Hi everyone,
I recently determined that I am a transgender woman. In the future, please call me "Becca" and use she/her and other feminine terms when referring to me.
Although I am taking steps to correct my name where I can, my old name will linger in various historical contexts, like the forum archives and git history, that cannot be easily updated; please don't take that as a sign that you should continue using it in new material. (It may also linger over the weekend in account names that I need an administrator to change for me. Don't worry—I'm on it.)
In the last few weeks, I have met dozens of people like me, and I've been struck by how much less I have to fear than most of them. For their own safety, many of them must hide who they really are for an extended and painful period. I don't, and one of the major reasons I don't is that the Swift community is the welcoming place it is.
This is partially because the Swift Code of Conduct covers people like me, of course, but the CoC would be a dead letter if we didn't all take its spirit seriously. In another open-source community, even one that professed to follow exactly the same rules, I might have needed months or years to muster the courage for this post. It is the work we have all done every day—from forum moderation to diversity support groups to just making an effort to treat each other decently—that has allowed me to take this step almost as soon as I was sure I wanted to.
So to everyone who has made the Swift community what it is, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
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Becca (née Brent) Royal-Gordon