squigglefish

So it turns out that there's no official board game sessions planned for BiCon, and the only geek culture ones are on Bisexuals in fiction and Slash fiction.

Given my audience here, is there anything in the area of geek culture and gaming that really should be at BiCon?

Accidentally ended up in a discussion about preventing rape today at work, werein the two men I was talking with cited "Most rapists were sexually abused as a child", and claimed there was evidence for this.

I'm pretty certain this is a load of crap, but I couldn't prove it. What are the counter arguments to this?

Need to do a dump of angst. Lots of stuff has been going on that I can't talk about, and my head is at risk atm.
( angst )

At some point, this viral thing started being an upper respiratory tract infection, and with that a worse result seems to have happened.

I've always had huge sleep issues, but now they are getting worse. It used to just be a head full of self-hate and headpeople that hated me. Eventually despite all the saddness I'd pass out, and if I was lucky (which was quite often), I'd awake better. If not, I would wake up after reasonable sleep, and somehow manage to eventually pull my head together by the end of the day.

But now things seem to have escalated. The headpeople have became downright abusive. The self-hate seems to be channelling the sheer acceptance of abuse that my bad multiple has, without actually switching. And in the end, I still can't sleep. I wake up and the abuse is still ringing in my head as a truth. Each time the next attempt at sleep gets harder, as having to live with that is scary. I'm caught in a vicious circle.

With any luck, this is just the illness at work. But how do you properly rest and heal if you're physically frightened of sleep? This illness has been going on for so long now that it's going to affect my job soon, but if I go back before I have my full strength back it will relapse. I know from past experience that if it relapses, it will relapse hard.

What also doesn't help is the damn dysphoria. I guess I must normally use spoons on ignoring certain body parts. I can't spare any spoons at the moment from defending myself, so I'm left with the acute knowledge that I have things that shouldn't be there. Things covered in nerve endings, making it very sensitive and causing your brain to map it as far larger and more distressing than it is. Which is ironic, since I know I'm 'lucky'* compared to many, my unwanted stuff is tiny.

Normally, I would talk to my parents about this. I can normally talk to them about almost anything. But they'll never understand sleeping issues. I've tried, and the very nature of the problem is inconceivable to them. A routine for sleep may help when not immediately at risk, but trying to relax the brain at the moment just lets them in. Napping suffers from the same problem of the danger being trying to get asleep, with the added issue of it messing up my sleeping pattern.

It's not like I can talk to doctors about all of this. As a trans woman who still needs the NHS's help, I'm basically screwed. Telling anyone in the NHS any of this could be grounds for trying to prevent me access to hormones or surgery. And if they started poking, they would probably freak at what they found (like having a bad multiple that identifies as male and wants nothing but to be abused).

There's other stuff, too. Eating has normally been a pleasure for me, and I've never found it hard to know if I'm hungry or to enjoy a meal. But this is turning increasingly more mechanical for me, and I haven't a clue any more if I'm hungry or if I should eat. This isn't helped by my need to lose a lot of weight for surgery (10Kg minimum, and losing more will give better results).

I'm scared :(

* 'lucky', as this is also a curse. I'm probably going to have to have an extremely dysphoria-inducing procedure before my main surgery to correct for the fact that there's not much material there to work with :(

Err... long time no post... I'm not dead, just been very busy :P

It occurs to me that I've not really posted anything about my life really since I wrote about plans to attend the local Pride parade in '09. That would be because everything got very busy soon after that ;)

At the event, I met up again with an old friend from uni, and found that she now had rather a lot more in common with me (tee hee) than a few years back ;). Things with her quickly blossomed into a very fine relationship indeed, and we have been steadily dating ever since. Most weekends I'm down visting her, and we manage to have quite a few geeky adventures, too!

I have remained friends with my ex, and she's still my housemate. The breakup actually seemed to help her engage with the world again, and she's seeing CX now regularly and doing volunteer work.

Since then, thanks to my lovely partner I've became involved in my old LGBTQ society one again, and have been a regular attendee at amazing LGBTQ rock nights organised by my dear friend swarmingness. Of special note was a Buffy themed night that I keep meaning to write properly about somewhere! (I know that rozk will proud of us ^^). I've found "Killing in the name of" by Rage Against The Machine to a rather appropriately queer song (the defiant chant at the end feels damn empowering), and it's amazing to be able to dance to Rocky Horror and Hedwig with the proper actions ^^

Sadly this time last year I was hit my an awful combo of illnesses, which caused me to put on a lot of the weight that I had lost. I'm now finally back down to under 90Kg, but I still need to lose a further 10Kg for surgery.

Work's going well, if still underpaid :P I'm looking for a new job and to move to be nearer my partner and all my friends, though. I'm still 'stealth' at work, and at times it's really annoying as it's hard ignoring the standard cis privileged crap you hear. Things will get interesting soon however, since I'm going to need to start electrolysis downstairs, and will be looking to get the face done whilst at it :S Not sure how I'll be handling that one, but will let you all know.

I still try to do my part in trans campaigning, but it's generally more via encouraging others and providing advice these days. This last year and a lot has given me a fair few things I could write about, so with any luck you'll hear some quality ranting from me soon!

Finally, I've been missing quality contact with a number of you - and I owe an appology to lisaquestions for not getting back to her sooner!

I'll catch up sooner next time, I promise!
~fish

The following was posted by linamishima. She's right, what they are doing is completely wrong. If dealing with trans paperwork wasn't bad enough, imagine having problems with posting it and receiving it back?
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So as you may have heard, postal workers at the Royal Mail are going to go on strike. The big bosses are painting them as reacting unfairly and this strike being pointless and actually a tool they can use to change things how they want. Royal Mail claims that post is down, and so is revenues, and the only solution to this is cuts to the workforce.

But let's take a look at the view from the postal worker's perspective.

Actual workload is going up. Partial privatisation has done little of it's objectives other than to turn Royal Mail into something to be exploited for commercial profit. And it quite frankly seems to me that someone high up in Royal Mail has been given a mandate to make Royal Mail appear to be failing to hurry up complete privatisation.

This strike matters to anyone who has need to use the British postal service from time to time - practically everyone. Even those who don't tend to use it still have to use it for certain things. Royal Mail isn't a company - it's infrastructure. Just look at how well the British Telecom and British Rail privatisations have gone - the later completely failed in most people's eyes, and the former has only just reached a state were the regulators are beginning to back off (and still BT has requirements that no other provider has). The big money in post lies with the large contracts to collect mail from offices for sorting - delivery, on the other hand, is a very labour intensive exercise that hence comes with high costs.

Royal Mail is the only postal service with a universal requirement to deliver mail, and it is doubtful that any companies after complete privatisation would have an equal requirement placed upon them. If we look to the States, we see that rural areas often don't have deliveries to the door - only to a postbox in a shared location. For small villages, this could leave them completely isolated. A market were delivery was not guaranteed also means companies could do such things as charge you for delivery of your post to your door (and remember, there's no plans to reduce tax when privatising Royal Mail).

Not everyone can afford the internet. Old Granny Smith can't even use a computer. Phone lines cost money. The loss of universal delivery would result in social exclusion for many people around the country, and cause increased costs both for households and for businesses (who will come to rely more on couriers). Some areas of the country will become reachable only by courier.

This postal worker strike could be our last chance to save universal delivery from a government intent on privatising the postal service to the lowest bidders and their best mates.

Please repost this, or at least spread the link. Postal workers need our support.

Yesterday, there were some posts made regarding the relationship between regarding subversism, genderqueer and trans. In reading these, I was reminded of my growing thoughts on similar matters, and one major obstacle that seems to repeatedly be ran into in any such discussion.
Anarchafemme's post in particular posited that there was privilege in being able to identify with a binary gender. This however seemed to upset the usually more stoic GallingGalla, who responded by detailing how the apparent mismatch between binary gender and physical sex. This, of course, was not exclusive with Anarchafemme's point, and so ze then listed explicitly some of the aspects of binary-identified privilege. Queen Emily then followed up with the rather true point that trans and cis binary genders cannot however be directly compared, with trans identities often being treated in an entirely different way, perhaps even viewed by cis people similarly to non-binary genders.

Some of the disagreements here, in my opinion, came from the language that the participants have been forced to use. This is a problem I have seen elsewhere in discussions regarding gender matters, and so this is what I'd like to talk about.

You see, whilst it is all very nice talking about gender, as a term it encompasses too much to be useful. To a certain extent, this is something the trans and feminist community is already working on. We now also have the fairly common ideas of gender presentation, how one presents oneself within society, and gender identity, an internal sense of gendering and sex, and finally gender role, how we behave with respect to society.
However these may not even be enough, especially when you consider that closely related term, sex. People tend to think of sex just in terms of genitalia and maybe breasts. But in everyday life, the most other people see of our 'sex' are the so-called 'secondary' sexual characteristics. Should these really be tied to genitalia? Given the number of trans spectrum people who manage what some might call 'compromises' regarding the mismatch of these, and similarly regarding cis people, I do not think that it would be fair to say that these have to be linked. Similarly there is the concept of 'hormonal sex', what blend of hormones work best for the individual.

With these three aspects to sex, we really need to consider there to be three aspects to 'subconscious sex'. And with body shape now freed from genitalia, can we really consider gender presentation a single category? Gender presentation tends to wrap together both the clothes one wears, and the body language one uses, yet it is only society that expects them to match. Gender role similarly breaks down into all the various genderings of actions we can undertake within society, which also closely interplays with sexuality.
But what about the person within, how they feel about all these things gender and sex? The concept of a 'gender identity' is perhaps similarly too crude, sweeping together various aspects which can each point in a different direction. For each of the aspects to gender and sex, we can consider there to be a related intrinsic inclination.

With separating out gender, sex and gender inclinations and sex inclinations, we can now look at how these combine together once more, or combine only to find internal dissonance, to then cause society to observe a discord between elements. This discord can be directly observed from the outside in the case of aspects that manifest in a highly visible manner, or it can be an internal strife felt by someone. However both of these form part of the privilege afforded to those without this observed discord. As well as people being privileged in terms of being safe from direct discrimination, there must also be an aspect of feeling welcomed, that you can identify with those around you, that your identity will be respected, that others share that identity.

Where it gets interesting is when someone can be at the foul end of one of these privileges, and yet also have a set of other privileges, which relate to what was previously considered the same concept – gender or sex. These privileges are hard to name, since they come from the intersection of aspects of gender and sex. One can have privilege in terms of physical appearance, yet lack it in terms of voice (and indeed the intersection here would also tear down the previously held former privilege). Body language or societal role can equally affect matters. And hence you can both have what could be called a 'binary gender' privilege and yet internally have nothing of the sort and feel phased by questionnaires and matters of understanding company. Or you could externally have no such binary gender privilege, yet within identify with a binary and be able to find safe spaces.
Within all these privilege sets, there is a common ground, or rather a common absence of privilege (or highly related privileges) that trans people all share and that cis people are privileged over. A fair chunk of this lies internally, in the inability to generally feel comfortable and accounted for within a group, and with respect to the internal sense of dissonance with external gender and sex aspects. This extends into aspects of personal history and all that encompasses, and probably also the idea of others knowing, bringing up without consent, private details of one's life (possibly in a less than well-meaning manner).

Where matters get more complicated and less generalised is with respect to cis appearance and cis interactions, but in general for trans spectrum people, although a cis appearance might be possible for the individual, it comes with the knowledge that the other side is privileged. For a trans spectrum person, interacting as if cis is not a safe inner shell, even though it can be extremely comfortable for some. However there are those who appropriate their way into the genderqueer identity. Although within the trans community this has a specific meaning, the wider world generally views it as being intrinsically associated with subversism and aspects of playing with gender without being trans - without having or wanting the shared common ground discussed above. It is this sort of crowd, those that 'play at being genderqueer' in order to be edgy and different (and, for some, 'feminist' no doubt) without the trans association that have caused the conflict between some aspects of the trans community and those who are genuinely genderqueer. For those who are trans, who find genderqueer the most suitable identity, there does not exist that safe shell of cis appearance and interactions that the cis subversists who 'play at genderqueer' get to retreat to – this is a false, 'policial genderqueer', much like the political lesbianism that drakyn reminds us of. This is something we need to realise and address, so that when we fight against subversism, we do not also harm our own, those who identify as genderqueer.

So I finally saw Mr Thomas today about surgery.

It turns out that there is still some uncertainty over if my PCT will fund, and if the last PCT shrink I saw has given the first opinion for surgery approval or not. I also made the faux pas of mistaking a gatekeeper-esque question for one of physical anatomy functionality.

But the real issues were when the examination happened. This is always traumatic, and although Liz helped to mitigate the discomfort, my groin region still feels messed up. Worse, however, was the news.

I am apparently tiny. In some respects, this is affirming - after all, I don't particularly want what's down there, and it's somewhat nice that it never grew much. But in terms of surgery, they really need a decent amount to work with to ensure a proper result. I know that there has been some shrinkage on hormones and with tucking, however I got the impression that perhaps there was little I could have done anyhow. He had great difficulty even locating what remains of my testicles.

The short of it is that, assuming proper weight loss, I can currently expect 3-and-a-half inches to four inches, with a risk of not even that. To put it in context, he believes four inches to be the required depth for activities with penises attached to other people. That doesn't currently seem to be my thing, but I'd rather not lose the option if I so desired.

He also presented two alternatives. Firstly was a colovaginoplasty, however Mr Thomas cites this as having a complication rate as high as 25%, which isn't really acceptable to me as anything other than a last resort. At least however this option would be retained for the future. The second alternative is the sort of thing you tend to only get by going to a private doctor - he suggested something that has never been used as part of SRS before. Tissue expansion is a technique already used to acquire more skin to cover wounds or burns, and in theory could be used in the scrotal region to increase the available doner tissue. This, however, has three downsides. The first is that it has not been done before, and so results would be unpredictable. Secondly, it would mean another operation, and hence more money that someone has to provide (and we all know how painful getting anything from a PCT can be). Finally the most difficult one, which would be a larger scrotum, which would need to hang there being all big. This looks to me to be an extreme dysphoria inducer, especially when combined with the need to be off hormones in the run-up to surgery. There is also risk of pain and discomfort from it, too.

On top of everything else, there is a pressing need to lose weight. The good news is that I appear to have lost perhaps up to 4Kg since my last doctor's appointment in january. The bad news is that I need to lose at least 20Kg still, and more if possible. It did help, however, to hear that he recommended just over an hour of exercise a day (which I almost do already), and actually could show me the depth of my subcutaneous fat, which actually gives me a better understanding of the importance of losing weight. This subcutaneous fat basically has to be traversed by the vagina to reach the area were the cavity is supposed to be, and hence is why weight loss is so important prior to surgery (amongst all the other reasons).

Of course, there are two options that he didn't go into but should also be considered. Firstly, I could simply have labiaplasty without a vagioplasty. However this doesn't strike me as ideal, and feels strange to me. And there is also the option to simply not have surgery. As much as I've been managing until now, that region really should not be there, and now that I've begun investigating surgery properly, I am noticing it's presence more and it is quite discomforting.

All in all, this wasn't how I would have liked today to have turned out. In the ideal world, of course, we could just grow from stem cells the new parts, and none of these issues would exist. However I doubt that day will happen within the next 50 years. I am left with some tough things to consider.

In the news today, it was revealed that the UK government is looking to raise the court fees for debt proceedings.

I am rather disgusted by this. Court fees for debt cases, much like bank charges, serve to worsen the economic problems that debtors are under. Most companies pass these fees directly onto their debtors, further worsening a debt that they already are struggling to deal with.

If you live in the UK, please consider writing to your MP to object to these changes, that will only make already troubling times for people far worse still.

Thanks to Kate Bornstein, I found out about this rather amusing slip that you can see near the end of this clip...