In the back of the cafeteria at Jenks Southeast Elementary School in Tulsa, Oklahoma circa 1999, there is a room that items pass through before they leave the school system for good. This room contains tattered encyclopedias, duplicate copies of paperbacks arranged haphazardly on a collapsing bookshelf, chairs with holes in the upholstery, dim lighting from a single-bulbed floor lamp, and an Apple IIe with myriad 5 1/4” floppy disks, some of which even work. Nobody comes back here, there’s no reason to. It’s where you put things that you’d prefer to forget about. This system works for people, too.

Both of my parents work, so every day after school, I stay in the cafeteria for a few hours, in their supervised after school care program. The adults who run it don’t much care for me; I’m a magnet for bullies, too effeminate for the boys, too much of a boy for the girls, and most of those adults either imply or, in some cases, outright state, that I deserve it. So I find my way to the back room, and I absorb myself in a computer that’s over a decade from the state of the art. I get good at Dig Dug, half passable at Donkey Kong. I start to learn how to program Applesoft BASIC, which isn’t too different from the QuickBASIC I’m already learning on the computer at home. Every so often, another kid pops into the room, usually to ask me how to do something on the iMac in the main cafeteria. I teach a few of them how to use AppleScript to make it say words with its text-to-speech engine; they later make it say something obscene and pin the blame on me. I learn it’s easier just to hide away, to mind my own business. A tomboy named Adrienne makes friends with me, she pops in every once and a while, we talk about the space shuttle or computers, or anything that can bring us a little distance from this shitty room with its shitty furniture and its shitty kids in shitty Oklahoma.

Today, in 2023, I don’t hide in rooms like that anymore. I make space, forcefully, if necessary, for myself and for people like me. I pick fights when I need to, but I’m often kinder than I should be, that same part of me who showed my tormentors how to use AppleScript to make the computer speak because I thought I could show them it was cool. From that past springs a desire to learn as much as I can about old computers. At a flea market in 2013, I stumbled across an Apple IIc, I brought it in to work where I hooked it up to run as a terminal on my laptop. My grandfather died in 2012; I inherited his books on Applesoft BASIC and used them to learn that dialect I had largely forgotten from elementary school. I find myself in retro-computing communities and groups, but I’m always conscious of being an outsider, a woman whose nostalgia is tied up not in the simpler childhood of the men around me, but a childhood that was full of complex trauma and emotional abuse, with these discarded machines serving as, at best, temporary reprieves.

This is why, when I read Laine Nooney’s “The Apple II Age”, I felt a sort of excitement building about their work; finally, a piece of history that tries to dispel the tired myth of male visionaries that so many people in these retro-computing communities cling to, a history written by a queer, another trans person, an outsider sitting in their outsider room, away from everything.

It’s not fair to project this on an academic historian. I am, of course, aware of that; Nooney is a brilliant researcher and writer but they are not telling a story about nostalgia, they are writing a history. Nostalgia is anathema to history, a curse on it, a thing historians must try to clean themselves of before embarking on their journey. But throughout the book, I kept thinking about my time in that room with the Apple IIe, and how their work managed to explain how such an artifact could arrive to me and affect me how it did, and how all the incels and conservative men in retro-computing forums and Discords were telling themselves stories about their incredible brilliance that were, plainly, untrue. This bit of academic history touched me in its truth-telling. It understood the material logic of capitalism, not the stories the boys use to tell themselves they’re special geniuses. It was a breath of fresh air, an anti-myth.

And then, I reached the epilogue. Nooney is at the Vintage Computer Festival East, in New Jersey, witnessing all the Apple II adherents coming to “church,” as their companion for the event described it. Having just attended the west coast equivalent, I knew what this event looked like: a large number of men, mixed in with quite a few trans women like myself, alongside an even smaller number of cis women, trans men, and non-binary people, like Nooney. Their description captures that in almost every respect but one: they describe themself as “one of the very few female-bodied people” in the room.

It took me a long time to think of a response to this sentence. For the uninitiated, the term “female-bodied” is often used as shorthand to describe people who were assigned female at birth, and to specifically exclude trans women from a naturalized “female” gender. This is, obviously, despite the fact that our bodies are definitionally female, the targets of misogyny when people can’t distinguish us from cis females, and transmisogyny, when they can. It’s terminology that excludes us, sends us to those back rooms where you keep the inconvenient things you’d rather not speak about, hidden away. And that would be an admittedly difficult thing to do, given the preponderance of trans women involved in retro-computing either historically, or as a hobby.

But is it worth it to condemn an entire exceptionally well-researched work for the use of a regrettable phrase? Obviously not; “The Apple II Age” is a book I’ll continue recommending to anyone with even a passing interest in computing history. Is Nooney categorically opposed to seeing trans women as women? I haven’t met them, but that would be a ridiculous conclusion to draw here. Maybe this passage wasn’t originally phrased this way and it was changed in line edits, maybe they had heard that phrase before and assumed it was inclusive. There’s no way to come up with any smoking gun of evil intent, no way to make an enemy out of them.

But, that was my initial response to seeing it. A strongly-worded defense of the visibility of trans women as women in the retro-computing space. After putting that version of this blog post together, I read it over, and asked myself “who is this for” and came up with a deeply unsatisfying answer: It was for me, and me alone, a response to my own trauma, the fear of being relegated to that dimly-lit room of forgotten things. There are so many things I have to defend myself against; just the other day, I was having a long, pleasant conversation with someone on discord about ways to archive 720kb floppies when I saw his bio read “there are only two genders”. Men have harassed me in these spaces for everything from my politics to how I dress. It’s very easy to develop a hair-trigger response to having my womanhood questioned or invalidated because, quite frankly, it happens constantly, from everyone, the second they learn I’m trans.

This is simply the nature of existing as a trans woman in the world. There’s the fear of being attacked, the certainty that it’s coming, and then, when it inevitably does, validation, proof that the fear was well founded. This cycle is reenforced constantly by the world around us; we are under attack nationwide, genocidal laws are being passed by the right to limit our access to lifesaving medications, remove us from sports, and criminalize our existence. Trans women, specifically, are more often than not the public targets of these bills; when Republicans make their case, it’s always the specter of a trans woman in a woman’s bathroom that motivates them. Spending any time at all online as a trans woman, plugged into the constant stream of horrifying news from right-wing exterminationists, means a constant background noise of fear that you can’t escape from. It’s this ever-building tension that makes defending myself feel important. And when I do defend myself, often I’m attacked for it, as a result of people’s inherent defensiveness and deeply-rooted transmisogyny. Trans women are easy villains, we are easy to make enemies of. That undercurrent of resentment then feeds the cycle, proves that the danger was always there, lurking just out of sight.

I’m so tired of this. I’m tired of seeing enemies around every corner, tired of existing in a state of siege. I can’t control the right-wing onslaught against us, but I can teach myself to extend a degree of grace. In the spirit of that Leslie Feinberg quote, “people have been respectful to me with the wrong pronoun and disrespectful with the right one,” intent matters, and I have to imagine that a life where I constantly assume the worst of everyone I don’t know is a very lonely one.

This doesn’t mean letting minor slights fly without comment. I will always stand up for myself, I’ll always deliver criticism where it’s deserved. People will tell you who they are very quickly: a person who, when gently criticized, leaps to defensiveness and lashing out is not showing respect or acting in good faith; it’s fair to assume those people are not friends or allies. But gentle criticism is key, and it’s important to locate criticism within the context of how we know a person. This is the only way I can think of to break that cycle of fear: every time I feel myself tense up with the certainty of an oncoming attack, I’ll interrogate that emotion, recontextualize it, ask myself whether or not there’s space to assume a person is acting with good intentions. In most cases when they are, I’ve proven that buzzing fear wrong, and it can get quieter, at least for the moment.

To return to old computers: Nooney wrote an incredible book; they are queer, and they are doing essential work in computing history. I’m thankful for that, and I’m urging you to go out and buy it. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.