Are you a boygirl or are you a girlboy?

And today is Alan Turing's yahrzeit. Fifty-eight years. In a little over two weeks, it'll be his birthday.

I got home from my hell-shopping yesterday (I have pants! It only took me four days!) to find the mail had brought my contributor's copy of Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Science Fiction. It's a beautiful book, cover to credits. I am actively happy to have a story within its pages.

After all, speculative fiction is the literature of questions, of challenges and imagination—and what better for us to question than the ways in which gender and sexuality have been rigidly defined, partitioned off, put in little boxes.

The first version of the Turing test—he called it the imitation game—wasn't machine/human; it was male/female.

We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?

It sounds almost like an oracle: if a man can be a woman, a machine can think. Either/or, but the line can be broken. No one knows how the machine identifies.

Across all boundaries: here's to being and thinking.