![]() “Our society doesn’t have language to define that!” ‘Transgender’ is about my gender it has nothing to do with my sexuality. “It’s just something I’m passionate about.” Guinan (pronounced GUY-ninn) tends to get worked up on the topic of gender. Not surprising, given that she is New York City’s first and only transgender firefighter. The FDNY employs more than 10,400, only 44 of whom are women, and Guinan is the only member who has served the department as both a man and a woman. Since September, when a poster of her wearing a tight T-shirt reading “So Trans So What” went viral as part of an awareness campaign for the LGBTQ-advocacy group V.O.I.C.E. (the Vocal Organization for International Courage and Equality), Guinan has seen her profile rise as a role model for others who battle gender stereotypes in male-dominated professions. Guinan does have something in common with many in the FDNY: The department runs in her family. Her father, George William Guinan V, is an FDNY lieutenant her grandfather George IV retired as a captain. Growing up, she heard stories about the escapades of her forebears - both of whom are heterosexual and, as she puts it, masculine and athletic. “There’s such an attitude in society that firefighting is for straight, masculine men,” Guinan says. That said, unlike many women who aspire to join the FDNY, she had no trouble meeting the job’s physical requirements. Standing six feet tall, Guinan weighs 240 pounds and doesn’t lack for strength. When my mother needs furniture moved, she calls me.” My body has a lot of natural strength to it,” she says. When it comes to stamina, though, Guinan says a lot of women in the department would best her. ![]() ![]() You have to know what you have and know what you have to work for.” “You don’t have to be six feet tall and built like a linebacker to do this job,” she says, arms folded across her chest. On this particular evening, she’s wearing a black sweater, black top, and tight blue jeans. A silver necklace with a dolphin pendant hangs around her neck, a gift from her boyfriend. ![]() Guinan doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t feel mostly different from everyone around her. Now she talks about not wanting to “let down” other transgender men and women who see her as an inspiration for bucking convention and stereotype to enter a profession where she is looked upon as an outsider.Īlthough she has grown accustomed to feeling separate from the norm, she admits it took years of burning under society’s intolerant glare for her to emerge stronger, certain of who she is and her place in the world. If meme stocks can be a thing, what’s to stop audio meme sharing from going viral!? Hoping to storm the ear-bending arena of social audio and win friends amid the gamer/creator crowd is Voicy - a Netherlands-based startup that’s building a platform for user-generated audio snippets (typically a few seconds long), offering tools to create emotive samples for reaction sharing to spice up your messaging/streams.“I couldn’t get the voices out of my head of people telling me I’ll never be a woman, I don’t look like a woman, I don’t sound like a woman, and it’s never going to happen,” Guinan says. It’s not hard to predict where this idea goes: Straight to gross out fart sfx and pwning troll clips - which are indeed plentiful on this fledgling platform for user-generated (or, well, sampled) audio. Borat clips, for example, or Squid Game sounds. Plus a cacophony of over-enthusiastic Internet memes in audio form. John Oliver screaming “GOOGLE IT!” repeatedly, or Epic Sax Guy’s epic saxing, and so on. The typical Voicy user is, unsurprisingly, young and trigger happy, per the startup - which envisages gamer voice chat as a key target for a pipelines of social integrations it hopes to build out. So far it has one integration inked with messaging app, Viber - but it’s offering a “simple universal API” to encourage other platforms to sign up. ![]() Zooming out, Voicy’s stated mission is to do for sound clips what Giphy has done for GIFs. “As we’ve seen with memes and GIFs, people love to create their own very creative content. ![]()
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