October 2008

Tim Chevalier was born Maria-Christina Romainville Velu Chevalier (you would
change your name too) on December 18, 1980 in Boston, Massachusetts. Before Tim
was born, Tim's mother thought he was a girl. Tim thought that too, until he was
eighteen years old.

Tim's mother emigrated to the United States from the Netherlands during the
1960s, escaping a country whose educational and job opportunities were too few
for its population. Thanks to permissive U.S. immigration policies at the time
(at least insofar as Western European immigrants were concerned), she earned a
graduate degree and worked for years as an administrator at several non-profit
hospitals in the Northeast. Thus she had adequate employer-provided health
insurance to cover her own and Tim's medical expenses during the time of his
inception. When Tim was young, she became unable to work, and both she and Tim
benefitted from the social contract that guarantees people who have put in their
share of work a modest income in the event of their disability.

Tim completed kindergarten in 1985, at the Josiah Quincy School in Boston's
Chinatown. Until 2001, his kindergarten diploma was his highest formal
educational qualification.

As a public school, Quincy was required to consider Tim for early acceptance to
kindergarten when he was clearly ready for such at age three. Teachers' reports
indicate that Tim found school rather dull, and thus Tim's mother investigated
alternative educational options for him. None being forthcoming, she decided to
educate Tim by homeschooling. Tim would have none of that for the most part, and
educated himself through the public libraries of greater Boston. Tim learned to
use the other part of his brain by playing the violin, and later, cello, in part
as a member of youth music organizations funded by government arts grants. Since
Tim's mother did not drive, he got to rehearsals by means of public
transportation.

Tim disliked his birth name, and insisted from the age of seven that everybody
call him "Kirsten".

In 1990, Tim and his mother moved to a more affordable housing situation, whose
incongruous location in Wellesley, Massachusetts (an affluent western suburb of
Boston) was explained by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts's requirement that
all of its cities and towns provide subsidized housing to people who needed
it. In the spring of 1995, he began taking college classes at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston, a state university. Three days a week, Tim walked half an
hour each way to the nearest trolley station: the Woodland D Line station, in
Newton, Massachusetts. Tim had to walk across town lines in order to ride to
school because his own town had done its best to fight off public
transportation.

Tim's real education began in a terminal room at the Healey Library at U/Mass
Boston, where he got an account on a timeshared computer system and began to
explore the Internet (which at that time had been fertilized by federal funding
for the past twenty-six years, and was just beginning to find commercial
support). He began to spend a lot of time talking to people online. In fact,
most of his socialization took place over the Internet: as a homeschooled
introvert who had never learned social interaction the hard way, Tim had to grow
up at a late age. He made a less awkward transition than he would have without
online communication, because it let him gain skill at expressing himself in
words without concurrent worries about face-to-face, partially-nonverbal
communication. Later on in his career, Tim's colleagues would tell him that he
seemed to know a lot of people. Tim mostly knew a lot of people from the
Internet. None of his personal development would have been as easy without
telecommunications technology that was developed by government-funded
research. All of his romantic relationships and most of his jobs ever since have
begun online, and he now works in a field that runs on Internet-based
collaboration.

In the fall of 1995, Tim also began taking classes at Wellesley College, a
private college that allowed local high school students to take classes at no
charge to themselves. This was a political rather than altruistic offer on
Wellesley's part, so as to sooth any incipient resentment on locals' part as to
lost property tax revenue. To make the paperwork go through, Tim enrolled at the
public Wellesley High School, though he never took a class there. Made curious
by his experience with online culture, he took a computer science class at
Wellesley. Subsequently he dropped his previous career plan to become a
political cartoonist (a plan that was also complicated by his inability to draw)
and set out to major in computer science in college.

In 1997, Tim matriculated as a first-year at Wellesley. Recall that though
Wellesley is a single-sex institution, Tim failed the gender test when he was
born, and so received the letter 'F' on his birth certificate and a letter in
his mailbox accepting him to college. He entered Wellesley as "Marie-Christine
R. Chevalier", the vowels in his name having gained consonance. Tim could attend
this very expensive college primarily thanks to a scholarship that the College
offered local residents (another political move by savvy college trustees). He
afforded the remainder of his tuition expenses (including room and board) by
federally subsidized student loans; the college assessed his parental
contribution as zero and his personal contribution as the amount he was able to
make from ten hours a week of work in the library.

In 1999, Tim was accepted to a Research Experience for Undergraduates program at
the University of California, Berkeley, funded by the National Science
Foundation. He was thus introduced to the joys of doing research, eking out a
meager living in the process, and La Burrita. In 2000, he worked in another
federally funded student research program at Wellesley College, after which he
decided to write an honors thesis and pursue doctoral studies in computer
science.

In his senior year in college, Tim applied for a graduate research fellowship
from the National Science Foundation, which he was awarded. At the end of that
year, Tim was married to his fiancé, David, by a justice of the peace at
Cambridge City Hall. This conferred upon them all the state-protected rights and
privileges of marriage (privileges that were -- until a few years later -- only
available to those Massachusetts couples that included exactly one member who
had failed the gender test at birth). When Tim and David moved to Berkeley to
attend graduate school, local rent control laws had already been defanged by
landlords' lobbying so as to only regulate relative increases rather than
absolute rents. Even so, what tenant protection was left allowed them to find an
apartment in Berkeley they knew they would be able to afford in the long run
rather than moving to a remote, anintellectual suburb.

While in graduate school, in 2003, Tim was diagnosed with a chronic disease that
was manageable with daily medication, but would have seriously worsened his
quality of life if untreated. He was able to seek medical care due to a
Berkeley-provided health plan that covers all its graduate students. Tim's
government fellowship covered his tuition, including mandatory health fees. But
if Tim had been employed directly by Berkeley as a teaching or research
assistant, Berkeley would also have covered his health insurance through state
funds.

Tim completed a master's degree at the end of 2003 and looked for jobs in the
Bay Area. He found a job at a small software company that was staffed mostly by
other Berkeley alumni, an example of the ubiquitous software industry pattern of
public research funds driving private enterprise. Tim took public transportation
from his house in Berkeley to his office in Alameda at first, but decided it
would be more convenient to learn how to drive. At the age of 23, Tim got his
first driver's license and lived in a household that owned a car for the first
time in his life. When he bought the car (used), he could rely on federal safety
regulations that ensured the car had been manufactured in a sound and safe way,
which necessitated only minor inspections in addition. He began driving to work
every day on a federally maintained interstate freeway.

Tim sought, and failed to find, greater satisfaction in a further series of job
and school situations. In 2006, he finally began to find what he was looking for
as an intern at a small software company in Ithaca, New York that was primarily
funded by federal small-business research grants. The company had been founded
by graduates of Cornell University (a mixed public/private university) and the
University of Wisconsin (a state university). Subsequently, he interned at the
UK research branch of an American company, enabled by a British government
student work permit program. These two experiences motivated him to return to
graduate school in computer science, sending out applications for Fall 2007
admission. Because he had some doubts, concurrently he looked for full-time work
in early 2007. Tim accepted a job working for a US Department of Defense
contractor, and worked on-site at a government research lab in
California. However, when he was accepted to the computer science PhD program at
Portland State University, he could not resist the opportunity to return to
academia in an excellent program at another public university. To his further
delight, he found that he would be able to focus on his research while at PSU,
because his group was funded by government grants and so he could be paid to do
his own research rather than having to work as a teaching assistant on top of
that. He enjoys the collegial environment of the university, an environment to
which scholars from other countries contribute no small part. If not for (still
imperfect) laws that make it easier for researchers to cross borders to find the
most productive intellectual environment for themselves, his field would be far
less vibrant.

Also in 2007, Tim decided that it was not worth it to continue living as a man
who everybody else thought was a woman, so he began to clarify his gender
presentation by social and physiological means, the first of which was to change
his name from "Kirsten" to "Tim" in his email From: header and signature. Since
he began his transition while an underemployed public university staffer, he
sought and received medical help from a publicly run health clinic for women and
trans people in San Francisco. For most people in the world, the act of coming
out as trans falls somewhere in between perilous risk and abject suicide. Tim
was lucky enough to have a pretty easy time, partly to due to the example set by
strong people, within his academic field and without, who had gone before him
and partly due to the love and goodwill of his family, friends, and
colleagues. He also could feel confident that if informal support fell short, he
would be protected by laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender
identity that the state of Oregon enacted on January 1, 2008. In 2008, Tim's
marriage fell apart and he and his spouse were able to get a friendly divorce
easily, thanks to legal reforms instituted during the 1970s.

While living in Portland, Tim has been able to continue his appreciation and use
of state university resources, public libraries, public transportation, roads
paved well for bicycles, state-funded cultural activities, public radio,
county-maintained hiking trails, state-underwritten health insurance for people
such as himself who would otherwise be uninsurable, and public health laws that
make it less likely that he will contract a serious illness from eating lunch at
the food carts. He is happy to know that the bridge he bikes across every day
will probably not fall down, and that if his roof catches on fire, he can call
somebody who will probably help at no immediate cost to himself. He hopes to
finish his PhD before his age reaches the next power of two, and then teach at a
public university.

Tim does not advocate small government.