Very eagle-eyed regular readers might have noticed that a few days ago I added a new category to the list of post categories over in the menus. It’s quite a rare event, to be honest: most of the categories have been there for many years, and new additions really don’t happen very often. Before this week, the last one I think was Being Crafty, which arrived several months ago.
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Keyword noise: blogging, trans, transgender.
A coming-out story. At least, one small fragment of a coming-out story
Published at 9:36 am on August 23rd, 2024
Filed under: Dear Diary, This Is Not A Memoir.
Since the Great Pandemic, our lives have changed so much. Being forced to leave the office, we realised that to a great extent we didn’t need to be in offices. Our jobs didn’t even need to be near home, at all, except when we still needed to visit the office for meetings or when we had something to say face-to-face. That’s why I found myself, at 5am on a very dark morning after lockdown had ended, getting in the car to drive from Lincolnshire down to The South. A straightforward four-hour journey, at the most. Within five minutes of setting off, though, it had started to snow. Gently at first, but getting thicker. Within ten minutes, I reached a hill where the car’s wheels just spun to a halt on the fresh, wet snow beneath them. I paused, let my heart stop racing, and gently tried to turn the car round. This office trip had to be made. It was the last day in March, but the date was purely coincidence.
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Keyword noise: trans, transgender, transition, work.
It’s over eighteen months now since The Mother died, and I’ve barely even talked about it here, aside from one piece I wrote about burying her. There are a whole heap of reasons for that. For one thing, the posting rate here has slowed down to one post a month if that, due to all the various other things making demands on my time. For another, a whole heap of the experiences I had around my mother’s deah pivot on it being, when it happened, less than a year into my gender transition. As I wasn’t open about being transgender on this site until this March, I could hardly recount a lot of the things that happened, from the excited curiosity of the funeral arranger, to the cold stares some of my mother’s friends gave me as I walked into the church behind the coffin.
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Keyword noise: death, The Mother, queer, trans, transgender, transition, Pride.
Today, March 31st, is Transgender Day of Visibility. This year, 2024, it’s fifteen years since the event first started. Event is maybe a big word. It’s a marker, a day in the calendar for trans people to stand up and be loud about who they are.
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Keyword noise: queer, trans, transgender, transition.
In which we don’t see the difference between genders
Published at 3:18 pm on May 24th, 2007
Filed under: Political.
Yesterday’s Guardian featured a long piece, trailed on the front page, about transgender people, and how some people have, apparently, been pushed into having medical transition operations against their will. A bad, bad thing, of course—people should never be pushed or persuaded into any sort of serious medical treatment.
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Keyword noise: authoritarian feminism, authoritarianism, feminism, Jenny Bailey, Julie Bindel, Sheila Jeffreys, transphobia, LGBTphobia, transgender, trans.