I'm coming back from another IT conference (the first WebAssembly Summit, not that this is about that event, lovely as it was) and I want to acknowledge something about my conference experiences.

Unstructured social situations such as the typical post-conference social gathering are strange to me. The interface to these events is almost completely undocumented and I don't understand their public API's calling conventions. This more often than not results in me confused, pacing through crowds of huddled groups, wondering what I'm doing there.

It's important to note that, because I'm never more consistently actively welcomed into social interactions that I don't otherwise understand than when it's by cis women (usually queer, not always) who've rightly or wrongly clocked me as a trans woman and made space for me without reservation.

So I keep these, again, very consistent, memories fresh in my mind whenever terfy logic pops up on social media feeds claiming that trans people erase womanhood or some shit. (Please don't boost shitty opinions; the sick dunk is not worth it.) Because my lived experience tells me the exact opposite.