This is very much my blog, so don't be surprised if this doesn't follow accepted patterns and norms. It is a place where I can be honest and I appreciate that. Here, I splurge. No one comes out looking good. It is a selfish place written by a pretty selfish person. It is a place of ranting and I am, ultimately, an unreliable narrator. Bear that in mind. I attempt to be honest, but things are very much from my point of view.
Highly subjective views of people in my life proliferate. It will deal with many things and new readers would do well to check out the "Story So Far" Page above. I can also heartily recommend that Dysphoria link if you're questioning or interested. Thank you!
I have, apparently, lost the ability to dress in a professional manner: lines and dots?
I had worn my "I feel so professional" suit at first, but it became apparent that whilst I could walk and stand, I was unlikely to get away with sitting.
Oh, this is at a coffee shop nearby the place I met my MP. Nice pitstop. Decent lemon drizzle cake. I suspect baked on site too.
Saw my MP today. That's a first and very uncomfortable for me. I went expecting a bit of a battle, but it was as though I was pushing an open door; my MP already knew, was already on my side: having a partner who is an enby, friends and relatives who are trans*. But, alas, it was as though that open door led to a dingy anteroom with flickering lights and a broken heater. My MP is a bankbencher, has seen leadership deal with people stepping out of line and watched as other methods of showing displeasure have achieved nothing. My MP radiated frustration at the system. What else could either of us do? Not much, it would appear.
A Friday repeated, and it was nice. I feel I messed up though - I'm relatively certain there was a point in the evening in which I should have said something and, for some reason, I didn't say it. I was aware of it, but can't explain why I didn't act. Fear? Confusion? Fear. Always fear. On the back of some shenanigans with an online account that seemed a bit fishy at first, but with whom I had a decent chat for a bit the previous day. I was prepared to give them a go, if I'm honest, but then the person typing on that account seemed to change, a shift change maybe, and I wondered anew who is taken in by such things. Mind you, that I noticed means they filtered me out as not the intended target. That this was finalised as I was walking to meet my partner in crime for the evening probably accouonts for some of the fear. And the visit to eat Chinese food - I am most unladylike in portions, style of eating, amount of visits and resultant burps.
£3.75!!!
Bonkers cheap.
An IKEA trip earlier in the week gave me ideas about something better to put my TV on than the health and safety hazard I currently use and also prompted me to finally buy a set of scales for the bathroom. Turns out I am consistently above 13st! I can shift my balance to get it up to 14st too, which is a concern. However, it does explain why my favourite dresses don't fit any more and why most photos are so unflattering - paunch territory. I mean, I can't claim to be fat, but I can definitely claim to be shaped in a way that a lot of the stuff I bought early on does not allow for. It is what it is.
My private prescription for HRT is supposedly in train, they tell me I will get a code on my phone, but it's been a few days and nothing yet. I shall chase next week I guess. Too early for me to be chasing the GP, I feel, but I shall take that up at the end of the month. Examinations are coming - my e-mail is regularly assaulted by reminders. I've been finding executive function hard, not just this last week (though it is far more noticeable without work shifts), so that I haven't packed yet for my holiday and have been struggling to wake and get ready in good time. However, I did manage a trip to the Scottish Restaurant with Youngest and hear about Eldest's plans for University (Manchester or Leicester). Not from Eldest, from Tilly.
Great Apps make photos, just not always as the owner of the App would like.
Though, honestly, I like the look of the jumper. It distracts from the existential dread.
I wasn't expecting to get told by Ewan MacGregor to choose life, choose a job, choose a career in a cynically sarcastic manner on my way into work last week; nor was I expecting to end up being slightly obsessed with it over the weekend and then mainlining it all the journey in and out of work these last two days. Indeed, this was thus compounded by hearing today that the Middlest has contracted COVID from his drama group. Eldest seems to have avoided it through having the antibodies from the last time still active; Tilly has also avoided it and, so far, the youngest is safe. Of course, I'm still testing negative. Choose a family, choose a big television, choose cars, washing machines, compact disc-players and electrical tin-openers.
Alas, because I am me, and because I am super into wasting the time that God gives me on this green (for now) Earth, I have failed to plan my time properly. Thus I am not going to Pokemon as myself despite the opportunity that has presented itself, I have stayed home and cooked pie for tea with some fresh veg and potato wedges. My nails have grown and... I am seriously giving internal monologue time to not cutting them. Which is something of a first, I have a bit of a thing about not being able to keep my nails clean generally and so I generally avoid letting them get long because they look awful and, well, have dirt underneath. Also I am wearing a lovely grey polo neck jumper that I acquired over the weekend, with lovely small frills on the wrists and neck, with my cat-eye glasses on and a stuffed bra. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Alone, in the almost dark, avoiding work but not playing or relaxing either.
Whilst on the phone to Tilly in a new area of the school for me, I spied this mirror and took a photo in it. Because of course I did.
Then I let the App go at it because, at the end of the day, I am finding that I am vain.
I probably think that this song is about me.
Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows; stuffing junk food into your mouth. And I think on the posts over at Femulate and across the Pond railing against viewing numbers on blog posts. The call to action, the frustration that even the TG community seems to care less about personal safety than they seem to do for make-up tips and what clothes people are wearing. Here am I, writing posts that regularly discuss clothes at the moment, and I am considering a great many things that I have never consciously considered before: eye make-up, lipstick, concealer, laser to get rid of the beard, nail polish? Nail polish... I mean, what the Hell, me! What am I honestly expecting out of thinking about that and not cutting my nails? I can barely cope when the nails aren't over the end of my finger-tips!
But Miss Warrington was wearing a single coat of silvery purple nail polish these last two days. This is highly unusual for Her at work, and not something that is normal for Her. It matched Her hair, also blonder and more silvery than normal. And, well, I can't get that out of my head. Not because I am attracted to Miss Warrington, I don't think I ever really have been, so much as the look really worked and was out of the ordinary. So obviously I have mulled on it. She told me that someone from work had bumped into Her at the gym over the weekend and asked about me - asked whether Miss Warrington was aware of any ongoing changes with me, whether She had the inside skinny on my hair and... apparently at this point the female colleague had gestured generally to the breast area - was I planning or already making, well, making changes? Miss Warrington said that She didn't shoot this colleague down but felt also that it wasn't Her place to really reveal anything, recommending that this colleague come and ask directly as I would be happy to chat to them. Miss Warrington is not wrong: like being autistic, I am very happy to chat to people about being trans in the end. I'm just not used to raising it.
Reality, of a sort, tonight.
It rather makes a mockery of the opening image, revealing it as the vanity it is.
Activism then. The urging to get out and be activitsts by going out and living authentically. I have a love-hate relationship with activism, being both fascinated and scared by it in equal measure. I have long longed to do something to help, to be a force for good and justify my use of the Gandhi quote "be the change you want to see in the world" but also recognised my propensity to get things wrong, focus on the wrong points and make things worse rather than better. What if I stumble? What if I fall? What if I lose my step and make fools of us all? Often I go off half-cocked, get the wrong idea and attack the wrong point and then end up compounding the things until it comes back to bite me and make my life more precarious without ever actually managing anything positive. Choose rotting away at the end of it all in a miserable home nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish brats that you spawned to replace yourselves. Around me the storm begins to rise, we can see the eddies on the wind, feel the cold, glimpse the lightning beyond the horizon, sometimes striking closer to home through an attack here, a mugging there, an article in the general press or on the BBC. The Grauniad finding common cause with the Daily Heil; the Express and Times bemoaning the woke mob, dogs and cats living together, congress with beasts and a scroll that winds itself from beneath the fundaments of the earth.
Reality on the way to the pub on Sunday evening. I failed to capture the sunset.
I wore the silver alice-band because it feels more 'me' and less hidden.
People wiser than I, with far more experience and a more level head, point out that much can be done in the secret and private places of social life. Writing to MPs, adding complaints to the BBC, carefully managing political activity - all without risking life or limb whilst also managing to live authentically and powerfully as oneself. They are right. These are people with just as much, if not more, to lose than I in life - they are people with families and supporters, jobs and careers, positions of strength and power in the TG community. These are people with good mental health, and who stand with all the groups.
You know, what I find hard to understand and hard to parse with the recent flurry, is the recent unpleasantness surrounding drag artists. It seemed, at the time, an odd choice of topic - to deride drag artists as being somehow responsible for making things worse for folk that live differently, specifically for the trans-femme community and... it didn't sit right. It is the long five-o'clock-shadow cast from my bruising (but nevertheless important) experience posting a photo, my favourite at the time, over at Stana's invitation and the comments requesting that I be careful never to present in public thus with a beard. I say, having been carefully shaving my face to obviate the beard for the best part of three months now and counting. Choose your future: choose life.
In the meantime I am avoiding work (standard for this time of year) and ruminating on the fact that I have chosen not to cut my nails. I don't own any nail polish, of course, and I cannot imagine me springing for any when I am struggling generally to spring for things. It's not entirely true, of course, I have sat on all of my furniture and stuffed a Chinese takeaway into my mouth after picking the eldest up from Dance and sitting with both her and the Middlest to watch a youtube video on Saturday evening. So, rather, I am aware of what I have spent and the need to save the pennies for things like repairing the bathroom, getting that PC I've been meaning to get since 2009. I am moidering about the postponement of the blood-pressure appointment due to sickness in the nurses at my Doctor's Surgery to the 29 November, meaning that the referral to the Gender Clinic will wait another fortnight or so.
I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And that, my friends, was the path less travelled for me, and not in the Frostian sense of longing and self-discovery so much as it was the painful trudging of that long walk home where you know you made some mistake in your route a while ago but there's nothing to be done now but continue on. The known unknowns are bad enough without factoring in the unknown unknowns.
As the people of France mourn, as the people of Lebanon mourn, as the people of Kenya mourn, as the people of Syria weep, as the people of Indonesia struggle, as the people are bowed, let us never forget that we are united. Let us never forget that none of us is ever truly alone. We are humanity. We are imperfect, impatient, questing and questioning. We are the dead, we are the living, we are the grieving and, but for the Grace of God, we could just as easily be the aggressors.
Charlie Chaplin put it well:
Right now, I have nothing else of import to say. My lateness with what I have is solely down to travel and lack of web access to say it.
I am late to this. But it is possibly the best protest / form of raising awareness I have ever seen. If all protests were like this I feel the world would change far more quickly. Maybe it's the dance, maybe it's the music, but this is powerful. Also, sad that it came to this. Sad that it had to be done.
Tilly and I are watching Twilight and it is unmitigated shit. We're watching for the reason to pull it apart. I think.
You know, human beings are the worst predators ever conceived. If vampires, or anything of that ilk, actually existed then we, as a species, would wipe them out in short order. And we wouldn't stop. Vampires may prey on human beings but human beings work as a pack, as a group, and we would bring them down. It is a principal failing of most supernatural movies of this form, of most legends, the things that prey on human beings are woefully under-prepared for full scale war with them. Maybe I ought to write that story...
Just a quick entry. I've changed my avatar again because I read someone posting about how they had been buoyed and strengthened by the simple act of seeing how many people changed to support marriage rights for all in the USA. Their explanation as to how it had improved their self-esteem and filled them with confidence about who they were struck a chord with me. So, I decided to be part of that support for others.
I am Christian. I stand with the oppressed, the dispossessed and those forgotten by society. The reviled, the hated and the persecuted. The prisoners and those in need of forgiveness. I don't do it often enough and changing a profile picture is such a small act. From one to another, I am called to love you as God Herself does.
What I should be doing is responding to comments and e-mails and checking up on friends and commenting on their blogs and commenting on Google+. I should be marking my guts out for the new week and finishing off a trilogy of lessons on Churchill and source technique. I should be doing more to bring attention to this and fighting to get something done.
A Muslim cleric has condemned to death Amina Tyler, a young 19 year old Tunisian who published a picture of herself topless, Amina posted on her Facebook account a picture with the phrase: “My body belongs to me, and is not the source of anyone’s honor.” She is a member of the group Femen, a feminist movement emerged in Ukraine in 2008 performing their topless protests to draw attention. The unusual protest sparked rejected her own family, which is considered a “insulting the modesty of a woman” and Islam. “This young woman according to Islamic law deserves to between 80 and 100 lashes, but she did much more than that so she deserves to be stoned to death,” the religious Tunisian daily said “Assabah News” . Sign the petition here: http://www.change.org/petitions/petitioning-tunisian-government-amina-must-be-safe We the undersigned unequivocally defend Amina, and demand that her life and liberty are protected and that those who have threatened her will be immediately prosecuted.
I should be changing the world and standing up for the rights of the oppressed - no, really - and at least making moves to get my own point of view recognised in my own relationships, in my job, by my parents and around me in the world I live in. But I am not. It has snowed, it is cold and lethargy rules the roost.
I dug out a coat that I use for dressing up as a Soviet cavalryman from the Russian Civil War (I use it to teach a lesson on the First World War because I like to dress up and wielding a cavalry sabre gets the attention of my students) and used it to walk out in the snow with the family. It was warm, it was wonderful and, I realised quickly, it has been re-tailored for a woman. Tilly spotted it pretty quickly, but I pointed out that it was a male coat (the buttons fasten that side and it is an RAF coat from the 1950s, so unlikely to have originally been a woman's). I checked it more closely today after having ruminated on the lovely tight waisted feeling it brought and, sure enough, there have been alterations to shape the coat. Alterations that almost perfectly match the style of Tilly's own military cut overcoat. So, it's been changed to be worn by a woman (though some features, such as the coat tail fastening near the knees, have not been moved). And, you know what, of course I am ridiculously happy about that. It would explain just why I liked it better than the other coat that is almost exactly the same but has not been altered (same size, no rank badges) when I originally acquired the two of them waaaaay back around 2002-3. Actually, it would have been December 2002 as I used them in lessons the following term.
So, what I want to do now is don my skirt from Toby, the boots I bought ages back, the tights I own, a pair of knickers, my bra (stuffed of course) and the coat and go for a long walk in the woods. But I shan't. I shall probably mark my guts out and plan a trilogy of lessons.
