Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I got a text from the gender clinic a while ago saying "You are due a mandatory in person annual review appointment," so that's what I'm going to this morning.

I asked D to come with me, which he kindly has taken off work for, and on the bus in to town he said "So what do I need to know about this appointment?" I said I had very little idea myself and read out the text: mandatory, in person, review.

I did this on the phone last year, but all I remember is that that's when I was first told that I'm too fat to get top surgery. I think otherwise I'm very straightforward: I take my T, I don't forget, my GP is good at prescribing it, I'm not too unhappy with any of the side effects. Last year I could say I was doing counseling from them and I was told I was getting near the top of the voice coaching waiting list (though, another year on, I've still heard nothing about that...)

I told D "I think it's just, like, a meds review but for the whole real, not just meds."

"A boy review," he said.

I grinned. "Yeah!" I rested my head on his shoulder and asked "How is your boy?"

"Pretty good," he smiled. "Could do with more sleep."

So yeah, I'm off for my boy review.

Me: starts to type "transmasc"

Me: thinks Wait is that right? More precisely, what I want to talk about here is people who take testosterone. Of course I don't want to imply that trans = hormones, but I also am not talking about all people with testosterone-dominant endocrine systems, the group I'm talking about is specifically those of us...on our second...puberty...

Me: types "second-puberT"

Exeter was great. I saw an old friend C who I'd forgotten had moved there years ago! Lovely to see his new life: his partner and how cozily entangled their lives are, carving out queer space in a city that otherwise doesn't have much; his drag queen persona (I love trans men as drag queens so much); his new and very different career.

The meeting this morning that I was actually in Exeter for seemed to go as well as it could have.

I made good friends with my Guide Dogs counterpart for the day. He covers the southwest and we don't currently have a person to cover the southwest which is why I was there. But he lives so far from Exeter he had also traveled up last night -- we got Told that our meeting was at 10am, even that clearly wasn't ideal for either of us! -- staying in the same Premier Inn as me (it's perfect, you come out of the train station and it's right there ahead of you with a giant sign, most accessible hotel ever). We ran in to each other waiting to board the same bus to the Bad Bus Stops we were here to look at: him with his guide dog and me with my cane, both wondering if the other one was who we thought it was.

We made a good double act, backing each other up on our less well-received points. I'm sad he's so far away! But he's in the part of the southwest I'm more often visiting and I'm super tempted to invite him for a drink if I get the chance!

I had a long journey back, not as crowded or overheated as yesterday's until Birmingham, but with delays it was still two hours after that before I got home.

I stumbled in, drank a lot of ice water, had a shower, ate some dinner (lovely angelofthenorth had made mushroom risotto!), drank some more water, and now I'm lying in front of a fan.

I'm glad to be back home, where there are fans and ice. I bought an iced coffee this morning and there was no ice in it. It wasn't even cold! It was, like, I forgot about this cup of coffee cold, not iced-coffee cold. Ugh. I drank it anyway, but I pined for ice all day. It was 84°F in Exeter, and the first half of our meeting did involve walking up and down a road to look at its terrible bus stops (they really were terrible too -- really did have to be seen to be believed).

I've agreed to go camping this weekend, so I'm enjoying the ice and fans while I can!

At least for camping I won't have to wear my work clothes! I wore a proper shirt for the meeting this morning but immediately afterward took it off of course. I considered jettisoning the binder as well, but the t-shirt I had grabbed to change in to is a tank top and I didn't like that. The binder, my new white one, was extremely visible under the black tank top as it has a higher neckline and wider straps, but I decided that I did not care at all. It was much more comfy and it just looked like I'd layered two different tank tops. The train staff who provided my assistance and checked my tickets didn't misgender me or act weird about it or anything.

The other day I overhead D telling someone that I now naturally have the voice that I put on for my character in our D&D game a couple of years ago.

I was an orc barbarian, heh.

I was delighted to hear this because I hadn't consciously been doing a voice for Bulrik (I went through dozens of orc names I hated in one of the online name generators before finding one I could live with at all, only much later realizing it's most of the name I chose for my self!) and I didn't know that's what I sound like all the time now! How delightful.

I haven't done any conscious voice training at all, just let the testosterone do its work. And I didn't record my voice at any point with the intent of tracking the change, which I guess is a norm in some online cultures. Both of these choices have been conscious decisions made to protect my mental health and I feel really good about that, but it does mean my boundless self-absorption has nothing to work with here! So it's nice to have some external observation.

The other stuff I've been meaning to write about is gonna have to wait; I'm too tired now apparently.

Last month I met someone whose visa has just been approved and who started T today.

What a good day.

I was excited to meet another trans immigrant... so much that I immediately behaved as if there was a kind of intimacy between us that does not in fact exist: I teased him about how he only had a few hours left until he started being stinky...and then as we were leaving he asked me "wait, so about that smell thing, was that serious, because I've been wondering...."

oh no!

But! It worked out okay: I saw him again a fortnight later, and he made a point of telling me I was right about the stinkiness. Which made me smile but also gave me a chance to apologize for saying something that could be so easily misconstrued. I tried to explain about the false sense of intimacy I immediately felt when

He said it was fine, it was funny. To be understood as I'd intended was a relief!

He told me that the person standing next to him, an acquaintance of mine, someone he had been draped over all evening, has been counting his facial hairs.

As of that day there were eight of them.

It was so heartwarming and delightful to see early transition so intimately documented like that. Especially for a masc person; the loving detail is something I'm so much more used to seeing from trans fems.

An online pal posted this, later dismissed it as drunk thoughts, but I love it and as LGBT staff network co-chair I wanna run this at work.

workshop specifically for cis people to “discover their gender”

workshop consists of reflections on questions such as:

• how would you describe your gender?
• what makes you feel that way?
• what attributes are prescribed to your gender, and how do you (or do you not) align with those?
• how about those around you?
• how do others perceive your gender?
• how would you change how others perceive your gender?

everyone knows trans people exist but they consider their gender separately to trans people and innate to themselves. put a stop to it.

Tonight I met someone whose visa has just been approved and who started T today.

What a good day.

I was so excited to meet another trans immigrant.

Got a lift home from trans gym and had a nice chat with my pal on the way. I was singing all my hits; topics covered include:

• ignore the EHRC guidance if you're feeling wobbly
• how to manage a hyperfixation on All This
• the importance of trans joy
• spite is a perfectly valid motivator

They had two bits of trans joy to share: someone they know came out this week as gender diverse, and when they were getting a haircut an old lady was getting her hair dyed rainbow colors in solidarity with her grandson who has his date for top surgery.

I'm wondering where I can find the UK transmasc organizing. (It is probably happening on reddit or bluesky or something that I don't have an account on, I know, sigh.)

Trans mascs/men's specific oppression under the supreme court ruling should be highlighted for itself, not in relation to trans women/fems' oppression, like as an abstract "beards in ladies loos" threat/stunt. (I'm sympathetic to the desire to "gotcha" the incoherent bigotry, but there are transmascs (yes even ones growing facial hair) who are already using the ladies' room because that's the way their safety calculations end up. Also I don't love the idea that beards or any other symbol of masculinity is inherently antithetical to, or exclusive of, femininity.)

Not only do TERFs talk about their "sisters" and "daughters" being swayed into "mutilating their bodies by gender ideology," books discussing this have been international bestsellers. Transphobic writers like Jesse Singal have made a career from anti-transmasculinity as well as transmisogyny.

One of the ways the UKSC ruling seems incoherent (from what I understand, I haven't read it all) is that while it says trans women should be excluded from women's spaces, it also says trans men should be excluded from women's spaces because of the "masculinising" effects of the testosterone we are all presumed to take. (This isn't surprising at least -- the TERFery that informed the decision takes a zero tolerance approach to testosterone -- but it never gets less baffling.)

This leaves trans men/mascs in a very weird position.

For example, can transmascs be removed from women's refuges if they take testosterone because it might "trigger" "survivors" (a status that of course no transmasc person could have, in this worldview)...? And of course I agree that a women's refuge isn't a great place for a transmasc person! But neither can we be left to just fend for ourselves around domestic violence.

A friend joked that if we can't be held in either male or female prison populations does this mean we can't be jailed, but their partner pointed out that transmasc people would likely just be held in solitary confinement.

Anyway. It occurred to me that most of the trans community I have -- certainly the activisty part -- is transfem, so before and after yesterday's protest I made some efforts to find both more trans advocacy and more transmasc community.

I'm in more WhatsApp groups and Discord servers now (sigh...especially because discord has found a new way to be inaccessible for me today! I literally can't scroll downwards!q), but I have plans to join some in-person gatherings this week too.

Another day trip to London for work.

It was a very successful in-person meeting. I'm still not used to the way that middle-aged white men treat me as One of Them now, and I hate how useful that is, but it is really useful.

I met the deadline for responding to a government consultation (in which I said that eight weeks doesn't give sufficient time for meaningful responses; I had two days to do mine thanks to other work).

But my biggest achievement of the whole day is possibly that I got put on my train early enough that I got half undressed very quickly to take off a sweaty uncomfortable binder. No one saw me.

It was so worth it, my journey home is gonna be much more comfy now!