About me

Hello, my name is Emi Gutekanst (pronounced like ‘Emmy’); I was born with the name Stephen Gutekanst and assigned male at birth, I hid myself from all family/friends/coworkers for ~15 years of my life before coming out publicly as a trans girl following the 2024 US election results.

This page is a tl;dr for coworkers, professional peers, etc. who want to quickly understand how to respect me.

What are your pronouns?

They/them is fantastic.

If you slip up and call me ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘dude’, ‘hey man’, etc. or my old name, don’t worry about it - I’ve been hearing that my whole life and it doesn’t personally phase me much. I understand that many people have never interacted with a trans person before, and I try to optimize for your personal comfort when interacting with you. This, of course, is just me.

I have a slight preference towards she/her in written text and they/them in verbal communication - but I understand that gets pretty confusing so really pick whichever is more comfortable for you! When in doubt, they/them is fantastic for me - so feel free to use that all the time.

Where can I read more about your journey?

I wrote about it in this blog post (warning: contains mild profanity and political statements.)

Where can I find you?

You can find me on GitHub, Hacker news, or here.

I write about game development, am building the Mach game engine in Zig, and when I’m not working with computers you can usually find me wrangling my small cat shelter’s worth of kittos - or gardening.

What is this website?

This website’s purpose is to replace my old usage of Twitter, so now you can have an RSS feed to my dumb ideas instead.

A lot of what I post here is stupid unprofessional jokes, pictures, etc. Sometimes I post programming related content, other times I post serious content.