Mostly lemon based

Blog

  • Non FFS Stuff

    Just before I disappear to bed I want to make a little note. Today I put in a request to a beta reader – because I’ve done the first pass edit on my book. I’ve had a huge row with imposter syndrome all day, but at the end of the day I’ve written a roughly 115k word novel. That’s what it is. I wrote a novel.

    It’s uneven, for sure. It’s a first draft and it needs work. I think it starts pretty well, gets a little *meh* in the middle, then has a stronger final third. I’m a bit thinking the ending is a bit abrupt, maybe it needs more fleshing out? But also…the ending is what it is because of the nature of events. But maybe the epilogue needs a little more. So.

    Yeah, so I’m at the “I need feedback from someone who’s not me” stage.

    And also, I need a break from it because I’ve been staring at it for more than a decade.

    And maybe it’s shit.

    And maybe it’s not.

    But at the end of the day I’d like to make it into something not shit, and something worth reading, and I think it’s not irredeemably terrible so I’m gonna try and do that.

  • FFS Days 4 and 5

    Days 4 and 5 have pretty much followed the same pattern except with the delight that Kathryn’s been home much of the time because it’s the weekend. She was, as she is, very sweet and went shopping getting me some less brown goop food options (Bananas! Avocado! Soup! Mousse (which, yes, is brown and goop, but it’s texture-ly different goop)). She also very sweetly made me food which was not just drunk from a shaken bottle of meal replacement protein drink.

    In addition to that I’ve gradually felt better enough to become more whiny. I’m [hoping/assuming/under the impression] that the staples and sutures come out tomorrow. Which will be nice because the staples on the left side of my head are really annoying and are pressed on by the jaw wrap that I have to wear most of the time. Also I’m increasingly irritable about not being able to wear my glasses properly because the jaw wrap gets in the way. Otherwise pain is very much in the dealable section, but still reasonably unpleasant if I fuck up the timing on the basic meds – if I don’t hit all the regular doses of ibuprofen and paracetamol then the centre of my head gets quite achy. And yeah, the staples on the left today have been giving me grief. It’s possible that during the night I slept on them some, but I’m not sure.

    Numbness wise there’s not really been a lot of change, unsurprisingly. My forehead is kinda patchy. The top of my head feels like a block of wood, which is weird, and probably won’t change for a long time.

    Swelling’s definitely dropping though, although in its place bruising is starting to come out, so that’s fun. It does increasingly look like I got in a vicious fight, to which the only answer to any concerns will have to be “Oh, you should see the other girl.”

    Day 4:

     

    Day 5:

     

  • FFS Day 3

    Mostly just a lack of sleep which is wearing me down. Lots of swelling although that’s definitely improving. And the day has mostly been spent chilling and watching films (Bring It On, and Pump Up The Volume).

    Not really much else to report. The pain remains manageable with Paracetamol / Ibuprofen. Mostly I’m just tired. I kinda want there to be more to add. I’m going to add in doing some drainage stuff to help with the swelling. I’d really like some food that isn’t a shade of brown and liquid. I had some scrambled eggs last night which was nice, but then a bit got stuck on a stitch in my mouth and bleh.

    Otherwise it’s been pretty intriguing – because I have face blindness I now have absolutely no recollection of what my face was like before. Logically, I know it was different and because I’m not 100% face blind, I can tell that there’s something different. And because I know what work I had done I know where things are different. But I can’t point to them and go “oh, that’s changed”. I just look at my face and am vaguely aware that it’s not the same as it was.

    I think I’m happy with it though. Definitely happy with the forehead/eye work, assuming that when the swelling goes down and the skin reattaches things are kinda where they are now. The jaw is more intense than I was expecting, but I think it looks cute, so, that’s going to take a little more getting used to. Also, because of the giant elastic jaw strap that’s something I’ve seen much less off.

    Of all the things, the giant elastic jaw strap is the most irritating because it makes wearing my glasses incredibly difficult. Which means I end up with kinda a headache just constantly nudging them into a semi functional position.

  • FFS Day 2

    So, another fairly sleepless night. Sleeping sat up is just something I find incredibly hard to do, which is weird and almost certainly just psychological, because I can do it fine during the day. I probably could sleep if I took the oxycodone, because the drowsyness would probably take over, but I really don’t want the constipation that goes along with that. Especially since (TMI) I’ve not been since the day before surgery. I’ve taken some laxatives but I think I’m just not moving enough for my body’s slack guts to get food processing through. That and all I’ve had are meal replacement drinks.

    As a side note I’m so very grateful to my wonderful wife and her mum, it’s been startlingly debilitating – just almost total exhaustion, the last couple of days and keeping track of which meds when? It would have been very difficult. They’ve both been so lovely, especially given Kathryns had very little sleep too, what with me floofing about on my side of the bed. I don’t know why but I didn’t expect to be quite so absolutely floored by it.

    Today, in about 30 minutes, the bandages come off. Theoretically I could shower but I’m going to be sensible and wait for Kathryn to get home. Despite the fact a shower sounds like a delicious thing. One of the deeply exciting things about having the bandages off, other than that my head will no longer be wrapped in miles of gauze bandage, is that I can wear my glasses again.

    Which means I can watch trashy films.

    I mean what good is recovering from surgery if you can’t watch trashy films?

     

  • FFS days 0 and 1

    Day 0.

    This one going to be kinda hazy because, well, anesthesia. So yesterday morning I rocked up at the surgery center at 7:15 and was ushered into a back room where I promptly realized I’d given my (borrowed from my wife) glasses case back to my wife when they told me to leave my valuables with her.

    Weight, a quick run through of health questions, and then getting changed into a gown and a wrap. And of course shitty hospital socks. My confusion as to why people love hospital socks has now grown because they are no where near as nice as the socks I took off. But, y’know, y’all do you. A check of my blood pressure (high, for me), and then it was time to chat with my anesthesist. He seemed nice, but since I am fairly frequently involved in anesthetizing people I didn’t really have much to ask. I debated asking which drugs they’d be using, but decided I wasn’t that bothered. I know they use propfol a lot from a discussion I overheard…

    Anyhow, then Dr Liu came in and had a quick chat and finally, Jess, my OR nurse came in and walked me into the room. Unlike my last surgeries I have a really clear recollection of the room because they gave me the premed in the room. Having popped an IV in my head they gave me a med that felt super cold. And him asking if I could feel it and me saying it felt cold was the last thing I remember.

    —

    My surgery took about 3 and a half hours and they booted me from the hospital around noon.

    Now apparently there were whole discussions and I was wearing my clothes again when I started being able to store memories again. Which, it turns into our, was several minutes into the car ride home. I don’t really remember much about it, apparently there was a huge hail storm that I slept through, and apparently I behaved enough that when my wife told me to stay in the car while she unlocked the house I did. Good, because I was about as stable as a 5 minute old lamb.

    —

    Most of the rest of yesterday passed in a haze of sleeping and occasional drugs. I took a couple of oxycodone through the day, the pain was pretty rough. It’s only about a 6ish out of 10 but it’s constant, like a toothache in my head. The absolute worst thing was the nausea. I’ve not had really severe nausea after meds before but last night was rough. In the middle of the night I got up to use the loo and good fucking god did I want to hurl. I was way too early for another ondansetron, so I threw a cold pack on my chest and did some steady deep breathing.

    Last night’s sleep was expectedly pretty broken, I slept in our rocking chair because that stopped me from slipping down in the bed… I’m not sure how tonight’s will be.

    —

    Day +1

    Today has mostly been sleeping. I’ve not needed any oxycodone, just acetaminophen/paracetamol although I can’t wait to add in an NSAID. Because the head pain is bad, just not oxy bad. I’ve drunk huel and the nausea has been, mostly, better. I’ve also been able to get up and walk about and write this which I think is mostly coherent.

    Tomorrow I get to take the gauze wrap off and shower which is exciting. And will mean I can wear my glasses again.

    Yeah, so that’s that.

     

  • Noted genius

    Today’s mostly been spent getting organised. Meal replacement drinks into the fridge. Smoothie goop out and ready. Checking through tablets n times +1. Laundering the sheets so that the bed has clean sheets and the sofa is also culovered (they’re very explicit that they want you to return to clean sheets). Also washed the towels, too. They were due it, but I’m not going to get to enjoy the fruits of that labour until I think 48 hours. I had to do a run to target to get the pillows and shite since the ones I ordered didn’t come. And I also grabeysome stuff to help me sleep.

    So, both surprisingly – given that I went through and made sure I’d packed everything on the list, and unsurprisingly, given that I’m a chaos angel (or gremlin, or avatar), I forgot to bring my HRT with me. Which would be not a problem if I was on injectables, because I’d already have it in me. But I’m not. So I’m going cold turkey on my estrogen for the next two doses, so whoop to that.

    I think I was thinking that I’m not meant to take it in the morning anyway, so I didn’t need to pack it. Which obviously makes zero sense because I’m 60 miles (almost to the mile) from it and while I have long gangly arms, they ain’t that long.

    Anyhow.

    Otherwise I’ve eaten an overpriced but adequate hotel chicken burger, been served in the restaurant by a very gay and very sweet bartender, discovered that TV really is that shit, and drunk a large complimentary glass of wine. Go go gadget hotel stay, I suppose.

    I’ve also taken my first hibiclens shower and I’m super glad that they said I could moisturise after the first one (I can’t after tomorrow’s) – because I vaguely recalled how harsh this stuff is but feeling my skin trying to flat itself from my body (okay, overstatement, it’s more like I’m being dehydrated through every single pore) is not as much fun as you might think. My skin’s pretty sensitive so YMMV with that information.

    Anyhow, now it’s just one sleep to new face time. Which is…a thing. Exciting and terrifying all rolled together. It kinda feels like I did when I got SRS/GCS. Like I know I want this, and I’m 99.9% certain it will be better, but also it’s freaking scary. It’s my face.

    Still.

    I dunno whether I’ll have time or what to post tomorrow since I’m first in surgery, so… Well, we’ll see.

  • Bye face.

    Today’s the last day that I’ll have this face. Which is an interesting situation.

    It’s hopefully the last day that the damage that testosterone did – most noticeably in those four years between 16 and 20, when I finally started HRT, when I finally got my shit together at least somewhat, and that I see in the pictures of me, will be there. I know that it’s going to take a long time for that damage to disappear because it takes a long time for the swelling to go down and your tissues to adjust. And I know that I’ll look in the mirror at least for a good long while and wonder whether it was worth the pain, and whether I look different at all. This I know, because I’ve been chatting with people who’ve had FFS.

    And I also know – because in the last 2 years I’ve put in a ton of effort to lose a ton of weight (stabilized at ~66-67 kg for a good long while) that my face has been changing, constantly. The change over these two years has felt pretty dramatic as I’ve shed the extra weight, but it’s also brought more clearly into focus the things that I dislike. Despite that, I know, and can see that over the years the woman looking back at me has aged and changed, I’ve had my hair long, and short, and whatever the fuck it is now (it’s PURPLE! And I have a number 1 on some of it and the rest of it is longer than its been in years. But all the same, how do people not notice that it’s PURPLE?! I’ve had 3 people notice at work – and only one of them is someone I work with regularly. I mean it’s handy because i can just point at my hair if anyone asks if I look different. But still).

    I’ve worn make up and not.

    I’ve worn glasses and not.

    But also – also – underlying the nervousness, the anxiety about surgery, about healing, about sleeping sat up which is something that I have never, historically, been able to do (incidentally, ebay sellers: check the address before you send stuff? My sitty-up-pillow-thing did not arrive and y’know why? Because the dozy pillock appears to have sent it to a random not-my-address)  – underlying all that is this bubbling excitement.

    The idea that I might be able to look at myself in the mirror and not just see the damage.

    That I might be able to look in the mirror and not shy away, or find myself focusing on the things I hate.

    Because I don’t see him, I don’t see the person I pretended to be to survive.

    I haven’t for a long, long time.

    But I also don’t see me. And the idea that I might get more than a passing glimpse of me is terribly, terribly exciting.

  • Reticence

    One of the things that’s happened over the past year is that I’ve had a bit of a reexamination of my transition. This was undoubtedly prompted by reading The Sisters of Dorley. There’s actually a wonderful circularity to this for reasons I’m not going to explain right now. And I honestly don’t think it’d’ve happened, certainly not soon, without it.There’s actually a wonderful circularity to this for reasons I’m not going to explain right now. And The book deals with transition, it deals with examining and dealing with trauma. It deals with the importance of community. It slices in various places exactingly, directly, and disturbingly to some of the trauma that I experienced. And it, from discussions with a bunch of other trans people — trans people who have been transitioned and to whatever extent it’s ever possible, finished with their transition (or so they thought) — does tend to prompt you to reexamine yourself. Deeply. I am not alone in this.

    I’m sure there are other effective ways to get you to dig down and reexamine yourself. To explore yourself and the decisions you made. And perhaps more importantly, explore the decisions you didn’t really make. The decisions which just happened, that got left in the dust of moving on with life. And obviously, for me, a lot of that centered around the trauma of the abusive relationship I was in immediately after transition. It’s something that kind of horrifies me. That I was desperate for people in my life I could identify with, people who I could talk to about what was going on, and this person took that situation and took advantage. And I’ve talked (either on here, or on mastodon) about the gradual realisation that, well, I am certain that I passed on impacts of that abuse.

    No doubt some of it was reflected in the support group I took over from her and ran. I think that the best thing I’ve been told is that I wasn’t intending to be harmful, that my approach to things came from a good place. But I know and I am deeply uncomfortable with the fact that I reinforced ideas that she promulgated. And I hope that the damaging things I did are outweighed by the good. Looking back I know I had a lot of internalised transphobia which I’m not sure to what extent that came out in the group. But it was always intended to be young(er) trans people supporting other young(er) trans people, so there’s always going to be a chunk of the baby trans working themselves out in that kind of space. And while I’ve reexamined that, without digging into the backups of old, old computers — computers that have long been consigned to e-waste — there’s no easy way to look through the group – and frankly – I don’t think that me digging through hundreds of e-mails from myself and the other folks on the list would be positive or productive. Interesting, perhaps, as a snapshot of early aughts transition. Painful — seeing those lost along the way. But probably not helpful.

    But where I’ve been really digging and working is on the things that my ex buried in me. The ideas she encouraged in me that I never really rexamined. About my presentation. About how trans people should be. About all sorts of tiny fractional pieces of me. And look, some of it’s fine. Some of it I think is fair – I don’t think that I should have to adhere to traditional standards of women’s beauty, because I don’t think any women should have to do that. And if I want to slob about it jeans and a teeshirt, that’s fine. If I want to wear that every fucking day, that’s fine too. But that she stopped me exploring my presentation, that she stopped me fucking about with clothes, that I accepted that being kinda androgynous would be safer, and less obvious — and that she planted and fertilized those seeds that meant I never really explored further with makeup and clothes than I had at the point where I met her.

    That she nudged, pushed, encouraged, enforced, whatevered me back towards the presentation I’d had before I transitioned. A kind of androgynous but female coded. The easiest path, the one that didn’t really involve work? And that I accepted that and didn’t go back to reexamine that, or look at it as I moved forward with my life? That’s a disappointment to me. Because it turns out I do enjoy makeup. I do enjoy fun clothes. And that was obvious from the fact I clung limpet like to the purple slinky fucking party dress that’s one of the first pieces of clothes I bought for myself. And some of that is that I’ve lost weight – I’ve held steady at 66.7 kg for the past – oh, while. I bumped up by a kilo around Xmas and straight back down afterwards (damn mince pies and Xmas pudding) – and that’s made me much more comfortable with my body. And some of that is that I’m probably fitter now than at any point in my life so far.

    And look, it’s not a case of assigning blame or fault. She had mental health issues and separating what was abuse from her mental health issues has always been tricky for me. Especially since they were undiagnosed for most of our time together. And I was young and new and shiny and impressionable and desperate for approval. And, fuck, it took me until sometime in the last two years to really grok that I am a survivor of domestic violence. That I’m a survivor of a deeply abusive relationship. And that that’s coloured who I am, and how I respond to things, particularly layered on top of the bullying I had at school. Basically there’s a solid decade of the time I’ve been on this planet, near a quarter of it, where I was in abusive places. And this isn’t an oh poor me, woe is me.

    This is a fucking celebration of the fact that nearly 24 years after I transitioned I am getting to explore myself again. I’m getting reexamine some of the foundational stuff about how I present, how I think of myself in relation to others, and getting to play with who I am.

    And that’s been really freeing.

  • On facing up to things

    Before I write this – I’ve been looking at some of my old posts. Seriously old posts. The first posts I wrote that still exist (unless my old Tripod site remains on some archive somewhere. But I can’t remember the address for that, or what it was called (although it might also still exist on my Risc PC)). Anyway, the earliest posts that exist and I’m painfully aware having read them that apart from a ton of just general working out shit from being in your first throws of adulthood, and the oh, second puberty is wild, there’s also a ton of internalised transphobia and pseudo-patriarchal stupidity which I had yet to identify and to whatever extent I have so far managed to overcome it, overcome it.

    So I’m pretty certain that in another twenty years I’ll look back at this page and wince. Because I sure as hell did as I uploaded some of the posts into the blog from 2000.

    Well, I’ll wince if in 20 years time the internet still exists in anything like a recognisable form. And society still exists and hasn’t crumbled into post-climate-change Mad Maxian scarcity. But anyway, just putting that out there since I’m gonna be rambling. And it’s been a while since I’ve had this kind of ramble.

    Trigger warnings: Suicide, death, dysphoria, self-harm, mentions of domestic violence.

    The last year has been tough in many ways. COVID continues to be a thing that so much of society is cheerfully ignoring, while I – someone for whom the first twenty years of my life passed in a blur of dysphoric dissociation – am moderately paranoid about both getting sick, and getting long COVID. It’s like being constantly gaslit – we know this disease is shit, we know that if you’re unlucky then it can hop in and not only destroy your immune system, but rewrite your oxygen transport mechanisms, fuck with your brain and clotting cascades and…basically everything. And yet we’re plodding along allowing it to repeatedly rampage through society. Which means even though I’m marginally less burned out than I have been in nursing, the forward looking bit of my brain is absolutely shitting bricks about what nursing, and healthcare in general, might be like in a decade. I’m already seeing what anecdotally feels like a hell of a lot more very sick people – sick as a result of clotting things – which we know is a sequale of COVID thing, and whether what I feel is that or isn’t that, well, anyway. That makes the future worrying in a way that I can’t so far work my way around.

    But this year has also been interesting mainly thanks to me reading Alyson Greaves. I’ve known Alyson for a long old time – we came out at the same time, and she was on the trans youth group mailing list I ended up running for a while. We chatted a bunch back when I was writing ill-informed internalized transphobia shit on this blog. Somehow she didn’t murder me and we’ve stayed in some-sort-of-touch ever since. Anyhow, she’s written a lot. In fact, I think she kinda inspired me to up and get back to writing because I really enjoyed what she was writing – and reading her work I suddenly realised there aren’t enough trans stories out there. And since that’s what I write, and I am not a terrible writer, maybe I should put fingers to keys and…y’know finish it. But that’s for another day.

    But the other thing, and this has been something that’s been very slow dawning is that reading her work – and others as a result – , and the diversity of experiences in particular in the trans experiences that she’s written has allowed me to spend a lot of time exploring my transness.

    Which is fascinating because honestly, I though I was done with it. Exploring transness, I mean.

    Realistically I’ve thought a lot about transness, and mostly for the past few years it’s been a part of my identity which has mainly existed as there’s this thing in my past that I share with some of my friends, and occasionally I crack inappropriate trans jokes about genitals, or lean in with a strong northern accent and proclaim “Oh, when I were a lad.” But then over the past few years trans people have become the butt of right wing ire about our very existence. There’s been the obvious, tedious rise of TERFism in the UK – which thanks to funding from evangelical shites in the US – and the western press’s absolute addiction to bothsidesing every argument even when there’s actually only one side; especially when there’s really only one side, has risen to a level of prominence that’s really spurring hatecrimes and hate-legislation. There’s been the constant, nagging, dispiriting chant of “fairness in sport” because, yeah, sure, my likely inadequately androgenised brain has some massive fucking enormous advantage in chess, ‘cos all women are bad at spacial awareness because really they’re just Suzie-Homemaker-Baby-Machines, or some such other sexist bullshit.

    Or the fact that I can’t build muscle for shit because E-no-T… That definitely gives me a huge advantage in sports – that’s why I’m an Olympic Triathlon Gold Medal holder.

    But then, in the last while there’s been the absolutely destroying knowledge that kids like I once was are going to be back to dying instead of ending up like me. That there’s going to be another generation of trans kids in the US who don’t end up having people a little older than them to help share their experiences. People who won’t see someone like them to know that they can be them. To know that being trans is a thing that is real in the world and that they might be that. That they might be able to make sense of their selves, and their experiences, and their child-I-don’t-understand-this-and-examples-would-be-fucking-useful-ness. There are kids who won’t know – and will have a huge black fucking hole in their selves – in their perception of who they are and how they interact with the world – and some of them will make it to adulthood, and maybe, maybe get to transition then (if they can escape those states, and those countries), and some of them will absolutely fucking die. And that fucking rips me apart.

    I’m a fucking elder in the trans community.

    I transitioned 20 years ago, and when I did there were so few people like me.

    There were a vanishingly small number of trans late-teens/young adults, and basically no-one a few years older.

    The few trans people I saw were all people who’d transitioned in their 50s and 60s. They’d had kids. They had families.

    I could not even conceive of living past my twenties.

    Fuck, I’d decided that at the age of 21 I would do something about being trans, or I’d do something about being alive, and we’d see which came first.

    Part of that was that trans people were “encouraged” to hide ourselves. To disappear into cis society. To not discomfort others with our transness, lest we lead others astray or cause discomfort. Or get the shit beaten out of us by some bigot – which would be our fault for being insufficiently cis.

    But most of that is that the vast majority of people like me (who ‘knew’ we were trans) and people who coulda/shoulda/woulda worked it out in their 20s and 30s. They died. By their own hand.

    I know – I know people who did. Because the ‘care’ that was available was so fucking poor. And that’s what they want to recreate.

    Trans kids don’t die because they’re trans. They die because they’re unsupported. They die because they’re othered and forced out from society. They die because their parents harm them. They die because they don’t see a future.

    I couldn’t see a future with my body the way it was.

    I hated it.

    I hurt it.

    I did it on purpose and I did it by accident. I did it because I didn’t care for it, and I did it because it hurt me, because it let me down every single fucking day. I did it because every time I looked in a mirror; every time I saw a reflection; every time I looked down; every time I had to touch it or perform even basic self care it felt alien and disgusting. It felt like it wasn’t me. It made others see me in a way that I couldn’t relate to.

    Christ, even now just thinking about it I can feel my old wounds. Scars no one can see.

    But for me I felt so much better after gender confirming surgery, and then I was entirely taken up with an abusive relationship, which once I got out of it took ‘quite a while’ to come to terms with the fact that was abusive – mostly because I didn’t realise quite how harmful it was. And then, well, life. I’ve spent so long examining the stuff inside my head, but I never really looked at the bit of me that went “huh, I really don’t like looking at me.”

    I mean, we don’t really have much in the way of mirrors around the house. Never have. I didn’t like them, and there was a background “I don’t like them”, which basically was just there – and had always been there – and like the background assumption that all boys hated being boys and just sucked it up and dealt, and I was just fucking terrible at it, I didn’t really look at it. I have a big degree of face blindness anyway, which means that I can’t picture my face basically at all, so I don’t really know what I look like except in the mirror. (I can’t picture anyone’s face, when I see people I know, I’m like “yes, that’s their face”, but I’ve also walked past good friends while actively looking for them because they’ve taken a jumper off and thus ceased to be recognisable). So yeah, to an extent the “I don’t like how I look” just kinda washed into the background of “I don’t like mirrors [let’s not think too much about why that might be]”  and “I have faceblindness, so this discomfort comes from that.”

    And then, as I read, and chatted on Consensus Discord with other trans people, and spent time actually processing some of my own trauma, it gradually dawned on me that what I was feeling was dysphoria. Not at the level that I’d experienced it with other parts of my body. But dysphoria none-the-less. And giving myself permission to accept that and think that “huh, I could do something about that”, that was a slow process. And then accepting that maybe, maybe I should do something about it. And that was harder – because I look at the things I’m uncomfortable with around my face. Brow ridges, jaw line, etc., etc., and I look at my mum, and my grandmother, and y’know what, they’re genetic. Like, a lot of south-Asian women have some brow ridge. A lot have a higher hair line. A lot have a stronger jaw. It’s probably just fucking genetics. And frankly – once you start looking at other women, this whole idealised fucking nonsense about what a woman’s face looks like is utter, utter bollocks. Basically everyone I work in my ER has some feature that when you look at Facial Feminisation Surgery (FFS) would be shaved off or hidden. A bunch have significant brow ridges, strong jawlines, ‘deficient cheeks’. That’s why makeup is such a big part of the beauty industry, it can help cover the terrible sins of being inadequately feminine. for patriarchal society.

    And then I had to spend a lot of time processing the nonsense in my brain of “well, if I was cis, would I want this”. And by extension “should I do this?” And that’s a whole ridiculous thing because at the end of the day I’m not cis. There’s no universe in which I would be me, and I would be cis. Had I been cis, the person that I ended up being would be so radically different from the woman I am now that — well, I have no idea who she’d be. Would she be queer? Would she be cis-by-default, or would she one day have ended up being non-binary? I don’t know, frankly, fuck knows. She doesn’t exist, at least in this timeline. Would she spend half her life in hoodies and jeans, and the other looking queer-as-fuck for a YT channel talking about cars and clean energy and moving the world to a better, more equitable (and survivable) future? Who knows.

    Who knows who that woman would be. Christ, I don’t even know who I’d be if I’d’ve transitioned as a kid. The concept of me coming out of the womb all cis’d up? That’s so far removed from who I am now, that the question of whether that person, whoever she might be, would want something that I want is patently absurd.

    Which is why I eventually realised that:

    1. I have saved up some money and it’s enough to cover this* (*I believe)
    2. This thing might make me more comfortable with my own appearance (risk: I might become incredibly self-absorbed and an unbearably sexy trans icon (as if I’m not already ;) ))
    3. It’s my fucking money and my fucking body and I should be able to do with it as I will
    4. I want this damn thing

    And booked an appointment for FFS.

    And then scheduled a date for the surgery.

    And so far, the only thing I regret is that I didn’t do this 20 damn years ago.

  • Not since November?

    Wow. It’s been a while. I mean it’s not entirely surprising. Life’s been full – at the same time as it’s been the same as always. But November was pretty much all taken up with writing my book – first draft finished but not edited. Dear lord is it not edited – and my short story. First fiction I’ve published online since a terrible start to a terrible story back in, what, the late 90s? That’s here, by the way. I’m quite proud of it. There’s things I’d change – every single pass, every read, I’d fiddle with stuff. There’s more that I could do, but I’ve decided to let it go.

    People don’t seem to hate it, which is nice.

    I’m back to editing the book. That’s a slog, which is why I’m writing this.

    That’s not true. I’m writing this because I decided to log in to post Chapter 1 of an Audiobook version of Glow, Worm – by Alyson Greaves. I’m not going to promise to keep recording it, but it was fun to do this one and it didn’t take quite as long as I though it would. I’d like to get better at soundscape stuff. I know audiobooks don’t generally have a lot of soundscape, but the few I’ve listened to have a bit, sometimes, and part of it is that I’ve been using just the freesound stuff. Nikki’s happy for me to use TE stuff (but then I’d feel the need to credit TE. Which is fine, but also…I feel weird about promoting my work on the back of someone else’s).

    Anyhow. So I logged in and realised that I never did my year in review thing (which, ha. I’ve not done that reliably for years anyway), and I’ve not updated you on my awesome ongoing life events, that you all care so deeply, deeply about. Well, anyway. So. What have I been up to? Well, there’s been slow progress on the garage. I’ve been clearing it with the theory that I have about four-hundred-billion projects that I want to get on with in there, but it’s hard to do that when you can’t actually get to any of the workbenches because they’re all covered in shite. However, it turns out that I still at a fundamental level neither like organising, nor do I feel particularly good at it. But I’ve been plodding along, giving an hour or two here or there. Another couple of hours might see it sorted to a point where I can get some projects done and out and get back to working on RebeccaMog. Which I really should do. I should really be doing the garage today, or working on the house, but in my defence, it’s freaking cold outside (there was ice on my car at lunch time) [please insert other excuses here].

    I have been intermittently working on the house. I really need to cut some more trim – I’m so close now that it’s painful to think about. The bathroom is the worst, it’s missing a bunch of trim around the tile edges, and the interior door trim, and the window trim. But honestly? It’s probably two – three days worth of work to get it all cut and oiled and up. (Although there’s a solid week inbetween of letting it dry). I also need to actually cut and attach the skirting board in the two bedrooms. That’s trickier because there’s furniture in both bedrooms, and that… is going to be more of a pain. But since they’re oiled and ready and just need cutting to length and attaching to the damn wall, I really should get on it.

    Once that’s done the main thing is the doors. We really should have some doors.

    The main thing that’s been taking our time has been adoption stuff. We eventually signed up with an agency and that means that we’ve been spending a lot of time filling in adoption related paperwork. It’s long and – while not complicated – takes a lot of thinking about it. And doing that and creating our profile book took a long time, and occupied a lot of the space that I notionally allocate as free time. Between that and my writing, oh and my singing, I’ve been fairly full up.

    Singing has been fun, hearing my range expand has been wild – I’ve gained, like, an octave plus since I started singing (a chunk at the top and a bit at the bottom). Hilariously, I discovered a ‘boy’ voice which I don’t think is my actual voice from pretransition, because I don’t think I ever really did chest resonance. People always thought I was my (female) flatmates on the phone (or my mum / sister when I was home). Most of my vocal therapy was focussed on getting me to have some intonation. But yeah, it is theoretically available – funnily enough though I was trying to do it today for recording Glow, Worm and could I do it (even after vocal warmups)? Hell no. Wouldn’t happen at all. So feh. Trans-girl-doing-boy-voice it is. Also, apparently I’m crap at breathing. I’m better now than I used to be, and it’s really noticable, but I’m not great a breathing still – and trying to remember to breathe before singing a line rhather than discovering mid-way-through that I have run out of breath is a whole thing.

    I’m also now singing with a group. As in, a people-with-instruments-and-lots-of-practice-and-skills-expectation-I-might-eventually-perform-in-front-of-people which is fucking terrifying, if I do say so myself. But last week I actually put some welly into it and sang in front of them (all it took was Sarah telling me to shout at Erik), and lo, I was off. Fuck if it’s scary though. And trying to develop some kind of faith in my body, and my voice, and my abilities? Not something that I’ve got a lot of successful past experience with.

    Still, I’m having fun. And Kathryn got me a little mini-synth for Xmas, which is awesome fun. Had a play with that this afternoon, which was fun. I feel like I need a sequencer to get the most out of it, and then I want to play with the BBC Micro / Music 5000. And then, and then. I really need to just be wealthy, it would make “not working and just doing the stuff I want to do” a feasible option.

    In other, other news, I got approval for FFS. I don’t think I’ve talked much on here about this, but it slowly dawned on me that other people look at themselves in the mirror. They don’t necessarily love what they see, but they can deal, and they feel like the person in the mirror is them. That’s never really been the case with me. There are bits of my face I’m fine with, but some of my face I’m really not. To the point that doing makeup, I’d focus on the eyelids, or the lashes, or whatever I was doing. Same with lipstick. I would then glance at, like, my whole face for a moment to check it looked “okay” as a whole look – and actually, with makeup on it was much more tolerable. The faceblindness meant that away from a mirror it wasn’t so bad, although in my head my face feels suuper angular. I can’t picture it, but I can’t picture anyone’s faces. It’s always kinda aggravating, because I ask my brain what someone looks like and it just produces this fuzzy blob. Me, them, anyway… so to an extent I think that’s what made it somewhat tolerable. But this year I realised that fuck me, that’s more dysphoria. That’s a discomfort with myself. And those discussions I had early on with my shrink about it – they’re still fucking relevant now. 20 years later.

    Genius that I am.

    Anyhow, I realised that I could, in fact, get something done about it. And that’s my plan this year. I had my consultation just prior to Christmas, saw a psrhink in December, and the surgery was approved by insurance this year. So.

    Apparently, also, in the list of “things I should have known but didn’t get fixed”, when my endo back in England advised me that I might want to see an ENT specialist about my nose, I should have listened because the FFS surgeon said that my nasal structure is why I find it hard to breathe through my nose. I’d always attributed it to allergies, but no. Apparently I have ‘hypertrophic turbinates’ and a deviated septum. Both those things are fixable. So that’s also on my list for the year. If I wanted nasal work as part of my FFS then he’d do it, apparently, but in my case, I don’t. So apparently I get to have that separately. Yay.

    Anyhow, so that’s the big kinda catch-all update. I now have paperwork to go fill in, so I should, uh, do that.