Insomnia (by alaric)

There's something about the combination of having spent many weeks in a row without more than the odd half-hour here and there to myself (time when I get to do whatever I like, rather than merely choosing which of the list of things I need to get done urgently I will do next, or just having no choice at all), and knowing I need to get up even earlier the next morning than usual (to dive straight into a long day of scheduled activities), that makes it very, very, hard for me to sleep.

So, although I got to bed in good time for somebody who has to wake up at six o'clock, I have given up laying there staring at the ceiling, and come down to eat some more food (I get the munchies past midnight), read my book without disturbing Sarah with my bedside light, and potter on my laptop. I need to be up in five hours, so hopefully emptying my brain of whirling thoughts will enable me to sleep.

There's lots of things I want to do. Even though it's something I need to get done by a deadline, I'm actually enthusiastic about continuing the project I was working on today; making an enclosure for our chickens. This is necessary for us to be able to go away from the house for more than one night, which is something we want to do over Christmas; thus the deadline.

Three of the edges of the enclosure will be built onto existing walls or woodwork, but one of them needs to cut across some ground, so I've dug a trench across said bit of ground, laid an old concrete lintel and some concrete blocks in the trench after levelling the base with ballast, and then mixed and rammed concrete around them. When I next get to work on it, I'll mix up a large batch of concrete and use it to level the surface neatly (and then ram any left-overs into remaining gaps) to just below the level of the soil, then lay a row of engineering bricks (frog down) on a mortar bed on top of that in order to make a foundation that I can screw a wooden batten to. With that done, and some battens screwed into the tops of existing walls that don't already have woodwork on, I'll be able to build the frame of the enclosure (including a door), then attach fox-proof mesh to it, and our chickens will have a new home they can run around in safely.

Thinking about how I'm going to lay the next batch of concrete in a nice level run, working around the fact that I only have a short spirit level by placing a long piece of wood in there and levelling it with wedges and then using it as a reference to level the concrete to, has been one of the things running around in my head this evening.

Another has been the next steps from last Friday, when I had a fascinating meeting with a bunch of interesting people in the information security world. You see, I've always been interested in the foundation technologies upon which we build software, such as storage management, distributed computing, parallel computing, programming languages, operating systems, standard libraries, fault tolerance, and security. I was lucky enough to find a way into the world of database development a few years ago, which (with a move to a company that produces software to run SQL queries across a cluster) has broadened to cover storage management, distribution, parallelism, AND programming languages. So imagine my delight when said company starts to develop the security features in the product, and I can get involved in that; and even more when (through old contacts) I'm invited to the inaugural meeting of a prestigious group of peopled interested in security. That landed me an invite to the second meeting (chaired by an actual Lord, and held in the House of Lords!), the highlight of which was of course getting to talk to the participants after the presentations. I found out about the Global Identity Foundation, who are working pn standardising the kind of pseudonymous identity framework I have previous pined for; I'm going to see if I can find a way to get more involved in that. But I need to do a lot of reading-up on the organisations and people involved in this stuff, and figuring out how I can contribute to it with my time and money restrictions.

I'd really like to have some quiet time to work on my secret fiction project, too. And I want to investigate Ugarit bugs. Some bugs in the Chicken Scheme system have been found and fixed lately, so I need to re-test all these bugs to see if any of the more mysterious ones were artefacts of that. I'm in a bit of a vicious circle with that; the longer it is since I've been tinkering with the Ugarit internals, the longer it'll take me to get back into it, and the more nervous I feel about doing so. I think I might need to pick off some lighter bit of work with good rewards (adding a new feature, say) and handle that first, to get back into the swing of things. Either way, I'll need a good solid day to dig into it all again; trying to assemble that from sporadic hours just won't cut it.

I'm still mulling over issues in the design of ARGON. Right now I'm reading a book on handling updates to logical databases - adding new facts to them, and handling the conflicts when the new facts contradict older ones, in order to produce a new state of the database where the new fact is now true, but no contradictions remain. I need to work this out to settle on a final semantics for CARBON, which will be required to implement distributed storage of knowledge within TUNGSTEN. I need a semantics that can converge towards a consensus on the final state of the system, despite interruptions in internal network connectivity within the cluster causing updates to arrive in different orders in different places; doing that efficiently is, well, easier said than done.

I really want to finish rebuilding my furnace, which I hoped to get done this Summer, but I'm still assembling the structural supports for it. I've made a mould to cast shaped refractory bricks for the lining of the furnace, but I've yet to mix up the heatproof insulating material the bricks need to be made out of and start casting the bricks, as I still need to work out how I'll form the tuyere.

I want to get Ethernet cabled to my workshop, because currently I don't have a proper place for working on my laptop; I have to do it on the sofa in the lounge to be within range of the wifi, which isn't very ergonomic, doesn't give me access to my external screens, and is prone to interruption by children. I find it very motivating to be in "my space", too; the computer desk in the workshop is all set up the way I like it. And just for fun, I'd like to rig the workshop with computer-controlled sensors and gizmos (that kind of thing is a childhood dream of mine...).

This past year, I've tried booking two weekend days a month for my projects, in our shared calendar. This worked well at the start of the year, with projects such as the workshop ladder and eaves proceeding well, but it started to falter around the Summer when we got really busy with festivals and the like. I started having to fit half-days in around other things, which meant spending too much time getting started and clearing up compared to actually getting things done, so my morale faltered; and with so much other stuff on, I've been increasingly inclined to spend my free time just relaxing rather than getting anything done. On a couple of occasions I've tried taking a week off work to pursue my projects, but I then feel guilty about it and start allocating days to spending more time with the children or tidying the house, and before I know it, five days off becomes one day of actual project work. I need to stop feeling guilty about taking time to do the things I enjoy, because if I don't, I'll be too tired and miserable to do a good job of the things I should be doing! And rather than booking my monthly project days around other stuff that's going on, next year I'm going to mark out my two days each month in advance, and then move them elsewhere in the month if Sarah needs me to do something on that particular day, to decrease the chance of ending up having to scrape together half-days around the month (or to skip project days entirely, as I ended up doing last month). I feel awful about saying I'm going to spend days doing what I feel like doing rather than the things the rest of my family need me to drive them to, but if I don't, I think I'm going to fall apart!

Now... off and on I've spent forty minutes writing this blog post. So with my whirling thoughts dumped out, I'm going to go back to bed and see if I can sleep this time around. Wish me luck!

Alien number systems (by alaric)

An interesting question came up on Twitter, and it started to be hard to fit what I wanted to say in tweets, so I decided to write it up on here.

Basically, the brief (as I read it) was to design a writing system for numbers that might be used by a civilisation who used numbers to measure physical quantities, rather than to count things. My theory is that we developed positional number systems as they make it easy to add up totals in columns, and that accounting was the original driving force behind our development of numbers.

Now, scientists and engineers like to use "scientific notation", which means you write a number like "1.57 * 10^5"; generally three or so digits, written in the form of a single digit, a decimal place, then two or so more digits, then a multiplier by a power of ten. That's convenient because measurements of the real world generally have a given precision, easily expressed as a number of digits that can be obtained, independent of their magnitude, which is then easily expressed as an exponent.

So, I reckon, a civilisation that built its number system for scientific notation might do things a bit differently.

So here's what I came up with.

Let's have ten digits; I'll write them as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 as that's a convenient set of symbols on my keyboard, but to avoid confusion, I'll write numbers in my proposed system inside curly brackets, like so: {943}.

The digits represent powers of two. 9 is 2^9, or 512; 0 is 2^0, or 1. To write a number in the range 1 to 1023, we turn it into binary and write the digits corresponding to the bits that are one, in descending order. So the number {943} means 2^9 + 2^4 + 2^3, or 536. You always write the digits in descending order.

You can't write zero that way, except as an empty string, but that can be mistaken for "nothing has yet been written", so let's use a separate symbol for zero: say {X}.

If we want to express fractions, we use a radix point. The digits after the radix point are another number that is, basically, divided by 1024; so one and a half would be written {0.9}. If you need more than ten bits of precision after the radix point, use another one; {0..9} would mean 1+1/2048. I'm tempted to reverse the order of the digits on the right of the radix point, making 0 represent 512 and 1 represent 256 and so on, so that {0.0} represents one and a half; but perhaps that's just more complicated.

But the way of representing very small numbers, or very large numbers, is to use exponential notation. But because the exponent of a number is more significant than the mantissa (the bit we've already discussed so far), it should go first, with a separator symbol. We write the exponent as a number in the above format; 1024 is raised to that number and then multiplied by the mantissa.

So if we use {$} as our separator symbol, one is written {0}, three is written {10}, 3*1024 is written {0$10}, and so on.

Very small numbers are written using a dividing exponent, which comes AFTER the mantissa and uses a different separator (say {/}). So {10/0} is 3/1024.

A number like 1023 is awkward to write - it's {9876543210}. But unless you need that level of precision, the entire ten bits, you'd normally just round it to 1024 - {0$0}.

I chose ten digits, not because I happen to have ten of them on my keyboard, but because it means that the simple form with no radix points gives you a range from 0..1023, which is about three significant figures in decimal; the precision to which higher-precision engineering measurements are made to. It's just plain difficult to be more precise than that with mass-produced instruments (you can, but the instruments tend to be very fussy about being calibrated and looked after). A civilisation with better technology than us might routinely use ten bits of precision by default for day to day calculations, I reckon.

The reason I went for the powers-of-two-as-digits representation is that you use more digits to represent more accuracy, rather than larger numbers as we do in our positional number system. However, there's some wasted space; I mandated that the digits be listed in descending order, so my number system doesn't have a meaning for a digit sequence like {123}. Perhaps that could be used for something?

Is information security good? (by alaric)

One of the interesting things to have come from Edward Snowden's leaks of classified documents is that the American National Security Agency has been working to introduce flaws into the design and implementation of security technologies, in order to make it easier for them to break said security for their own ends.

There's been a lot of outrage about that. The argument for it is that the ready availability of strong security technology makes it easier for bad folks to conceal their crimes (and, worse, conceal the fact that they are planning such crimes, so they cannot be stopped in advance), so the NSA is right in acting to make sure people don't have strong security technology. However, even if we can trust the NSA (and that is far from certain) such vulnerabilities can be found by people we certainly can't trust: "cyber-criminals" intent on stealing our credit card details in order to rob us of our money, commercial competitors looking for strategic advantage, and so on.

There are also deeper issues that have been raised; this means that the NSA is covertly working to sabotage the products of US companies. Should they be allowed to do that? Can those companies now sue them for damages?

But I think that, at the heart of the debate over this, is an even deeper issue.

We have the NSA - the part of the US government officially responsible for information security - acting to subvert the information security available to US individuals and companies, on the grounds that it is harmful to the public if they have strong security. While on the other hand, we have individuals and companies striving for better security; working to make more secure products, choosing products that claim to provide security benefits, and so on.

This shows, to me, that there's a big unresolved question that US society as a whole - government and non-government together - needs to ask themselves: Is information security good? The government's official position seems to be that information security is harmful, as it makes it harder to provide a more general notion of security that is threatened by criminals, foreign governments, and terrorists; while everyone else's position seems to be that information security is good because they don't want information criminals and foreign governments stealing their secrets (terrorists don't seem to have cottoned to this trick yet) - and, maybe, because they don't want the government knowing ("stealing" is a contentious term here, as the government gets to define what "stealing" is) their secrets, too.

So before they can really debate whether the NSA's actions are justified or not, I think the US needs to step back and look at the bigger question: Should information security be a right, or not? If not, then they should just use legislation to stop companies and people from wasting resources trying to achieve it while other resources are being spent subverting it so they only receive an illusion thereof. That's just plain inefficient. And if information security is deemed good, then the NSA should be prevented from subverting it, and refocus its efforts on ways of doing its job without being able to break encryption; traffic analysis, meta-data analysis, exploiting specific installations of security systems where a threat is suspected, and so on are all time-honoured mechanisms that work even against well-educated adversaries that use encryption systems that the NSA hasn't been able to subvert.

Privacy (by alaric)

I have a looser attitude towards privacy than most people, but I have began to reconsider that lately.

Generally, I believed (and still do) that anything I do in public is pretty much exempt from privacy. I have no privacy objection to pervasive CCTV, because if I do anything in a public place, somebody could be watching me anyway. The fact that my enemies can now just consult massive archives of CCTV to find me rather than having to get somebody to follow me around isn't, in my view, a huge deal. Indeed, I quite like the idea of sousveillance, having my own recording of what happens around me. It might be inappropriate to be doing that in circumstances that the people around me consider "private", so I'd turn it off for their comfort when it seemed right to do so, but I would still assume that anything I do in the presence of other people is basically recorded to some extent - after all, it's in their memory, at least!

Likewise with monitoring my network traffic at my ISP; I have never had any illusion of privacy there. I encrypt traffic that matters, and accept that the existence and destination/origin of encrypted traffic might be used by my enemies for traffic analysis.

So, I didn't really have any objections to mass surveillance; I had far more objection to the facts that encryption is far from ubiquitous and that information security is not taught in schools. My feeling was that if I can't stop an enemy that doesn't abide by the law (eg, organised criminals) from performing traffic analysis on me, then I can't assume it's private; I can stop them reading my stuff or impersonating me by using public key cryptography, so as long as the law doesn't hinder that, I'm content.

As such, I always wished that Web browsers would just include some kind of unique user ID in the headers, ideally backing it up with a public-key signature of the entire HTTP request. Then we could dispense with session cookies, logins, and even things like OpenID; we'd just authenticate to our browser by supplying the keypair in some browser-dependent way, and then head out onto the secure-single-sign-on Web. There's no loss in privacy compared to the current status quo that people are happy to identify themselves to web sites with email addresses, but it'd be a whole lot simpler for users and for developers. And so that, basically, is the security model I developed for ARGON.

However, I am starting to change my mind.

I've always felt that the "hole" in my approach to privacy was that it depended on my own knowledge of security and my enlightened use of encryption; I wanted sufficient education to bring everyone to that level. Encryption tools are generally a bit clunky, but if more people wanted to use them, that would create demand for better tools (or, more pertinently, better integration into the tools they already use). I felt that if we could just get people to encrypt and sign their communications, and encrypt their storage, and use Tor for things where the cost is worth the protection against traffic analysis, everything would be fine.

However, what has made me start to change my mind is the move towards storing one's data on third-party servers. By which I mean, living your life through Facebook, or letting Google store your email and your documents. People are moving away from having a computer full of their stuff, and communicating semi-directly with their peer's computers, towards letting third parties hold all their stuff. Often third parties they don't pay money to and are in no contract with, so they have little or no leverage over.

It's easy to say that educating people in computer security would make them realise that's a bad idea, but I use many of these services despite not trusting them one bit; I do it because network effects force me to. I could run my own StatusNet server on my own hardware, but instead I use Twitter in order to make it easy for people to communicate with me. I use Facebook because it's the easiest way to keep up with my many peers that do, and sometimes because I am forced to; an organisation I am a member of uses a Facebook group for important announcements. Many people do not publish an email address, but instead require me to contact them through various third-party services.

In effect, we are being forced to hand our information to third parties, and to trust them with it. Variations on these services that store your information on hardware you control exist; variations on those services where you actually pay a service provider to store it on their hardware (in exchange for them looking after maintenance, amortizing up-front costs, and so on for you, and where they are more incentivised to keep your stuff secure so you trust them than to try and find ways to make money out of it) also exist.

But they are not popular, as the big "free" providers have the vast majority of the users, and the value of these services is in all your peers already being on them. Now that worries me.

I'd really like to see more push-back against this. If enough people used decentralised software like Diaspora or ran their own mail systems, then the network effects would benefit those, rather than centralised commercial outfits. Clearly, some large incentive needs to be found to push people over, and an unpleasant transition period where everyone needs to be on both. Eventually, organisations like Facebook, Twitter and Google would find themselves forced to interoperate with the decentralised protocol or lose their place in the market, and then would find themselves having to compete on points such as "privacy" when the same ease-of-use and functionality can be had elsewhere for little cost.

But, we need technical measures as well. Build sensible public-key infrastructure into the core of applications (including Web browsers). Ditch cookies, and replace them with explicit authentication: provide a system of public-key-signing HTTP requests as I suggest, but turn it off by default, and force web servers to request it with a status code, as is already done for HTTP authentication (not that that is used for web applications, alas). Let browsers seamlessly support multiple identities, and when a web site requests identification, let the user choose which identity to use; and then colour the border of the Web page according to the identity in use so they don't forget. And while providing identity management through that (controlled) mechanism, try as hard as possible to remove all other means of identification - don't send headers leaking lots of information about the user-agent and its capabilities and settings, and disallow Javascript from querying that sort of thing. Bundle Tor with browsers, so it can be turned on and off with the click of a button, as part of the "private browsing mode" found in many browsers.

I still don't think there's much point in trying to fix this with making information gathering and retention illegal (the recent PRISM scandals suggest that legitimate authorities will find ways to work around limitations on their information gathering, and organised criminals simply won't give a damn anyway); we need better technology that makes us anonymous by default and pseudonymous when we want to be. But there may be some value in legislation helping to break the stranglehold on the social software market held by big centralised organisations!

I'm updating the ARGON security model to work like this (not that that makes a difference to the Real World, mind...)

Gender (by alaric)

A friend on Twitter opined:

hey i am really confused abt my gender right now but not in a bad way i guess

— Budget Skeleton Arm (@corpsehands) July 17, 2013

Ahhh, gender; it's an interesting topic, and one I've felt like blabbering about for a while, so this seems like a good opportunity to do so!

There's a whole academic field of gender studies, and to start with, let me make this clear: I've never studied any of it. This blog post is purely my own thoughts on the matter, based on my own personal experience. I've not even read that Wikipedia page! So my amazing insights will probably just be a tiny subset of the corpus of knowledge held by proper gender academics. On the other hand, I am hoping that therefore my thoughts will be more accessible to normal people.

As I see it, gender is almost entirely a social concept, like "democracy" and "fashion".

Don't get me wrong, I have a penis, don't have significant breasts, have a deepish voice and get lots of stiff facial hair; I've fathered children; I'm undoubtedly biologically male (although I haven't had my chromosomes checked).

And I'm lucky in that I don't mind that. Some people feel very wrong in their bodies, and suffer greatly with the feeling of "being trapped in the wrong body". I sometimes feel something similar about the fact that I'm blind in my left eye (so, medical advances aside, will never know what it's like to perceive depth directly, and will always be rather poor at catching thrown objects), so I can relate somewhat to that being very unpleasant. Luckily, it's possible to have surgery to swap the bits around, which provides great relief; however, complications remain further up the stack - full legal recognition of a change in gender can be hard to obtain.

Anyway, being happy with my body's gender means I get to call myself a "cisgender male".

I'm not sure if I'd feel uncomfortable in a female body; my first thought is that it would probably be quite interesting. I'm honestly not certain if I'm not uncomfortable in my male body because I'm inherently male inside, or because I'm just easy-going about it. Perhaps if medical technology advances to the point where sex changes can be had on a whim and easily reversed later, I'll give it a try.

But there's more to being male than just having a willy. I'm also romantically and sexually attracted to women (It's handy that I'm consistent in both kinds of attraction; is this always the case? Do some people fall in love with members of one sex, but not want to have sex with them, and instead have sex with members of the other sex?). So I also get to call myself a "heterosexual cisgender male" (I'm white, able-bodied and educated, too; thanks for asking!).

And that, pretty much, is my actual gender.

However, I live in a society with a whole load of stereotypical ideas about other attributes I'm supposed to have because of the above. And, pretty much, I reject them all.

Yes, I'm a nerd; I like computers and maths and science fiction and engineering and metalwork. These are stereotypically male pursuits, but that's not why I like them; I'm just fortunate to have a bunch of interests that society doesn't consider wrong for my gender. My interest in making things extends to cooking, crochet, and sewing, as well, which are stereotypically female pursuits; but apart from the technical details, I don't see any fundamental difference between those fields and my other interests that should justify a gender divide. Cooking is largely applied chemistry combined with some construction skills. Sewing and crochet are just another means of making objects from materials, another technique alongside other such as casting metal or routing wood.

Society also says that, as a heterosexual male, I mustn't be affectionate with other men, and certainly not have sex with them. Well, I'm quite an affectionate person at heart, and I'll gladly hug whoever wants me to (one of the best things about having gay friends is that they'll warmly hug me without worrying that it "makes them gay"). And I'm not excited by the thought of sex with men, but that doesn't mean it repulses me, either; if a horny male male-fancying friend asked me to Do Them A Favour I'd give it a go, and I'd be rather intrigued to see what it was like. No big deal. I'm certainly not afraid that it would "make me gay".

Society certainly has ideas about how it's acceptable for me to dress. Although, in my society, it seems to be perfectly fine for females to dress just like males (perhaps with the exceptions of formal garb such as top hats and tails), the opposite is considered rather unusual; I'm not allowed to wear dresses and lipstick. Thankfully, I don't like make-up much (on myself or on others) so that doesn't bother me much, but I find being told I'm not allowed to wear a dress a bit annoying. I've no interest in the rather unpractical "pretty female clothing" that actual transvestites might want to wear, thankfully (as that would put me in opposition to society's expectations, which can be awkward), but I do hanker for a kilt. And when I get one, I'll wear it, even though it will attract occasional ridicule, because I'm not easily cowed.

More subtly, society seems to think that, as a male, I should generally be dominant and take charge of things. I quite like taking charge of things, but that's because I enjoy the challenge of problem-solving and helping a team of people to work together towards a common goal; it doesn't seem to involve my penis at all (although... it might be interesting if it did). I'm not particularly dominant, though; I think that the "macho" male stereotype of always being in charge and never "letting anyone push you around" is really just borne of insecurity, that to respect somebody's leadership is to "admit to being weaker than them". The strongest shouldn't be in charge. In general, the strongest should be out there doing stuff, while those better suited to planning are in charge. There is no shame in either position.

My daughter find this frustrating, too. She often complains that people tell her some things are "boy's things" and some things are "girl's things", which she finds limiting. She introduces herself to people as a "tomboy" as this justifies her being interested in both. When she seems concerned about people saying she can't do something because it's "for boys", I often ask her this simple (and tension-releasingly-amusing to a seven-year-old) litmus test question: "Ok, do you actually need a willy to do this thing/play with this toy?", and the answer is almost certainly going to be no.

So, what of my twitter-friend feeling confused about their gender?

I don't know exactly what they are going through. They look female in pictures, and have occasionally expressed a weak preference for a more masculine identity, but have generally spoken of gender non-comformity and confusion, so I'm going to hedge my bets and stick to the gender-neutral pronouns "them", "they", "their", etc for this blog post (and if they ask me to refer to them with any given set of pronouns, I will endeavor to do so (although the pedant in me would like to add that I restrict this offer to pronouns that (a) can fit into tweets and (b) only use characters on my keyboard and (c) do not break any local or international laws)).

But I have a suspicion that being confused about ones' gender is probably a consequence of social pressure. I've worked hard to reject the social pressures on me, and have concluded that I'm a heterosexual cisgender male, but I've also found that that's quite a "weak" alignment; it's not a huge part of me, it doesn't really define much about me that matters to people who aren't trying to have sex with me, and I don't see it as excluding me from anything.

However, I think that if I took the social stereotypes and stigma to heart, I might find myself a bit confused about why I don't seem to feel strongly about them in my own right. I might then "worry" that I was secretly gay or bisexual (as society would like to tell me that this is at least slightly wrong). However, even if I was a homosexual cisgender male, there's a stereotype for that in society that is now largely accepted (if still rather second-class), so if I was that way inclined, at least I'd see myself conforming to a standardised place in society.

But if I really didn't fit into any of the Standard Places, and I took society's expectations seriously, I can imagine myself feeling pretty confused. I can imagine myself thinking or feeling something along the lines of "I have observable trait A, which means I should also have trait B, but I don't. So what am I?".

And so, on the assumption that this is the problem facing them, I would encourage my confused twitter-friend to see if they can separate their own model of themselves - based PURELY upon objectively observing their own feelings and body - from social stereotypes. Find out who you are, and only once you're sure about that, worry about where you fit into social expectations of gender. And try to keep the worrying down because, really, it doesn't matter that much. Unfortunately, life can be awkward for people who buck social expectations; I hug male friends (and hope to wear a kilt) knowing that this will sometimes attract negative comments, because I can do so from a position of otherwise being secure in my life; indeed, to some people, the content of this blog post alone will mark me as INCURABLY FILTHY GAY. Somebody who is struggling to get by, and who faces a real risk of violence or other abuse if their community fails to accept them, may well have to wear masks for more of the day than I do. This is bad, and needs fixing, but we'll have to live with it for now.

But this is starting to lead towards a later tweet in the conversation that ensued:

@endofthepath ha oh god no i can't find anyone weird enough for me.

— Budget Skeleton Arm (@corpsehands) July 17, 2013

(in which they are suggesting that nobody will enter into a relationship with them).

NO. No no no. Dear God, no. I only know them from what they say on Twitter (although, to be fair, that is rather a lot), but the pictures they post of themselves look quite fanciable to my tastes, and the things they say have generally made me like and respect them; if I wasn't married and on a different continent and all that, I'd certainly like to ask them out (I probably wouldn't, but that's just because I'm stupidly shy about that sort of thing, alas...). Their "weird"ness, to me, comes across as "not being a boring conformist". And there's something I admire about somebody who has undergone the stress of realising that they "don't fit", but not let it destroy them - they come out stronger, and with a deeper understanding of reality. I'd definitely hug them if we met and they seemed to like that idea (regardless of what gender they looked on the outside, or felt like inside). To me, what they see as "weird" is attractive.

However, I understand they live in a rather conservative Christian community. This feeds my suspicion that the source of their confusion is, at least partly, having a strong conformist social expectation model shoved down their throat at every turn; and it also leads me to suspect that they feel very, very, alone in "being different", which is sad, and "locally true" in their community, but unrepresentative of the sheer breadth and depth of humanity out there in the larger world.

And so, I wish them luck in escaping the confines of their community, be it physically, or purely emotionally.

See also: wise words on "labels"

2019 UPDATE

I've decided to come back to this post and edit it. Not that I've changed in any way, but because I've learnt more about gender thanks to more trans people coming out and talking about their experiences, which has had two consequences:

1. A better description of me would be something along the lines of "agender heterosexual cissexual-male"; I don't have an innate feeling of gender, I have male sexual characteristics and don't feel any dysphoria about them (although I don't feel any euphoria about them either, it means no more to me than eye colour), and I'm attracted to people with female sexual characteristics (regardless of their gender).

2. When I wrote that, out trans people were a rarity in my circles, but it turns out this was because they were all closeted. That's changing now and lots are coming out, and talking of their feelings of having gender that doesn't match their sex! Now, when I wrote the above, I thought that gender was a purely social construct that I found mildly annoying because society's expectations of me only loosely fitted me, and trans people were people who happened to find it VERY annoying because society's expactations strongly didn't fit them. But statistically significant numbers of trans people reporting a feeling of innate gender can't be a coincidence; it must be a thing for at least some people.

That means I'm actually OFFICIALLY A BIT QUEER in being agender; reading up on this a bit (mainly, /r/agender on reddit), agender people have a self-image that seems very consistent with my self-image, but it seems like most agender people follow the same sort of path of self-discovery as trans people - complete with stressful coming-out experiences (I have opinions on that!). My story is entirely different...

I grew up as the only child of a single mother, so my household had no comparison between sexes/genders; the axis was "small child / adult parent", rather than any "mother / father" or "boy brother / girl sister" comparisons. My mother never implied any gender expectations of me; there was no "you should do this because you're a boy" or "you can't do that, it's for girls". I saw social expectations of gender in others, and in fiction in books and on TV, but whenever they were apparent, my mother was disdainful of it as sexism. I remember her fury when she and another parent were discussing their children's likely careers; I was very interested in science and technology so seemed set for a career in those fields (correct!) - and the other parent responded "Oh, of course [their daughter] won't amount to much, she's only a girl". I grew up in a world with a female Prime Minister and a female monarch; it seemed clear to me that people had physical sexes, but the idea that those sexes had relevance beyond their direct biological consequences was just a hold-over from a darker age, like racism and homophobia, still lingering in dark corners of humanity where forbidden jokes were quietly snickered but denounced in all public discourse. Grammatical gender in the English language, and gendered clothing expectations, were things that carried on through social inertia but would fade with time. To put those views - in hindsight, rather progressive for the 1980s - in perspective, we lived next door to a gay couple and a transvestite guy lived a few houses down the other way!

So the surprising revelation for me wasn't that I was agender, but that everyone else wasn't...

Of course, I base this position on other people's reported sense of gender, and this always comes from trans people; I don't think I've ever heard a cisgender person say "I feel totally and definitely male" or whatever. So perhaps - just perhaps - being cisgender is actually no more commonplace than being transgender; a small fraction of humanity have the misfortune to be innately gendered, and have a 50% chance of that gender matching their sex! 🙂