Blending In

Journeys in gender at Denver Hackerspace

By Jamie Siebrase

“If you aren’t familiar with it, genderqueer has nothing to do with gay or straight — it’s just what gender you identify with,” says Mar Williams, founder of The Concoctory Hackerspace, a place where makers and hackers gathered to, say, create miniature 3D replicas of themselves, learn to pick locks, or rap about infinity while petting Parsley the shopcat. Though the space recently closed its doors — at the time this article went to press, The Concoctory was having a blowout inventory sale — the discoveries made inside its walls remain in the minds of those who bravely used the space to hack, among other things, gender norms.

While some transgender people identify rigidly as either male or female, Mar thinks of gender as “more of a spectrum,” she says, noting how that ideology seems especially prevalent among genderqueers working in technology and science-based fields — both male-dominated industries where it doesn’t exactly pay to have tits.

“Women aren’t taken seriously too often, and it took being on the other side to realize that fully,” Mar continues. Mar is playful with presentation, bouncing back and forth between both genders easily.

Jace, a transman, is more fixed in his identity. As a third party administrator at a local tech company, he’s had a similar opportunity to “fully feel the experience of being male and female.” When Jace moved to Denver five years ago, he hadn’t started his transition, and was presenting female at another technology firm. Today, Jace blends in well — so well, in fact, that nobody at work knows he was born with female parts. “I’ve never been questioned even once,” Jace emphasizes.

The majority of Jace’s colleagues are men. “I get to see the male bonding experience a lot more than I used to, and it’s interesting to be able to blend and see the differences between gender,” he says, noting drastic discrepancies between how men and women are treated — and promoted.

When Mar was chair of denhac (the Denver Hackerspace), she was presenting female and wasn’t on hormones yet. “It was a weird thing,” she says. “I was chair of a hackerspace but felt like I had no credibility. People would come in and walk by me to talk to the nearest male.”

“In male-dominated fields, I think there’s posturing that guys grow up with that they aren’t even aware of,” Mar says, adding that women are typically socialized to Keep quiet and wait their turn to talk!, while men aren’t afraid to talk over each other.

Now, if Mar finds herself in a situation where she has to, let’s say, speak to a room full of guys as the authority on a subject, she feels she’ll be much better received if she presents male. So, she does. “Some might call bullshit on that, but I totally feel it,” says Mar.

Jace, for one, would not call bullshit. “Just listening to the way guys at work associate with some of the girls … it’s a man’s world, that is true.” Most women at his company answer phones or play other gender-stereotyped roles. “The guy roles tend to be a lot more into the tech portion, and IT is all guys,” adds Jace. “There are very few leadership roles for girls, and I don’t think I’d have advanced to where I am now as a woman,”
he continues.

There might be clear-cut advantages to being male within a boyish brood, true, but both Mar and Jace ultimately feel their gender identities are more innate than environmentally convenient. And, Mar, for one, still enjoys presenting female, “and not necessarily for the way it has me interacting with other people.” l

Learn more about Denver Hackerspace at DenHac.org.