Pax Ahimsa Gethen is a queer black vegan activist, blogger, and photographer. Assigned female at birth, Pax legally and medically transitioned to male in the year 2014 at the age of 43, but identifies as agender and uses gender-neutral pronouns (they/them/their).
Pax graduated from Northwestern University in 1992 with a BA in American Culture, and departmental honors. The focus of their studies was law and ethics. They received a full fellowship to the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at the UC Berkeley School of Law, but dropped out and began working at UC full-time in tech support and web development. They later moved to UC San Francisco to continue working in web development, podcasting, and video editing.
In 2008 Pax left UCSF and launched an event photography business Funcrunch Photo. Their specialty is performing arts, with a particular skill in low-light concert photography. In 2015 they shifted to a patron-based funding model, making all their new work freely available under Creative Commons licensing.
Pax has volunteered for food justice organizations in San Francisco, preparing and distributing vegan-friendly food to the needy with Food Not Bombs and the Free Farm Stand, and gardening at the Free Farm and Alemany Farm. They believe that free access to healthy plant-based food should be a universal human right.
Pax blogs at The Funcrunch Files about gender and social justice issues, with a particular focus on cissexism (oppression of transgender and non-binary people) and speciesism (oppression of non-human animals). Their approach to animal rights activism is based on the standpoint that animals are people, not property, and that veganism is a social justice issue, not a diet.
Pax currently lives in San Francisco with their partner Ziggy. Pax and Ziggy both enjoy vegan cooking and music making; Pax sings and plays piano and electric bass.
