Cora Birk
Cora Birk was the alter ego of the RAB's infamous yttrx, and was the author of BME's Shapeshift Column. Cora described herself as:
...a 30 something pre-op transsexual living in New England. She's chosen a loose bodyart-as-aesthetic model to describe her full-body-concept transformation, squarely defining the shapeshift for herself as extreme modification for spiritual, psychological, physical and emotional reasons. Cora likes small cats and big dogs, as well as olives, China Mieville, Concrete Blonde and bowling shoes. She dislikes labels of all kinds, particularly ones of sexual preference and identity, though she recognizes their importance in the vein of communication and understanding and therefore ends up using them quite a lot, especially in reference to herself.
[Among other things, Cora was] a UNIX systems administrator at a liberal arts university in Massachusetts, as well as a writer and a freelance aesthete.