Hi folks, I stopped posting (not here, I never posted here) back in 2014 or so when my local DOT stopped being responsive to my incessant requests for better bike lanes and kept not posting as I slowly became overwhelmed with the constant stream of opinions from other white dudes clogging up all the tubes, but the fediverse is starting to coax me out of my shell. One of these days I might even manage one of these 'shit-posts' the youths are doing.
I'm an engineer (structural and software), and I live in a city in the US, and I ride bikes, work on my bikes, camp with my bike, and look at my bikes a lot. I'm into urbanism and transportation and other things that go hand in hand with riding a bike in a US city. I also make clothes and do some hand-tool woodworking, am weirdly into swords (it's not a good time to be a leftist sword guy on youtube, I tell you what). I belong to an industrial arts group, so if you're looking for space to make shit and you also happen to live in a city in the US then let me know, we like new people.
Politically, I read the Manifesto in high-school and considered myself a leftist but generally went along with liberal ideology for a long time, thinking markets are cool we just need better regulation, I'm sure we can vote our way out of this, if we all just had (business) unions everything would be fine, etc. Finally climate change, Black liberation movements, and yeah, Ol' Bernard started motivating me to peel back some of the cracking layers of contradiction in my ideology and read (or OK, listen to podcasters read) some theory. I feel better now.
Genderically, I chose comrade/them pronouns as I've long been pretty lukewarm about being a cis man. I felt some dysphoria around high-school and college but then I grew a big ass beard and just decided that my personal definition of masculinity was pattern baldness and a face rug, and I could perform whatever way I wanted and feel secure in myself. I've been shopping around he/they or various forms for a minute and figured the internet, and especially Hexbear, would be a fine place to pin one on for a while.
Sincerely, LuddyBuddy
Hey there fellow they/them with facial hair. I realize I don't feel comfortable performing masculinity and I want to have more freedom to express myself so I gave up the male identity. But I feel I look better with facial hair so here I am.
Some of my resistance to identifying as other than male has to do with a feeling of ‘stolen valor’. For the most part I have not suffered oppression for the way I perform gender, (except for my older brother occasionally reinforcing how boys ought to behave through mild bullying), so I don’t feel like my identifying as any kind of genderqueer really helps anyone. This is probably a reactionary liberal identity politics brain worm, and none of my queer friends agree with that sentiment, but that’s how I’ve felt.