Author: Chastity White Rose

You probably won’t hear this from other transgender women because they are often too politically correct and picky about language, but in my experience struggling with gender identity issues, I think the primary motivation for my desire to transition in the future, given the chance, is about not being seen as someone who acts like men stereotypically do.

I don’t drink beer, watch football, have sex, drive a car, hide emotions, try to be tough or violent, kill animals, or any of the countless things that people think being a man is about.

And seriously who really knows what a man or woman is supposed to act like. I don’t really believe in that concept. At the root gender roles are merely the idea that you must act a certain way because of how you look.

“If you have a penis, you should play sports” or “if you have a vagina you must wear pink and have long hair”.

Isn’t that pretty much how people think? That’s the impression I get from observing people.

I don’t really follow what goes on in politics nor do I care much about what idiots in the LGBT population say. They argue over dumb things like about the difference between a transgender person and a cross dresser. And then there is the whole thing about trans people playing competitive sports and if someone has an unfair advantage because they were born male.

And don’t even get me started on all the nonsense that happens when transgender people try to date and then people get angry because they didn’t know the person was trans and then they get sexual and find out the woman has a penis. Weird shit happens in the world because people are just dumb.

I’ve read enough and watched enough transgender people on YouTube to get a basic idea of what goes on.

I have a whole different perspective on such topics and I know one thing, I will not model my life based on any one person or group of them. When you copy someone you also copy their flaws.

I will do things my own way as I always have. I was never the type to like being associated with labels because then those labels become stereotypes just like gender roles.

I just thought of a brilliant programming idea. Technically it would be possible to use an integer array to store all the values of an image. The width, height, bits per pixel, and the array of pixels are all already expected to be 32 bit integers. My functions currently require passing the pointer, width, and height to every single function. But if the width and height were just part of the array then only a pointer would need to be passed to each function in addition to the other arguments that a required such as filenames, etc.

But of course that would require a massive rewrite of the thirty or so functions of C code I already have. Probably not worth the trouble but worth mentioning just because theoretically it COULD be done, which is a nice thought.

But I’d probably be better off using classes with C++ if I was to spend that much time on a rewrite. I would call it “BBM++” .

I may not have time to work on my programming until I’m moved but I come up with quick ideas all the time. I’m thinking of using languages such as Java and C# to write conversion programs for my image formats. I have basic experience with Java and have read much about C#. These languages already have support for popular image formats like PNG and JPEG as part of their standard libraries. They could be used as a quick method of having a conversion program that people could use until I learn more C tricks to enable me to convert between my BBM, BGM, and BPM formats.

Though I’m not sure if anyone actually cares enough about the image formats I’m creating. But even if not, it’s a great way to learn more programming.

That’s because graphics programming is a little bit different than writing text based utilities or video games. It requires enough understanding of a language to know how to read and write files and to seek to specific offsets to get and set the various variables needed to read, write, or display an image.

What all graphics files seem to have in common is the width, height, and bits per pixel. In addition to this they may differ slightly in what bits and bytes represent. They may be Red, Green, and Blue(RGB) in that order or they could have the primary colors arranged in some other order such as BGR or GBR.

And monochrome images may have zero represent black and one represent white, or they may have it just the opposite. Interestingly the BMP and TIFF formats can do either.

I’ve got so much knowledge about computer graphics in my head that I could easily give a speech on the pros and cons of the most popular formats used on the internet today and which types of compression they allow.

Perfectionism

One of my biggest flaws is that I’m a perfectionist. I always try to do things right and get heartbroken when I inevitable fail.

The benefit is that whatever I do I try a lot harder than other people. I have greater motivation than other people and it’s terribly obvious in all things. Whether at work, playing video games, computer programming, or considering important life decisions, I want everything to be the best.

And people can argue forever about the concept of perfect and whether it even exists, but I personally think it does. It only makes sense in the context of a certain goal which must be achieved.

If there is a task that must be done or that you want to do, then you do it, then perfection is achieved.

However there is a dangerous trap that I fall into. Comparing myself to others who can do something faster than me or who can achieve things that I currently cannot.

And many times I have made this mistake. Comparing myself to coworkers, other programmers, other vegan activists, and also humans both men and women but in different ways.

And what people don’t realize is that I’m incredibly self aware. Only I know my thoughts and feelings about things. But what I’ve learned is that comparing myself to others is a great flaw in itself that does not actually help me achieve things but only makes me feel bad.

So if you ever see me comparing myself to other people, kindly remind me of what I have said here. I don’t wish to spend my life worrying about whether I’m as good as someone else. It’s irrelevant because I will never be them, I can only be myself.

Recently I created a project on sourceforge about my Binary Bit Map library. My project includes several goals.

0. Create my own image format.
1. Create useful functions to allow me to draw pixels and basic patterns to my images.
2. Write a conversion tool that non programmers could still use that converts between my format and others.

As far as goal 0, I did previously create my own image format and even wrote a very large text file detailing it. However I ran into some problems.

First, I tried to save space by not adding any padding at the end of a row of pixels. This meant that my files were smaller than other uncompressed formats but the space saving was such a small difference that it added tons of complexity for saving a few bytes. It wasn’t worth writing a totally different function. I may consider changing this.

As far as goal 1, I already have many good functions I’ve written and have the means to draw pixels anywhere and save the arrays to several popular image formats. However I’m lacking a few things. I don’t yet have a way to drawn text, lines, or polygons on them. Previously I did so using SDL or Allegro but I really don’t want my code to depend on the overly complicated libraries that change and are not easy to install and set up. It defeats the purpose of trying to write my own graphics library.

And for goal 2, there is much work to be done before I can consider my own format to be final and write viewers or converters for it. However it occurred to me that when that time comes, I could try writing them using other libraries or even other programming languages. It may be the subject of a book.

I also created a logo for my project. It’s not fancy but it gets the point across of what it’s about.

My focus has been on monochrome Bitmaps because of their simplicity and beauty. Some images fit into my project well and others don’t. It’s an art form of itself trying to see what can be created in the limitations of black and white.

Here is the animated version.