vaginapagina | VP team bio: Alex

Dearest vulva-loving superstars,

As several of you have requested, your friendly neighborhood VP Team members are taking this opportunity to let you get to know us a little better. We will take turns posting our bios about once a week. Check out the tag for this entry to view them all (mine is only the second one--lots more to go!).

Of course, we want to get to know you, too, so if you haven't already and you'd like to, feel free to introduce yourself here, as indicated on the profile page. (Note that you can also now add yourself to VP's Frappr map from the intro page.) If you made your introduction a while ago and your life has changed dramatically since then, reply to your old comment and update us!

Hey all!

I've been hanging around as a maintainer for long enough now that it's probably time I introduced myself to everyone... :-)

I joined VP shortly after getting diagnosed with endometriosis, when I was looking for a place to learn more about it that wouldn't make assumptions about me - and, well, here I found that.

My laundry-list of labels: I'm genderqueer (preferred pronouns are they/them/their); I'm white; I'm physically disabled and mentally ill; I'm upper-middle-class; I'm queer; do not tumble-dry; and I'm based in the UK, but culturally I'm a bit more complicated than that.

Probably more interesting is, well, what I'm interested in: I'm a scientist (rocks! chemistry!); I make music (french horn!); I read a lot of speculative fiction (Dicebox!); I like making cookery up as I go along, and writing fanfic about people who are rubbish at crafts. In very good weeks I go hiking; in bad weeks I curl up in bed and take more painkillers. I knit hats designed to look like vulvas (asymmetric labia ftw!). I was brought up by the Internet, and some times it shows more than others, and I'm joking less than you think. I like open-source software and intersectional models of social justice and watching scientifically inaccurate films for the sake of yelling at them. I have a major thing for kitchen gardens and castles.

And I'm really, really proud to be a part of a community that's so dedicated to being an informative and safer space, and I am absolutely in awe of how awesome you all are. :-)

Looking forward to keeping working for you,
--alex.

PS questions welcome :-)