In the past week, I've seen various iterations of two different but connected conversations. Specifically, "women, people of color, and people who are not cis/straight are discouraged in STEM fields" and "women, POC, and queer people don't REALLY like geeky things."
I think it's important--not world-shaking, but still important--to acknowledge that these are different pieces of the same conversation, and that many aspects of one can, will, and does apply to the other.
There are studies--multiple studies--showing that girls are just as interested in STEM as boys at early ages, and are systematically discouraged from those interests as their education progresses.
I experienced this directly, to the point that I stopped telling people I loved math after third grade, when my teacher spent the whole year accusing me of cheating because I was too good at math for a girl, and thus must have help.
(There are also studies showing that children of color are less likely to be nurtured/supported in these interests. I can't speak to this experience directly, but don't want to downplay its role in shaping what we see as "geek spaces.")
At the same time as my teachers were moving from "everybody can count, everybody can add, everybody can like bugs" to "some things are for boys and some are for girls," I was beginning to experience those things from my peers, about my interests.
Ask my mother what my favorite shows were when I was a very small Seanan, and she will look put-upon and say DOCTOR WHO, HE-MAN, and MY LITTLE PONY. Of these three shows, only one was "a girl show."
I loved comic books. I taught myself to read partially from the episode titles of my favorite science-fiction shows. I spent hours with the Monster Manual, long before I was old enough to play D&D.
When I was eleven, I invented my own giant sprawling LARP/improv game with a complicated elemental magic system, which I roped my cousins into playing with me for literally hours at a time.
And this whole time, from age three to age fourteen, I had people saying I couldn't like what I liked, because it belonged to boys. I watched girls who had always liked the same things suddenly decide they didn't like them, because they wanted boys to like them more.
I don't know where this "fake geek girl pretends to like what the boys like to get attention" thing comes from, because trust me, the attention I got for ACTUALLY liking those things was enough to make a lot of more socially-aware girls find new hobbies.
(I have never been the best at reading a room, socially speaking. I was the kid still bringing live frogs for show and tell in eighth grade, because I didn't realize it wasn't "cool" anymore. So I was less stubborn, more oblivious, about being myself.)
Sample a group of six year olds and you'll find kids who like comics and science and rockets and math and robots and unicorns and magic and physics and biology and all sorts of things. Not all kids, no. But not just the boys.
Some people discourage kids they read as female from being interested in "geek things" in the same breath as they discourage them from being interested in STEM fields.
This will never does never has never can never eliminated girls/people of color/people who aren't straight, or cis, or whatever from being into those things. People are people, and people like stuff, and are stubborn or oblivious or whatever.
We have always lived in the castle, and some of us are in too deep to remember where the exit is, or too damn stubborn to be willing to leave.
When I finally got to join my first official D&D group at fourteen, after dreaming about it for years, the first words my GM said to me were "I hoped you'd be pretty."
He got mad at me, regularly, when I was better at math than he was. When the other (male) players min-maxed, he applauded their cleverness. When I did it, I was cheating. And I played with them anyway, because I was desperate, I was clinging as hard as I could.
And the beat goes on.
We have ALWAYS BEEN HERE. We will ALWAYS BE HERE. But when I started my own gaming group, I didn't invite anyone from that first one, that "I hoped you'd be pretty one." I can't remember half those people's names, but I remember his sneer.
We have always been here. But we pulled back and we grouped up, we gathered next to our spawn points until we had the numbers to feel like we might survive with our hearts and our throats and our dignity intact.
If it suddenly feels like we're everywhere, that's not people jumping on a bandwagon; that's the monsters coming out from under the bed, because we finally had the resources to take care of our own.
There is room for all of us here. Absolutely. But "here" does not, cannot, will not mean "80% straight white men to whom the community belongs, you can have the fringes." We've had the fringes. We ate them alive.
And if we demand a better table. If we don't want to live under the bed anymore. If we want to do the exciting math, play the big games, roll the important dice, we're not taking anyone's place. We're taking our own.
We have always, ALWAYS lived in the castle.
It's time for everyone else who lives here to learn to share.
It's time for everyone else who lives here to learn to share.
And to the ones who say "a girl was mean to me in high school because I liked comics," okay. A lot of boys were mean to me. At least one of them said he'd stop if I sucked his dick. All his friends laughed. So can we just agree that everyone was an asshole in high school?
This escape was never intended for one group of people above all others. That's not how escapes work. When people are hurt and hiding, you offer them a hand, not a fist. You share.
Let's share.
Let's share.
