In 2010, Phyllis Frye became one of the first two openly transgender judges in the United States. She currently serves as an Associate Judge for the City of Houston Municipal Courts.

Phyllis was born around 1946, a time of very rigid gender roles. She didn’t understand why her body didn’t match her brain, why she wanted to be in the Girl Scouts instead of the Boy Scouts, why she wanted to wear dresses. And she thought she was the only person who had these types of feelings. As a teenager, she got caught trying on her mother’s dresses, but covered it up with lies.

In college, she married a woman and they had a son, and Phyllis later joined the Army. She continued to dress in women’s clothes in secret, until her wife caught her. She underwent numerous therapies that didn’t “cure” her, and Phyllis’s wife eventually divorced her. She got kicked out the Army and tried to commit suicide. Read more ›

Here’s another Badass Woman I’d like to tell you about. Mary Two-Axe Earley was a Mohawk from Canada who fought for the rights of Aboriginal women.

Mary Two-Axe was born on the Mohawk reserve of Kahnawake, Quebec, in 1911. She grew up there and in North Dakota, and when she turned 18, she moved to New York City, as many Mohawks did at the time.

In Canada, the Indian Act (first passed in 1876) determines who legally has status as a native person in Canada. Those who have status are often referred to as “Status Indians,” and they are recognized under federal law and have access to certain government programs and services. Read more ›

One of my friends has been posting 100 days of Badass Women on Facebook, so I’m stealing his idea to write about a few of my favorite Badass Women, starting with Viola Desmond in honor of Black History Month.

Viola Desmond was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1914. She started out as a schoolteacher, but she really wanted to be a beautician when she grew up. Unfortunately, beautician training in Halifax wasn’t open to Black women, so she traveled to Montreal, Atlantic City, and New York for training. She came back to Halifax and opened her own hair salon, as well as founding The Desmond School of Beauty Culture, where Black women could train to be beauticians. Desmond also started her own line of beauty products. This was at a time when women, much less Black women, did not generally have the opportunity to become entrepreneurs.

On November 8, 1946, Desmond was on a business trip when her car broke down in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. She had to wait a day for the necessary car parts to be available, so she decided to go watch a movie to pass the time. Desmond didn’t know the theatre was racially segregated, so she tried to buy a ticket for the main floor section. However, Blacks were only allowed to sit in a segregated balcony upstairs. She was told she could only buy the balcony ticket, which she did. But then she went to sit in the main floor section anyway. Read more ›

I wrote an article on responsive typography for .net magazine a few months back, and it’s just now available online: Make your type look good on any device.

Typography can often seem like the easiest part of designing a web page – after all, how hard is it to put words on a page?

But on responsive websites you are challenged with using media queries to make sure the type looks good and is easy to read, no matter the size of the user’s screen.

Your typography choices should help the website get its message across, not get in the way of the message. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to ensure your type works effectively on devices of all shapes and sizes.

There’s also a sidebar which was published online separately: How fonts affect your website’s performance