Chastity White Rose

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  • Age Verification Rant

    As a Free Software and Open Source advocate, I am always aware of the latest technology changes. In March of 2026, I found several articles and visuals detailing laws that people were trying to pass to force operating systems to have “age verification” built into them. I should not have to tell you my opinion on this because it should be obvious.

    The goal of these laws is to force people to prove that they are 18 years or older to be able to use their computers. As someone who grew up with old computers running DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 98, and Ubuntu Linux, all before I was 18, I have to say that I oppose such laws because they prevent kids from learning how to use computers at an early age.

    People who are in favor of these laws claim that they are protecting children from harmful things. Don’t fall for this lie. No additional software changes are needed. Parents are ultimately in charge of the computers they buy for their kids and installing parental controls on them if they wish. Also, many websites require users to be 13 years or older to create things like a Facebook account. At some point, these children and especially their parents need to be responsible for following the rules.

    I am not against age verification in principle, but I have to consider the facts. In many cases, age verification will require users to provide photo IDs or Driver’s Licenses to access services we depend on. AI software for reading these already exists for many websites.

    If the government just decides that your state ID or driver’s license is nullified and invalid, this means you can no longer do what others do. See the situation in Kansas for why I, as a Transgender person, am concerned with the evil things governments can do on a whim.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kansas-revoked-drivers-licenses-1700-transgender-residents-rcna262120

    But laws like the recent one in California go a step further and want to make age verification part of the operating system.

    https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

    If you are on a PC or cell phone using software by Microsoft, Apple, or Google, you will not experience any change because these operating systems already lock people out if they don’t have money to buy things in the app stores or a cell phone that can receive text messages. In most cases, only adults have access to cell numbers and email addresses due to the fact that email providers now force people to verify with their phones.

    Side note: The two-step cell phone text verification is a crime against my own mother, who cannot operate a cell phone and has to have my help to get into her own email sometimes. I have also been kicked off my own email several times and had to use my phone. Digital ID is already here because nobody is allowed to do literally anything without a cell phone these days. People can’t even work at Walmart without a cell phone anymore because everything requires the MyWalmart app, which uses the same verification. If my cell phone is lost or stolen, I can’t clock in to work, can’t check my bank account, order an Uber ride, or even call my mom to tell her I am alive. Though at least I can walk since we are both in Lee’s Summit.

    I am a 38-year-old adult who used computers long before I even had internet access. My own response to these evil actions is to censor and restrict people from using their own computers. The biggest target that will be hurt is the Linux operating system because Linux is all about Freedom of software and privacy. The laws passing in some states can make it illegal to install or distribute an operating system without these age verification signals, constantly letting the government and all foreign enemies know who you are and how old you are, because they have your photo ID, which may or may not be valid depending on how transgender you are at the time.

    My cell phone controlling my life is something I can’t do anything about, but nobody touches my Linux PC, where I write my books and do my own programming for the pure love of math. These draconian laws basically make the past 30 years of my life using computers illegal.

    But you know what? It’s gonna be funny when I go to prison and am placed in a room full of rapists, murderers, and people who did nothing wrong but were accused of things because of their skin color. They will ask me: “What are you in for?”

    And I will tell them, “I used Linux and wrote several books and hundreds of fun programs.” Then they will ask me what Linux is. If you feel bad because you don’t know what Linux or the GNU project is, keep in mind that these lawmakers don’t have a clue either.

  • The Intersection of My Religion and My LGBTQIA+ Activism

    The Question Hook

    “Have you ever been told that you have to choose between your soul and your self? For years, I was warned that my identity and my faith could never occupy the same room. But what if the gap between scripture and advocacy isn’t a canyon we fall into, but a bridge we build?”

    The idea that I had to choose between being a Christian and admitting that I was transgender was strange to me, but it is what other humans seemed to imply. I am too smart to think that other people or God can be fooled by dishonesty. A person who is of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum has the choice about whether to LIE about their feelings, but they can’t change them. Those who come out of the closet are just being honest with themselves and others, which, in my opinion, is always less sinful than the alternative of coming up with new lies.

    Although some claim that their faith caused a change in their gender identity or sexual orientation. I think these are not something the individual does but is forced to undergo over time. Either they are pleasing people and trying to conform to what their church teaches them, or perhaps being gay or transgender doesn’t seem to matter as much when they learn their purpose in life is better served as a single person who can do with fewer friends to influence them in the wrong direction.

    The Universal Code

    “In computing, a binary system uses ones and zeros to build infinite worlds, yet we treat the gender binary as a cage. What if God’s mind isn’t a simple ‘either-or,’ but a complex digital landscape? Understanding this logic didn’t just save my faith—it revealed how my advocacy is the ultimate prayer.”

    There have been moments when I almost feel I see something supernatural and beyond anything I was taught about God or the power of the soul. When I am deep into math algorithms used in my computer programs, I sometimes am shocked by the idea that math is a Universal Language, which is at least partially represented by programming languages and the traditional math notation used by physicists and other mathematicians. Humans may have invented the symbols used, but they never could have created numbers, colors, or geometric primitive because these things must exist before anything else can exist.

    Many religions cannot agree on how many gods there are or whether the one Christian God is split into 3 parts. Others like me tend to believe in a dualistic bi-theism where good and evil can only be defined when both exist. Otherwise, the statement that God is good and the devil is bad makes no sense.

    But beyond that, it is important to see that the binary numeral system is the closest way of representing this duality in computers. Perhaps this is why it is the checkerboard or the yin-yang of everything, I believe.

    The Provocative Question

    “What if respecting the identity of the LGBTQIA+ community is precisely what Jesus would have done if he walked the earth in 2026? Most assume faith and advocacy are at war, but I’m deconstructing that myth. Let’s reconcile tradition with authenticity to prove these worlds are beautifully and inherently compatible.”

    When looking at the character of Jesus. He spent a lot of time around the sinners and was often criticized by religious leaders for it. I like to think that Jesus might actually be a better example for people like me than he was for mainstream heterosexual and cisgender people.

    After all, if Jesus is God, and humans, both male AND female, are made in the image of God. Then clearly God is not simply a man or a woman. Even if he presented as a man two thousand years ago, this says very little about what he truly was before he came to inhabit a human body. The pronoun he is only a convenience and tradition, but I would not call it a reality, especially when I don’t identify with my birth sex because it never felt right.

    Of course, much of this is speculation, but I think it is fair to make connections to modern topics that were not discussed in ancient times but are relevant today. In fact, none of the things in the Bible match our modern society. There were no cars, airplanes, or computers in the ancient Middle East. The English language didn’t even exist back then.

    But there is no doubt that gay, transgender, and intersex people would have existed during Jesus’ time. The closest mention of it is what he said about eunuchs.

    "9 And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.

    10 His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry.

    11 But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given.

    12 For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." – Matthew 19:9-12

    Clearly, some of us were born different. I would argue that the LGBTQIA+ people were what Jesus was referring to, although the language we use today didn’t exist back then. Even if it had, we can assume most of Jesus’ audience were cisgender and heterosexual people. Those of us who are not like the majority must find our own path.

    And the final question that I think about every day is: Am I a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake? I am not sure what it means, but I can’t help but feel it is relevant in some way that I don’t have the education to understand.

  • Chastelib Readme and Manifesto

    Chastelib is a library I have been developing since mid 2025, though some of the functions have existed in some form for 20 years and have been hacked together as I needed them for projects. Over the past 6 months, I have refined them and have extensively documented the source code, and have even begun writing a manual on how to use them. This project will take years, as I have fun improving things and explaining why my own methods of outputting numbers now surpass the capabilities of the C and C++ standard libraries when it comes to printing integers in other bases.

    To my knowledge, nobody other than me uses these functions, but they are extremely easy to use by including header files or just copy pasting the functions you like into your own C and C++ projects.

    Core Function List

    • intstr: Convert an integer to astring in bases 2 to 36
    • strint: Convert a string in bases 2 to 36 to an integer
    • putstring: Print a zero-terminated string to standard output
    • putint: Print an integer using intstr and then putstr

    To understand the context of this library and how it came about, you have to know that I have been a C programmer for 25 years. Most of my projects are just toy programs for printing sequences of integers. Even more strange is that I enjoy bases other than ten, referred to as decimal by humans.

    Math is a game to me, and I do computer programming for fun. I also think that the C programming language is the best programming language to ever exist. However, there are some limitations that come with it.

    The printf family of functions can output formatted text containing arbitrary strings of text with format specifiers and arguments to print integers and floating point numbers.

    For integers, there is the %d for decimal, %u for unsigned decimal, %X for hexadecimal, and %o for octal. Although these are the most common number bases used, I prefer the option to print binary. The %b format specifier does exist as a GNU extension, but because I like my code to conform to the 1989 standard, I decided I should write my own set to manage the conversion of integers to and from strings that I can always rely on.

    Of the core functions, only putstring uses a C standard library function. It uses the low-level fwrite function to write a string after finding its length by searching for the terminating zero.

    Although simple, the putstring allows me flexibility when I am translating chastelib to use a new C library, or when I want to translate all the functions to another programming language.

    For example, when using other languages, I can’t rely on printf being available. Moreover, printf is a complicated function to write, and I have no idea how it actually works. When I tried translating my functions to Rust, having putstring as my trusted output function helped a lot. That being said, Rust is a painful language, and I stopped because it hurt my head too much, which is saying something, given how good I am at Assembly language on Intel platforms.

    The putstring function also helped when I was using ncurses because I could just change putstring to call addstr, which does the same thing in the context of terminal programs written with ncurses.

    The other functions don’t read or write to any devices and rely on putstring to show results. However, this means they execute very fast. Not only is C fast because it is a compiled language, but I have incrementally improved my algorithm over months to do the work quickly, and also made the code look good at the same time.

    Of all the functions used, strint is used the least because most of the time I am the only one providing input to my programs. If other people were using my programs, they would of course provide strings from the keyboard that would be parsed as integers. I have tested the function to ensure that it works correctly. In fact, my program chastehex was why the function was originally written. I could have had a generic hexadecimal converting function, but I made one that was flexible and supported any base from 2 to 36.

    Technical note: Base 36 is the highest base because digits 0 to 9 are used for digits less than ten. Letters A through Z are used as 10 to 35, whether they are uppercase or lowercase. The ten digits plus 26 letters of the English Alphabet provide a standard that programmers have used before I was even born. It is a good standard, and so I stuck with it.

    Future Extensions

    • floating point conversions
    • ncurses utilities

    The Github repository with the latest source is here:

    https://github.com/chastitywhiterose/chastelib

  • Determinism

    Do you believe in fate/destiny?

    I don’t believe in the religious concept of fate/destiny where the greek gods have decided what will happen in my life.

    However, things are still predetermined to happen as they do because I cannot control my body nor my desires.

    This is especially relevant today for example. I am sick and have not been able to breathe well enough to sleep well. I also had to call into work because I was too sick.

    I spent a long time recording podcasts explaining the illusion of free will back when I was Executive Producer of the Free Will, Science, and Religion podcast. This prompt about destiny reminded me of those days.

  • Pedophile

    If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?

    I do not actually support banning words, but for the mental exercise and to make a point, I believe that people should stop using the word pedophile because they use it interchangeably with “child molester”.

    Stop conflating those who have harmed children with those who may have been born with an unfortunate attraction but still know better than to have sex with a child.

    • Not all pedophiles rape children.
    • Not all who rape children are pedophiles.

    Society has yet to have a serious discussion on this topic. When I see people say that we should “kill all pedophiles”, I am concerned about the innocent pedophiles who may have a sexual attraction to children but will never act on it because they know it is wrong to do so.

    Here is a simple fact. People do not have sex with everyone they are attracted to. First, they may be committed to celibacy; second, they may be monogamous and only have sex with their spouse, who they are no longer attracted to, but they have been married for 50 years, so they might as well. Third, we need to be wise in how we use our words so that we don’t mislead people into thinking we are talking about something we are not.

    But the question weighing on my mind most is, if someone is a pedophile, where do they go for help? To a therapist? To a pastor? I don’t really know what I would do if I were in their situation because anyone they go to for help will probably kill them or call the police and put them on a sex offender registry, even though they have never touched a child.