Washington Practitioner Application: Fill & Download for Free

Hmm.... let's see what this legal fiction would take....Let's say they wanted to do this in my state of residence (Washington state.)I suppose the first thing they'd want to do on their way to legally establishing themselves as women would be to get their drivers license to reflect that. It's an important piece of documentation to update in order to present legally as a woman. What does it take to do that?Well, there's a form you have to fill out (you can find it here: Page on wa.gov) but it's not just you that fills out the form. You also have to have a medical professional sign off on it.Any of the following may complete the “Physician” section of the form:Medical physicianInternistEndocrinologistGynecologistUrologistOsteopathic PhysicianPsychiatristPsychologistWashington state licensed naturopathic physicianWashington state licensed advanced registered nurse practitionerWashington state licensed physician assistantWashington state licensed certified osteopathic physician assistantIt's nice that Washington makes it easy to do this with so many options for what kind of provider you see, but that provider has to provide their license # and certify:The applicant has undergone the appropriate gender transition clinical treatment.That's a nice, vague statement. What does that mean? Well, that might mean, if the provider filling out the form is an Endocrinologist, that the person in question has started Hormone Replacement Therapy... that's going to be fun for a person wanting to create a legal fiction. I don't think you're going to get a Urologist to sign the form without an Orchiectomy... and that requires a year of HRT and the sign off of a therapist to get to... plus being willing to go without your testicles.When I did this, my psychologist signed off on it. What did it take to get her to do that? Six months of therapy. Oh, and presenting full time living as a woman for a while... and starting hormone therapy... and legally changing my name. Then I got to go to DOL to get a new license that said 'F' for gender. I considered it a fairly significant accomplishment, and I live in a state where doing this is comparatively easy. I wouldn't want to try this in my home state of Oklahoma.And that, dear friends, is the easy part. To have your gender recognized at a federal level would require, at a minimum, getting your Social Security gender marker updated, if not having your birth certificate amended. Doing that takes more hoop jumping, and more letters. In some states, handling the birth certificate requires that you undergo genital surgery.People have this idea floating around their heads that trans* people can get up one morning and say "I'm a woman" and just because we say it, everyone respects that and life moves forward from there.It doesn't work that way. Satisfying the requirements to change a gender marker on a government document can be damned hard to do, which is why so many trans people don't have documentation that matches their identity.The notion that a person could claim to be transgender in order to gain access to the legal status of being an opposite gender for any purpose is ludicrous. It's right up there with the completely specious notion that letting trans people use the bathroom that matches their gender identity will put women at risk for sexual assault in bathrooms.It's hard enough for people who are actually trans* to get through all this. Maintaining the fiction that you're trans to get around a requirement to promote gender equality would be ... it's just beyond my comprehension that someone would deal with the things we deal with for anything less than a genuine experience of gender dysphoria.

Several colleges and universities such as Michigan State and the University of Washington offer online certificate programs in Business Analysis but most BAs actually learn on the job by working as a BA for on multiple software development projects translating business speak into nerd talk.After 5 years of working as a practitioner of business analysis you are eligible to apply to take the test to become a PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA)® or an International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP).It took me 15 years to go from application developer to systems architect to business analyst to business consultant. That was my road. YMMV.

"Distributed systems" is a broad term. My claim to expertise comes from being a database kernel developer later Hadoop/HBase/Spark/etc. practitioner.If you are seeking to learn Hadoop or NoSQL, Coursera has plenty of lectures on that; I took the Hadoop Platform and Application Framework - University of California, San Diego | Coursera course to try and learn all the differences between the Apache technologies, and it worked out reasonably well.If you are seeking to understand distributed systems at a deep level, that's a tougher call. Try learning about Computer Architecture - Princeton University | Coursera to get started on thinking about how parallelism actually works at a hardware level. Then take some parallel programming courses and networking courses to expand on the understanding. Personally, I have a bias for HPC (High Performance Scientific Computing - University of Washington | Coursera ) because the ideas in there can be applied to larger distributed systems.