Growing up as an immigrant is not easy. I lived for years without my father who supported us from Korea. In the states my college educated mother had to work night shifts in factories. My grandparents worked well into their old age. All just so that we could afford to live 3 generations in a …
Cookie Tester
Introduction So, tell me, have you ever wondered what would happen if you one day decided to set a cookie with the same name with a domain specified and without a domain specified. Why in the world would anyone do such a thing you ask? Because reasons! Now the question is how does IIS and …
Coming Out to Parents
I was visiting my sister in Chicago while my mother was in town from Korea. She always went to see my sister as she had a small baby. My sister left and took the baby with her to give us a little bit of privacy. I came out to her a few months back and …
Twitter’s Conservative Ban
Recently Twitter has been accused of targeting conservative users of it’s platform and censoring them. But let’s dig into what happened from a technological standpoint… The algorithm that Twitter used to tell what is a bot vs a normal user is most likely a neuro network. Neuro networks are unique in that often times not …
TSA Transgender Guidelines
A while ago the TSA put out a video on guidelines for transgender travelers in the US. Let’s do some analysis of the message that is being said to our community, and how useful it is… “Ensure that the information on your boarding pass matches your government issued ID.” This may sound like a simple …
How to Date a Transgender Woman
Transgender Women; yes, I know we are amazing. I don’t blame anyone one of you guys for wanting to date us. We are strong, confident and smart people. Through our difficult past, we grow this amazing ability to love ourselves and to live our lives genuinely. You have identified that amazing transgender woman of your …
Dear Mr REDACTED
This is an unfortunate interaction I have had with the father of a friend of mine from high school. It particularly hurt because I have had interactions with this person before and the friend and I were really close. Also the accusation that I was trying to swindle people out of their money on a …
What’s in a name?
My legal name is not Sophia, it is actually Sangyoon (상윤). I still go by my Korean legal name to people who speak to me in fluent Korean. It was when I moved to the US during high school I was asked if I wanted to be referred as a different name. I thought about …
Reaching Out
One of the many issues that I had when I was early on in my transition was finding positive role models in the transgender community. transgender visibility is a real issue these days. I wanted to find young professional transgender women, and all I could see were people struggling to survive. I wanted to see someone …
Passing
Within the transgender community there is a term called passing. Passing is when a transgender person becomes feminine or masculine enough to “pass” as a cisgender person. The term passing is a very controversial term within the community. When we talk about cisgender women, we treat all women as women regardless of how feminine or …