The trip home was uneventful, apart from TSA in Oakland stopping me on the way through security, asking me to remove my belt, and patting me down in that area. In hindsight I'm lucky I didn't become another trans travel horror story.
What I really wanted to post about was something which reminded me of a recent post from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ivy: at several places in Soma, the part of San Francisco where the Folsom Street Fair happens and at whose edge I was staying in an AirBnB, I saw stenciled "Queers hate techies".
My immediate reaction as someone who's both is an internal 'Can't we all just get along?' Well, of course we can't, because a) too many techies are jerks, being tourists in queer spaces where they don't belong if not committing actual hate crimes, and b) even activity that isn't intrinsically jerky like buying or renting housing a reasonable distance from work can really screw the queer community, of which the trans community is the most vulnerable part.
So what can I do about it? Wayell, not staying in an AirBnB on the edge of Soma might be a good start. AirBnB is contributing to the already-inflated demand for housing in and around Soma, and indeed in all of San Francisco.
But even though I was a tourist because I don't live there, I'm not a tourist in the cultural sense: I belong there. I show up to the Cat Club in my latex and nice boots, I get my stompy boots blacked, I chip in more than I really need to at Bay Area queer events, I (ahem) buy too much stuff from fair vendors, and above all I behave myself.
What I really wanted to post about was something which reminded me of a recent post from
ivy: at several places in Soma, the part of San Francisco where the Folsom Street Fair happens and at whose edge I was staying in an AirBnB, I saw stenciled "Queers hate techies".My immediate reaction as someone who's both is an internal 'Can't we all just get along?' Well, of course we can't, because a) too many techies are jerks, being tourists in queer spaces where they don't belong if not committing actual hate crimes, and b) even activity that isn't intrinsically jerky like buying or renting housing a reasonable distance from work can really screw the queer community, of which the trans community is the most vulnerable part.
So what can I do about it? Wayell, not staying in an AirBnB on the edge of Soma might be a good start. AirBnB is contributing to the already-inflated demand for housing in and around Soma, and indeed in all of San Francisco.
But even though I was a tourist because I don't live there, I'm not a tourist in the cultural sense: I belong there. I show up to the Cat Club in my latex and nice boots, I get my stompy boots blacked, I chip in more than I really need to at Bay Area queer events, I (ahem) buy too much stuff from fair vendors, and above all I behave myself.
