't even occur to you (and straight white non-disabled male is the default state for humans, amirite?).

Come on Amazon. I love your products, but on the diversity front you're setting a bad example. A company of your size, influence and reach is in a fantastic position to lead by example: just as your services help your customers (and, some would say, lead the way), please use your influence to help the industry improve in diversity too, so we can all feel included.

Thank you.

Headshot images from their various public profiles.