Turns out that my trach shave likely screwed my vocal cords. Well, one of them. They can’t be sure. But the timing is suspicious (my voice was okay -> surgery -> voice not okay). And it’s a risk with surgery in that area – the ligaments and such can just get a bit looser afterwards and maaaaybe that’s what happened.
Thing is, my speaking voice is fine. It’s singing that’s a bit fucked.
Basically I lost my falsetto and my passagio got patchy, and over the last month or so I’ve started to notice that my voice is a bit tired at the end of a lot of talking. Not bad bad. But it feels a bit like it used to at the end of a conference day.
Anyway, so today I had a camera down my throat. They gave me the option of local anaesthetic, but for singers it’s better if you can cope without. So I did my best to cope without. I managed to get right to the end, then something they did made me cough multiple times (which is super fun with a camera right near your vocal cords, lemmie tell you).
Aaaand….they managed to capture in their high-speed imaging that one of my vocal cords is not managing to get fully taut. That means that they don’t meet properly, which is why my high pitches are fucked.
Apparently this is something they’ve seen before, but dealing with it is tricky. On the plus side, it is just one side that’s iffy.
So, next week we’re going to try a temporary fix (lasts 2-4 months) which, excitingly, either might fix it, might do nothing, or might drop the pitch of my voice (yaaaaaaay).
That’s next week. If that works, then we’ll do a rinse-and-repeat with a permanent solution (which is a fat graft).
If that doesn’t work then we’re into the land of marked Here be dragons on the map. They might try and shorten that vocal cord just a smidge, so that it can mate up properly with its friend.
And if that doesn’t work then we’re into actual pitch-type surgery, if I want to get any of the high-pitches back reliably. But that will permanently change my voice, reduces range (although I currently don’t reliably have my passagio and my falsetto is completely gone most of the time). Oh, and it also loses me the lower pitches.
So that…is not optimal.
Anyhow, so fun-fun-fun is that next week I get to have someone stab a vocal cord while I’m awake. Yaaaaaaay.
I don’t know if I’ve ever scheduled a post before. I’ve never had something in my life I couldn’t really talk about publicly that I’ve wanted to kind of explore and work out and needed some space to write and thing about that I couldn’t just do it. When I was ‘laid off’ from Xebec, it was public knowledge that they were moving the company to the US – they announced it to us, the team that worked on the products in the UK at the same time as they made it public.
But this time I’ve known something since last week and…not been able to speak about it. And won’t be able to speak about it publicly until Tuesday next week. The day I’ve set this to go live. Which y’know, I could talk about it, there’s nothing legally stopping me, but I know Nikki wants to announce it then and I gave her that option, so, here we are.
I exist at the intersection of a bunch of identities. Like colonizer and colonized. White and South Asian. I’m trans, I’m a woman, I’m an immigrant, I’m a survivor of domestic violence. And I’ve never really felt like my identity was my job. I hopped from career to career. And from “oh, I’m a biochemist.” to “oh, I’m a sys-admin”, to “oh, I’m a technical writer.”
And I kind of got that nurse had become part of my identity – partly because it’s something I’ve been doing for more than twenty years in some form or another – it’s hard to do that without it becoming a part of you. But also because it has so much impact on the way other people see you. When they ask you want you do, and you say “Oh, I’m a nurse” or even moreso “I’m an emergency nurse,” like they really do look at you differently.
But I’d never really realized journalist was part of my identity. I’ve been a journalist – climate/automotive – for a decade. Yes, it’s been in the form of scripts rather than written articles (although I used to contribute the odd written article to Transport Evolved when it was a text based site – but they were consistently opinion pieces). But yes – although I always presented it with some minimizing statement: “Oh, it’s just on YouTube.” “Oh, it’s for my friend’s company.” – I have been a journalist. I have a little card and everything that says “Member of the Northwest Automotive Press Association”. I have an ID card that says “Journalist.”
But as of – really today – I’m not anymore.
I offered a long time ago that if it made more sense for Transport Evolved to ‘let me go’ it was fine. Because I’m well aware that YouTube videos don’t pull in that much money anymore – most of that money goes to Google. And I’m also aware that I’m an acquired taste. People either loved my videos or hated them. And that the vast majority of our Patreons subscribe for Nikki’s incredible depth of knowledge, not for my occasional forays into upcoming tech.
And last year I warned Nikki that – with me setting up my own business I’d probably have to stop doing it this year. And then a couple of weeks back, when I was talking about my vacation and time off needs for some surgery later in the year I reiterated that I could do them unpaid or, if it made more sense I could step away now. And after chatting with her wife, they opted for “well, it makes sense for you to step away now.”
And so this year there’s this huge shift in the things that make up my identity – and I’m kinda grieving them and feeling at a bit of a loss in processing them and I’ll talk to my therapist about them in a couple of days and y’know… I’ve spent quite a bit of time crying about it which I have been rather stunned by.
It’s interesting because I’m super excited and massively terrified about the press. And I knew that as the press ate more time I’d have to stop doing first the journalism (because it pays less) and eventually the nursing. But… yeah. Despite knowing that I don’t think I’d internalized or really understood how much it would hit me.
And I don’t really know what this post is other than chucking this out in the void. Trying to process, at least a bit, something that I don’t know how to process. Grieving for the loss of part of my identity. Or the change in it?
But it’s been a rough day – with a lot of crying and feeling very weird about my place in the world and how I don’t really know what it is at the moment. And yeah. I might come back and add to this before it goes live, but right now that’s all there is.
This has not been proofread, because I’m fucking tired.
We got kittens. They’re a delight, but exhausting.
Anyway, onwards.
I’m not always very good at that. It’s a work in progress, not being an absolute shit to myself about me. It’s funny because everyone else I’ll ignore other peoples mistakes, I’ll let go other people’s issues. Myself? I will criticize at the faintest opportunity.
Honestly, I don’t even really need an opportunity. I’ll just do it.
And this – uh – period of time has, it turns out, provided more than sufficient opportunity for me to practice not doing that.
I’ve been working on the press and trying really hard to get us set up with payment processing. It looks like we’re going to abandon our ‘local payment support’ people because we just can’t get approved for a payment processor that’s not in Texas, because the California processors they work with are both ‘high risk business’ processors (which we aren’t) and have incredibly strict rules about what you can and can’t do. The process to reach this conclusion has taken months and I have been fighting the urge to feel like I’m letting (authors) down with my lack of knowledge. And so-far? I’ve been pretty good about it. I have my moments, I sometimes curl up with my wife and get reassurance, but honestly…
…I’ve been managing to mostly keep in my head that it’s not my fault. This has been difficult and then there’s been Xmas / Holidays and yeah.
Then there’s music – today I sang the first time in ages with the band – as in lead. We’ve decide to cover KiNG Mala’s I could have been worse. Which I adore. We’ve had to shift it down a bit for my voice but tonight I actually sang and after a bit managed to find something like my voice (and not the strangled noise) that I first produced. And y’know what? It wasn’t terrible.
Of course, afterwards my brain decided to try and yell at me that I’d made a fool of myself, that I’d sucked, that they would be planning to work out how to tell me no. And I know that’s bullshit. I know it’s just my edgelord little turd of a brain trying to make me feel bad. And despite the day I’ve had (which has not been fun really) I managed to slap it into submission. I told the edgelord to get fucked, and listened to music and y’know what, it actually worked.
And then there’s Roller Derby. Because yes, I’m doing derby and this is a new skill and learning new skills takes time and doing the Roller Derby Bootcamp has been a profound exercise in accepting my lack of knowledge and skill. And being bad at things in front of others.
It’s a challenge. But I’m working on it and so far I’ve been pretty good (I’ve also had a shit ton of fun. You should do Roller Derby it’s fucking ace).
I dunno what I’m saying here. I think to an extent I’m distracting myself from the utter and total collapse of American society. It’s pretty clear that we’re basically on the verge of maybe a civil war? Maybe the downfall of the government? Maybe the sudden implementation of fascist martial law? Who the fuck knows. If I could predict shit it would be really handy.
Whatever, it is, I’m pleased that I think therapy has helped. Sorting out my HRT properly – not just listening to the WPATH guidance but actually researching, finding levels that work, all that jazz, has helped with mood and energy. And obnoxiously doing exercise and socialising consistently. Even when I don’t feel like it.
So yeah. I’m doing better with that. The US — and much of the world — is still on fire. But my little bit? Not quite so much.
I keep looking back. It’s really hard not to. I’ve entered 2025 which, outside the year when my dad died (then I got dumped, and then I fucked up my nursing course (not y’know, permanently, but I went from being like top of the class to “oh this screwed my grades and I’m busy falling apart from my dad’s death” and then what has turned out to be ADHD became much more of a factor in my course) it’s been one of the hardest of my life.
I have support from an awesome wife, and I’ve got awesome friends, I’ve even got a shiny new therapist. But: the political climate is utterly horrific; we’ve been trying to adopt for 5 years without a match and we need to think about renewing and that just thinking about that make me want to crawl in a hole and hide; and did I mention the politics? And the climate change stuff? And a bunch of my friends having a staggeringly shitty time from which I’m powerless to protect them and also which sits poorly with my overdeveloped sense of justice?
Yeah. All that.
Anyhow. So on the biting hand, that’s part of the reason I keep looking back – because the world is a trashfire and so I look back and wonder whether I should have done something differently; and the answer is obviously both yes, and very decisively no.
But the other reason I’m finding myself looking back is because the Kate who exists right now, on the 30th October 2025 is so fucking far from the Kate that existed on the 30th of October 2022. Or 2021. Or for any of that twenty-plus years that I was out prior. And I’m confronted by that fairly often. The last few years have been marked by a shit ton of work on myself. A shit ton of saying yes. A shit ton of going outside my comfort zone.
And mostly, a shit ton of trying to explore who I am when you peel back the hot mess of compartmentalizing and trying to repress the results of bullying and abuse.
And it’s weird.
It’s really fucking weird.
I mean maybe this is just a mid-life crisis (in which case, yay, I get to live to 94). But honestly it’s really weird to start to like myself a little. To maybe believe that I’m a likable human. To feel worth and value in myself.
Which, like, not to be a whiny person (which I am, but in this instance it’s just fact), I’d never really considered myself. I mean Kathryn tells me I am. And she tells me all sorts of nice things about myself but I find them hard to believe and she loves me so…it’s always felt like she’s biased or just being nice (which is ridiculous because why would she put up with me and tell me nice things about me if she didn’t like me in the first place)?
But now I’ve been getting it from friends which yes, also, hard to believe.
And then I’ve started to feel it just a little bit.
And it’s funny – because the political climate is so utterly fucking toxic. So utterly toxic. And so damning of the temerity of me daring to exist. And my response to that has been to like myself? And do more things for myself? And to be burning through this period of fucking trash fire kill-the-trans going “no fuck you, I’m a decent person who (tries to) look(s) after my friends and has empathy and does her best”.
But *also* has come out of this period going “actually I like the way I look, and I have fashion and style choices and fuck you if you want me to be different.”
I re-ripped all my CDs. Or I thought I did. And then I was looking through the old ‘mp3’ folder on my media server which contains disks which got ripped at some point between about 1999 and 2015 when I decided to start from scratch and re-rip everything to FLAC.
And as I’ve gone through I’ve removed the duplicates, mostly, and so what should be in there is just stuff that I downloaded over the years; digital albums obtained from a variety of places over the decades. And as I scrolled I suddenly saw The Best of James which is an album that I bought in my second year of my first go at University. I already liked a few James tracks, and this had a bunch on that I liked. It was an outlier – mostly I bought women artists (“They just sound better.” Sure, Kate, that’s definitely the reason). Once I got it, I listened to it a shit ton. Now, apart from the horrifying realization that that disk is not in my FLAC folder, which implies with it the existence of a box of CDs that has not been ripped, or that I just missed some going through ripping them (a dispiriting thought since actually getting to the end of what I thought was my ripping project took a bloody decade), it also led to me going “Huh, I haven’t listened to that for ages.”
Now of course, I hopped straight to Laid, which I used to blast (and indeed, did blast both yesterday and today); screaming out the lyrics. My therapist said not to see you no more. Prescient, given the disaster my first major relationship was. But the lyrics in that that grabbed me at the time were:
Dressed me up in women’s clothes Messed around with gender roles
God, basic bitch trans girl really failing to come to terms with things. But the whole album’s kinda like that. I had this flashback to me, sitting alone, despairing because I knew – in my heart – that I was trans. I knew that I felt like and wanted to exist in the world as a girl, as a woman. I remember singing Sit Down. I remember it with a sense memory of the shitty carpet tiles beneath my feet, the posters and postcards all over the wall. My door firmly closed…
Now I’ve swung back down again And it’s worse than it was before If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor
And in my head I felt like it was about transness. About how maybe if I’d not experienced the little flashes of warmth, of comfort, of being seen as and being treated as a woman, maybe I could live with the experience of being a man. That’s obviously a lie. I knew what I was; I know what I am. But I was so fucking scared. The world kept telling me that being trans would be terrible. That it would be lonely. That it would be devastating. But the only kind of future I could possibly imagine for myself was being a woman.
It seemed so utterly unattainable. I knew that people did transition. I knew – I’d read some of how. But like; there seemed so few. It seemed so improbable.
I couldn’t possibly be that, and if I was, I couldn’t do that (I wasn’t strong enough), and if I did do it, I’d lose everything and end up alone. The world told me so.
God I wish I could go back and reach into her mind and tell her it will be okay. Whatever fucking trash is going on in the world right at this moment – being trans has opened doors I never expected. Yes, it’s closed a shit ton – the months after I transitioned where job interviews were “let’s stare at the trans girl and laugh at her as she leaves” – which fuck them, and fuck that. And it’s pretty clear that being out and trans is almost certainly what made my search for another job a while back impossibly difficult. People are assholes, yes. But it’s also what drove me to finally start a business – doing something I care about.
And also – trans people – as a cohort? We’re awesome and amazing. I have met the best people. People who’ve overcome adversity and societal expectations and families that have been ruinously terrible. People who are kind, and generous, and hilarious, and talented. I’ve got to be part of a community that will bully you to be your best self, and to celebrate and love your worst self, and laugh with you as you do both. A community that’s been resilient and dedicated to supporting each other (and also, a horrific circular firing squad, too. But y’know, queers be like that).
My life is a fucking gift. One I didn’t think I’d ever have. And in viscerally carrying me back to the moments of despair that I felt this album has absolutely reminded me of that. Of how low I felt before. Of how impossible having this seemed. Of the fact I’m really fucking lucky, and sometimes I’m so glad I’m trans; because without it I don’t have any notion of who I’d be, but I know I wouldn’t be this damn cool.
Gotta keep faith that your path will change Gotta keep faith that your love will change
I’ve been reading a lot recently. Not just because I’m in the process of setting up a press; a sentence which when I say it or hear it sounds ludicrous.
A dream I’ve had for much of my adult life.
No, not that. Not a dream. That’s a thing that might feel achievable.
Something that might feel like you should aim your goals towards making it come true.
No, think smaller, even more ephemeral than that.
A fleeting thought I’d had now and then. An ‘it would be interesting’, an ‘it would be cool.’
A thing to be contemplated only with sufficient intoxicant or enough levity to know it could never happen.
But here I am on the precipice of making it a reality. The bizarre intersection of the many choices I’ve made over the past few years as I try and undo the years of neglect on my social and emotional life making it possible. Not that those things were there to… remedy? No, that implies to big of a thing, and my beloved has nurtured me and cared for me and held me and helped me. It’s not that I’ve not had the delight, the joy, the hunger to make more of this opportunity of a second life that’s been afforded me; but it’s that I was so comfortable, it was so easy; I didn’t use the space afforded by that care and love as I could have. I failed in those years to look and see the weights that my past had attached to me.
That I was dragging along a body, a self, a being that had been forged in harm and in a bleak place.
That didn’t really trust that you could connect with people – that I had found that spark of connection with one phenomenal person and didn’t dare trust the opportunities placed in front of me to let connection flare anywhere else.
Because that way lay risk; rejection; mockery. And eventual isolation and crushing pain, again.
That way was a path to the kinds of pain I’d had as a kid. To the kinds of pain I’d had as an adult when I admitted to someone that I was trans and they cut me off. Something that only happened once, but happened after she and I had confided in each other things that I’d never dared tell anyone else. And then there where we’d had a friendship burning bright was suddenly nothing. Not embers. Just ash.
And the world’s become harsher and darker in the interim. The hatred Nazi’s have for queers, and specifically for trans femme people (whose very existence tears at the heart and fabric of the nasty, ugly lies that are the thread of fascism and patriarchy), it’s become an inescapable part of the daily fabric of life here, and indeed in the UK. It slices across my friends lives.
Tries to make their lives darker and smaller.
And it cuts into me too.
Burning joy from me. Excising my compassion. Turning me from someone I like; someone I have slowly come to even love at times; into some blunt thing that bleakly enjoys the knowledge that those stoking the fires of this hatred will soon also be burned by its flames. That watches the leopard eat the faces of its enablers with ever darkening enjoyment.
I could choose to let that consume me.
I’ve been reading a lot. Nothing really deep – I just can’t right now. I can’t find it in myself to read the things that would probably help me understand this fucking evil better. I don’t know that I want to understand it better. Since those that claim to understand it seem as ineffectual fighting it as those of us clawing at it, one fucking nail after another. Exhaustion washing over us, but standing again each fucking day to say I will not let you destroy what I fought for. Knowing that fascism is weak because it is founded on lies that will not stand; knowing that eventually we will bring it back down and send its adherents back to the dark corners of society where they belong. But also knowing that in the fight to do so there will be losses. Losses that will cut us all. That will seem unendurable, but that in the end will form just another scar on our already battered existences.
Time won’t heal, but it will distance.
But ironically, instead I’ve found that thanks to the last few years what I have done instead is built things I care about. Built more life, more light, more joy, more connection. And as someone who’s so deeply cynical, whose very existence originated in a love that was abhorrent to many in British society, born to a woman that those charged with her safety literally attempted to kill, to a woman who devoted much of her life to saving the lives of those who repeatedly tried to exclude her and continue to do so, it seems bizarre to stand at this moment and know that I have chosen a path even more hidden from me than the one I’d been on. The safe path which said “Be a nurse, suck up the exhaustion and the moral abjection that is the US healthcare system, just earn money and get on with your life outside of these hours.” The easier path.
And instead I’ve chosen one which matters to me. Which matters to people like me. Which allows me to plant the bones of that girl who was beaten, spat on, kicked, excluded – and which allows me to say “Fuck you all, something good will grow from this.“
There’s a lot in vampire mythology that speaks to the excluded, the minority, the people that society says we should not be. And reading Bury Your Bones in the Midnight Soil, I couldn’t help but feel parallels to how I’ve been feeling lately. And while the current government is setting the world alight (and here I could refer to either of my home countries; both of which have adopted fascism with the kind of glee of a child loose in a sweetshop; only in this case all the sweets they’re stuffing in the mouths of the public are laced with poison), I am making an active choice to do something to try and make the world better.
Granted that’s what I’ve done for years. It’s why I’ve been working in climate/transportation journalism. I said to my therapist “I have an overdeveloped sense of justice.” And I do. And it’s exhausting. But perhaps this thing that I’m doing has the potential to refill my cup a little. Like the last gig I went to did; and I wish I could find that enthusiasm again right now, but it’s elusive, having had some bigot ask me to sign the anti-trans ballot measure yesterday, then have the gall to pretend like me being salty was unreasonable after he ruined my day.
And apparently today.
And so here I stand on the precipice.
I will do things I’m proud of. That I can stand behind. And I’ll do so as long as I can.
I’m on holiday, on vacation as my adopted country calls it, mostly a trip to visit home. A trip to see my mother who I deeply miss and who, because of our annoying similarities, drives me nuts. We normally head down to her home to see her, but for a variety of reasons we decided, instead, to head to my ancestral home.
Alright not ancestral. Maybe spiritual.
Obviously not ancestral, because I’m kinda Welsh, but spiritual – because we came here almost every year when I was a kid. First whining, then eventually falling in love with the place. The Lake District in the UK is wound into my bones. Twisted into my DNA. I never felt a particular attachment to the town I grew up in, but every time we came here it felt like we’d returned home.
We’d walk the mountains, drive over the passes, and stay in sparsely decorated static caravans; often the cheapest one with just a radio, no TV. And my dad’s attitude that there was not the wrong weather, just the wrong clothes, meant that I saw this place cold and wet, hot an sunny and at all points in between.
Which is to say I love this place.
Before we came here we went to Finland. A brief stop taking advantage of the fact that it’s not hugely expensive to add a stop. By sheer coincidence it turns out that it was pride weekend. We knew that it was before we came, and when we arrived Helsinki was decked out in Pride finery. Flags everywhere, happy queer people around. Maybe it’s always like that, maybe it’s not. The folks of Finland are, apparently, not super chatty nor it seems, loud. But they were friendly and welcoming.
And the first thing I noticed when we got there; well, maybe not the first thing, but a thing I noticed very quickly was that after a few years of floating, formless anxiety that washes over me at any point. That saps joy. That wears away at me like water washing over a stone. That? It just went.
I could just be me.
It’s not like ‘me’ is super exiting. I’m just another vaguely queer girl wandering through the world and loving my wife. I don’t generally run down the street accosting people and sharing my transness with them.
I actually woodworked being the cis-lesbian or indeed in some points and places in time just assumed to be cis-straight girl, more or less, from some point in the early 2000s until about 2015. I was out online, in ways that were much less pervasive than they are now. Back then, when twitter wasn’t a nazi hellhole, and people didn’t background search everyone looking for a job, and also, back then when most people didn’t give a shit if you were trans – christ, most people didn’t even really have the faintest clue what it meant, that was easier to do.
I had a separate online existence where the few trans people I knew shared stuff, but mostly I talked about classic cars, house renovation, whatever weird project I’d picked up…
…and I had my cis-woman life where I had friends who didn’t really know I was trans. I would occasionally go out with work colleagues or whatever.
I always found that hard because as anyone who knows me knows I’m an obnoxiously open book. That, and it took me a long time to overcome the transphobia society instills. I still find little pockets of it hiding there. And thing is, if you’re close with me, at some point I’ll probably make some joke about it. I’ll tell the story where it only makes sense if you know I was presenting as male at the time (albeit, it turns out, not well). I’ll crack some inappropriate and childish joke about how much I dislike dick.
So I found it hard to have close friends. I was always watching myself. Wary of questions that might suddenly expose the transness and then invoke the “having to explain the transness” and also the different way a lot of cis people suddenly relate to you when they find out. The look of searching – trying to find clues. The reappraisal process ending up with placing you in a different and special category (UK supreme court, anyone?)
So in a way it was a relief when I came out again more thoroughly. More completely. It’s not like everyone knows, there are folks who do and folks who don’t depending on how well they know me. And cis-het folks in particular mostly have no idea, so even though I sport trans pride colours on my ID badge, on my water bottle, sometimes on my clothes…
…people still often don’t know until I tell them.
Which these days I’m more inclined to share, because I think it’s important that people know they know someone trans. Because I want people to have a face to put transness to. Because I want them to know, as they vote to strip trans people of their healthcare and ship trans people off to fucking camps, that’s who. I don’t want them to see trans people as some distant fucking unknown. We’ve always been here. We’ve just often hidden because of the bullshit of transphobia.
And the relief I felt in Finland was almost palpable.
And it fucking hurts being in the UK. The UK is a disaster right now for so many reasons. For the shredding of the social safety net. For the destruction of the lives of those with disabilities reliant on services that Labour should be saving and investing in, and is instead cutting. For the abject horror that is Starmer’s failure to do anything of substance (mostly because he’s not really a person, he’s a cardboard cut out of a human covered in work-shopped talking points and focused grouped policies to attempt to attract the not-quite-as-nazi-nazi’s to vote while ignoring everyone who might actually vote labour).
As soon as I stepped foot in Britain I felt that leaden weight reinserting. The corset constricting. The fucking theft of breath that comes with the knowledge that the government would rather kill kids than let people grow up trans. That I can be accosted in a toilet for the terrible crime of needing a pee, and that the head of the UK’s human rights organisation thinks that’s really fine and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the position that maybe it’s kinda sketch to photograph women in toilets.
And I realised how much it costs me to be in this place. Or to be in the US. To have that anchor dragging around after me. To spend so much energy trying to support community, to fall-apart and be repaired by my wife, my friends. To return the favour of dragging me from the bed in which I curl, crying because I just want to live my fucking life, and I don’t want other kids to go through the pain and torture that I went through.
Huh. Well. I don’t often y’know, actually write stuff here because I’m too flipping busy. I’ve got so much social stuff going on and so little time to actually think about things that aren’t that, and work, and y’know being a lady of leisure. I mean, that and—and I’ve said this before in a bunch of spaces and probably here—but having actually *worked on myself* and *worked on social stuff* and generally been a human trying to fix things about my life that I wasn’t happy with (even if I sometimes didn’t twig that I wasn’t happy with them) I’m in this weird position where the world is horribly on fire, but I’m with this amazing woman (still! Like it’s been nearly two decades of being with an awesome woman!) and I’ve got this friend group locally that’s cool, and this mostly trans group of friends spread across the whole damn world, and they’re awesome and lovely.
And yes, I need to make more effort to talk to some of my older friends (Hey Emma, Peter, Lauren, Chrissy, John, Brian, James, Pari (and everyone else!) if you’re reading this!) and I also found and messaged the guy who saved my life (hey to you too, I dunno if you got my e-mail since I’m basically blind sending shit to your domain and I’m not always great at noticing stuff that comes to my non-personal e-mail addresses here).
But I’ve had a bunch of thoughts while I was on vacation and a today I’ve had more, so I thought I’d try and make some time to get them out.
I mean, I could just chat with my therapist about them, but hey, why not whine at rando folks on the internet. It’s been my modus operandi for a long time anyway. (Actually I do have some notes about some of this stuff to talk to her about and some stuff that I’m not going to share here).
What I think’s finally tipped me over into actually writing is that I’ve spent the day working on the small press (we have a bsky account! We have a website! We have meetings set up with other bookstores and printing presses!). This is the small press that I’ve thought about setting up for what, 2 decades plus/minus? That press that I’m finally trying to set up (because the economy’s just so gosh-darned good for setting up a queer business right now). Well, it’s kind of pushed a whole lot of ‘people see me as way more competent than I feel’ in my direction. Like they share some comment or something they’re hoping to do with me and the press and I’m like “fuck, what makes you think I’m going to manage to be that good?” (which also leads me to knowing that I’m going to have to be that good).
There’s this whole character thing in LUU which is hinted at now and then about one character’s competence and the other people’s perception of themselves, and that never the twain shall meet, I guess. Which it turns out is probably me doing write what you know unintentionally.
It’s a background thing, which is I guess how it is in my life. It’s taken me a long damn time to like myself. It’s taken me a long damn time to consider myself sexy or pretty or even, sometimes, beautiful. But considering myself as “good” at anything in particular? That’s something I still really struggle with. And y’know, for at least a decade and a half it’s been clear that other people think I’m good nurse. As in a “won’t you please apply for this more senior job” and “please be in charge” and things like that. But I have always been quite…circumspect about my abilities.
But like, I was doing a training yesterday and it had options for “I know it” “I think I know it” “I’m not sure” and “I don’t know” and I vacillated between the middle two because that is, frankly, how I roll. I very rarely have faith in my decisions. (Also this training was a nightmare because unless you were very clear about “I know this” it was interminably long). Which is weird because if you put me in a situation where something actually serious is going on then I’m full-on this is what needs to happen and now. I’m pretty much super confident and very in-charge. Or at least, that’s the mask I put on.
I actually had a doctor not just thank me on the day, but when I saw him again weeks later he thanked me a second time for just being chill and getting shit done in a critical care situation. Which y’know. I absolutely didn’t know what to do with that compliment. But it was nice.
If you put me in a situation where I need to advocate for someone else, or I need to do it for a business then I absolutely will be the bitch. I argued us into a bunch of places when we’d do CES—pushing for us to be present above much bigger outlets—presenting us as the team you needed to have.
I can do that.
…but doing it for me? Not a skill I’m good at. And I really, really need to work on it. Because I am (one) really fucking honest about what I think are my shortcomings—especially with friends—and (two) I’ve got an absolute shit-ton to do, and there’s so much more that I haven’t even thought of yet, I’m sure. And all of that requires advocating for the business I’m trying to set up. But it’s *my* business and so we’re at this weird intersection of “other people see me as super competent” (which honestly, is probably the more accurate reflection) and I see myself as a wet fish (which is probably not terribly accurate).
Well, that’s not wholly true. But I have trauma around running a business and I also am shit at self promotion (again, to be clear, good at promoting others, shit at self promotion) and yeah. Stuff for me to work on.
Anyhow so that’s kinda what kicked me into doing a post. It’s not like there’s going to be an immediate resolution – but just like switching from being self deprecating to making jokes about how I’m actually awesome seems to have rewired my brain, I think this is a “I need to do some affirmations and be reinforce different pathways about how I think about myself networking and socialising and generally doing business related tasks” task.
Anyhow, there’s this other thing that’s totally unrelated that I kinda wanna ramble on. So look, I got FFS a bit over a year ago and I don’t want to be like poster child for surgery, because not everyone wants/needs/should get FFS (not as in gatekeeping, just some folks need to do some mental health work before they get it). And I, to be quite blunt, really fucking like the end result. My face feels like my face in a way that it never did before.
And I mean I’ve *also* put a shit ton of work into losing weight.
Just a more healthy diet, a shit ton of exercise. I feel better now than I have for at least a decade, probably for nearly two. And yes, yes, ridiculous unachievable western standards of beauty, and yes, patriarchal bullshit, and yes whatever. But I’m happier with how I look. I’m more comfortable with my weight. And to some extent I’m just also *really fucking pleased to be kinda fit*.
When I was in NY I did an insane amount of exercise.
That’s a mixture of 2 miles a day elliptical, and then walking everywhere. That’s apparently what I’m like if I’m a lady of leisure in a city now.
And so there’s this really interesting dichotomy of: I feel fantastic about the way I look, I’ve got much more comfortable with my style, I’ve got much more confident with makeup, and just y’know, I *feel* good in myself.
…but at the same time that’s come at the cost of not being so easily identified as part of the in-group of trans people. And partly, yes, that was the point of FFS. But it also makes me a little sad when I clock a trans girl and before there was often that mutual recognition of “oh yes, we both know, and we’re both okay with this. Hi.”; that’s gone now. I appear – seemingly – to read as cis to both trans and cis people (unless they know me) and that community recognition is…a complicated thing for me to process. Also I come across as weirdly just smiling at trans women for no apparent reason now. Eh.
And ongoing thing for me to process.
And yes, I’m fully aware of my privilege in this; thank you.
We have finally been to NYC. My wife had a conference to go to and so I tagged along because – well, why not use that not-any-more double occupancy on the hotel room? And why not take the opportunity of someone paying for a flight for one of us to go see a city that both of us thought it would be interesting to see. She, perhaps unsurprisingly, had been once before, but not for a looong time. And I’d never been.
We had a few days of together time during which we managed to meet up just very briefly with one of my friends during the few hours of overlap at the end of her trip to NY and the start of ours (brunch! yay!), see the Amy Sherald exhibit at the Whitney (and a fascinating exhibit by Christine Sum Kim), hit up the MoMA for a bunch of really interesting exhibits (a huge and also fascinating textile work exhibit, a very unusual Swedish artist – Hilma af Klint who did botanical drawings but also added her own I suppose – interpretations of the characteristics of the plants in these diagrams that…yeah, very complicated. Someone I’d never encountered. We also saw an exhibit of Jack Whitten’s work who I’d also never heard of and really should have (Kathryn had, though)) checked out flea markets in Chelsea, and saw both the (relatively) new production of Caberet, and Hadestown. We walked a chunk of the Highline (I’d like to do more of that) saw a corner of Central Park, ate Georgian food (soup dumplings! Yummy), drank cocktails, visited the Transit Museum, and we finally tried NY Pizza (which was…from Midtown which is apparently not the best place to get it and it was fine, but not a patch on Bristol’s old Flour and Ash. Yes, I’m saying it. Y’all can come at me).
The next day I met up with one of my online friends, because I wildly disregard the advice about meeting friends off the internet. I had a great time with her – we got a nice lunch and coffee, chatted, checked out the Brooklyn museum, went to a bar (where Kathryn met up with us), then out for Italian food at one of her favoured local Italian places, then Kathryn headed back what with her actually being in NY to do work, and I went and drank far too much at another bar, then sang on stage.
Yes, that’s right, I am now a woman who’s performed on stage in New York (yeah, yeah, it was just karaoke, but with a live piano so…it counts).
The next day was kinda odd – but nice. I spent it basically finding places to sit, chill and do a bit of writing. The friend we met up with the first day reminded me that NY has a bunch of “public spaces” that are not always well known, and some of which are inside buildings. Most of them are just big patio/park affairs outside buildings, but I was intrigued by the indoor ones. They’re a tax benefit and/or a planning benefit (build taller, take up more of the block, something like that) and so it seems like we ought to be using them. A lot. So I hung out in the one at the Ford Foundation (nicest) and read for a chunk of time (it really needs chairs, the wall’s fine, but not hugely comfortable) the IBM building (less nice, but has coffee and chairs). I also just had a bit of a wander round looking at architecture. Oh I also tried an NY bagel which was much better than my local bakery (but I will say the NY style bakery across town does here actually I think does a pretty solid job), and I unintentionally got to give Arsehole Tower the finger. We met up with some of Kathryn’s colleagues for dinner and then headed out to our third show of the trip – Gypsy (which we scored tickets to a whole 15 minutes before show time and then dashed to the theatre to get in).
And then finally in my whirlwind tour of NY I…left.
Yeah, I went to see another of my friends, but she lives in New Jersey, so on my final day in New York I headed out of town for the majority of the day, wandered around her nearest medium size town (apparently she lives properly out in the boonies), and just chilled and got to meet another of my lovely online friends in person. And then when I got back into town (after one of the most miserably overheated train journeys I’ve been on. NJ? Put some f’kin money into public transit will you?), I managed to make it back in time to meet up with Kathryn and a colleague to briefly visit the Poster House – which is a lovely Poster Museum.
And then today we flew back…
…and it’s nice to be home.
But I’m honestly stunned how much I enjoyed New York. I’d happily go back and spend more time there (although since I walked ~9 miles a day (well, including my elliptical workouts) I need to be more prepared next time lol).
I had an unusual experience a couple of days back. One for which you need to know that as a very cis teenager who was very good at boy, I owned a girl’s school uniform.
I went to the same school my older sister did. She actually left school the same year I started. And when she went off to university I – struggling with my gender identity as I was – would occasionally put on her school uniform and just *be* in the house. Both my parents worked and I was so wildly unable to function as a boy even at that point, so when I got home I’d often just kick around in my school uniform for a bit, reading or playing games. When I realised I could pilfer my sister’s and do the equivalent but expressing this bit of me that I desperately repressed the rest of the time, it was just this strange relief.
A year or so after my sister went off to university, she cleared out her wardrobe sending her school uniform to the school’s second hand uniform shop. And so…I decided to get one for myself. First I had a couple of stabs at seeing if I could get one from lost property. They’d throw stuff out every so often, but I never quite got the nerve to go through the pile of stuff to be chucked.
So instead I went to the shop and told the totally believable lie that my sister who happened to be the same size as me needed stuff. The extremely skeptical woman asked a lot of questions about my fictitious sister and I’m certain I didn’t come across as at all suspicious.
And it being me, and me being excellent at being a temu copy of a boy, the whole “only wearing it around the house” lasted about a hot minute. The experience of being a girl or a woman in the world is so very different to that of being perceived as male. I’d gathered that much from the other girls around me, from my sister’s comments about feminist concepts, and from my mum’s frustrations in the world. I don’t think I really gathered this on a conscious level. I was so busy just trying to ignore the screaming voice in my head, but in the end I just had to see what it was like, so I snuck that uniform out in my bag, slipped out of school early, and went to the local shops. And once I’d let the genie out of the bottle it absolutely wasn’t going back in.
Fairly soon we reached the point where I was pretty regularly my own sister at the local shops.
The reason this is relevant is that that uniform had a pleated skirt. Since then I haven’t often one. I don’t think until – eh – last year, I’ve owned one. But I picked up a cute pleated skirt on sale last year and decided on Tuesday to wear it. I have worn it a couple of times before, but not a bunch.
And it happened to coincide with this urge to listen to All Saints – Pure Shores. Which happens to only exist on my music folder in this random assortment of files that I put there back when disk space was at a premium so I’d only have specific songs encoded and on the computer.
That folder’s helpfully called “unsorted”.
Anyhow, when I hit play on Pure Shores, Emby populated my playlist with whatever rando stuff is in that folder. And as I was driving back from my bass lesson, sun shining, driving in my wife’s Kia Soul with the windows down, a bunch of random stuff that I listened to in the late 90s/early aughts came on and I was thrown back to my younger self.
Music has this ability to do that.
I sung my little heart out and car-danced, and suddenly in the pale grey of the interior of the soul I was reminded of the pale grey interior of the 205XE that I learned to drive in. And although I’m pretty certain I never drove that car in my school uniform – time wise it wouldn’t be quite right – I think started learning to drive in 6th form – when the school uniform requirement was some kind of neat casual (like I did that, ha) – it felt like a memory.
Long ago my brain overwrote the memories of the cardboard copy of boyhood I tried to represent with me as the girl I was desperately fighting to hide. I’ve been out as me for much longer than I ever existed as that pile of rules of acceptable things to say and acceptable behaviours.
But in that moment as I was singing my little heart out I could feel the confusion in my memories of “this never actually happened but it feels like it did.”
