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

I wrote and sent (luckily could retrieve in time!!) an email to them from my erik@ address, rather than the Gmail address I've had since 2004 and use for bank stuff and parent stuff and... that's about it now.

I have never even started to do such a thing before, I don't know what happened here! I'm feeling fine today, so for my brain to be so addled is very weird!

Luckily (??), emails sent from the erik@ account from my phone often bring up an error message that means I have to fiddle around a bit to get them sent, and when that happened this time my blood ran cold and I quickly deleted the email altogether. It never got from "outbox" to "sent" so that should be okay!

But sheesh what a near miss!

It was an email about my birthday present too so very obviously from me, I couldn't say it was just spam or something.

I never got around to talking about the other two things that D and I saw that week, Breaking the Code or Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

Breaking the Code is a play that D had seen a TV movie version of (starring Derek Jacobi, that sounds amazing) of a book he's also read and considers the best biography of Alan Turing. D knows quite a lot more about Turing than I do, so I consider this high praise. My knowledge is more on the did-the-walking-tour that that guy (Ed something?) does around "Turing's Manchester," I've seen his mug chained to the radiator at Bletchley Park and for the afternoon I was there I did understand how the bombe worked but I've forgotten again now...and of course I know the tragic ending to his story that queers absorb: prosecution, chemical castration, suicide. I was really enjoying the walking tour until I remembered that bit was coming up at the end...

Anyway, I really enjoyed the play. I liked the epilogue that has been added to it, where a modern-day pupil at the school Turing went to is doing a presentation or something about him for LGBT History Month, which adds his pardon and a little more context to what's otherwise an utterly pointless loss of life. This life also happened to be really important to the second world war, but I am always mindful of how many ordinary lives were diminished in similar ways. I do think that having to be secretive about what he did during the war, even afterward, does offer a sad parallel to his isolation.

The play is set during his time in Manchester, with flashbacks to school and Bletchley and everything and I've no idea how true to life this is but in the play anyway he's wistful about his time at Bletchley, seeing it as a period of freedom, getting to be himself -- he's played with a very autistic affect and a stammer that can be severe, he could be weird and queer and chain his mug to the radiator and he could get away with whatever he wanted because his brain was so important to the war effort.

"Breaking the code" at first seemed an odd name for the play because breaking the code is exactly what -- D taught me -- Turing did not do; three Polish cryptologists did. (Turing developed optimizations to their methods, and created an electromechanical computer which allowed Enigma to be brute-forced much faster. He was a genius and deserves to be recognised as such. But he was part of a team at Bletchley who were building on Polish work, and Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski deserve recognition along with the French spy Hans-Thilo Schmidt and many others.) But of course the phrase can also of course to social codes, which included compulsory heterosexuality. When Turing reports a burglary to the police and in the process tells them he has broken the law -- "gross indecency" -- they have to act on that; he has broken a part of the legal code.

The other metric that D judges a biography of Alan Turing on is whether it says he invented the computer -- he didn't, or if he did it depends on what you mean by "computer" and for that matter "invent" -- and the play could probably have done better at that but it didn't feel egregiously inaccurate either. Turing does at one point say something like "we won the war because of me," but of course saying it doesn't make it so, and he says it to his "bit of rough picked up from the Oxford Road" as the police officer describes the young man, so the possibility of exaggeration to impress (or dismiss?) seems plausible.

Finally in a thing that probably only I noticed, near the end of the play when Turing has met up with an old Bletchley friend, who's now a wife and mother, and he's now infamous for his gay crime. So they have a lot to catch up on. At one point Turing is explaining about his "chemical castration," which was the option he took to avoid prison. I'd known about this, but I'd somehow never until this moment considered that what he'd been given was of course estrogen. They gave him dysphoria, I thought. What an awful thing to do to anybody. Anyway, the thing I noticed is that when Turing tells his friend in his matter-of-fact tone "I'm growing breasts!" all around the auditorium there was a chuckle from the white, older audience who like D and I were spending our Halloween at t the theater. I didn't laugh. Turing cheerfully went on to say something like "No one knows what'll happen to them when I stop getting the injections, if they'll go away or what!" Sitting there, seventy-one years later and a short walk from the stop where we'd gotten off the bus, which I just learned is where he met his "bit of rough from the Oxford Road" as the police officer in the play describes his lover, and a chest flattened with modern compression fabric, I winced. No. If only they just went away again... I was disappointed but not surprised at the room full of respectable theatergoers laughing at this. (The idea that taking estrogen would make someone less horny seemed much more amusing to me, but that's based on knowing so many trans women, and they are of course women and not men who are being punished.)

Oh wait, one other me-specific thing: in the play, Turing's mother did not accept that her son had died by suicide. It reminded me of my own mom, who was outraged when asked by police if my brother might have crashed his car intentionally. I understood that they have to ask but she was livid at the question. Maybe some mothers are just always going to be. You think you know your son so well, maybe better than anyone else, and then it turns out that no one gets to know him any more. I saw this play the day when I'd had that dream about being called my brother's brother so maybe that's why I thought of this.

I actually had the second half of my voice therapy session today, and after some initial nightmarishness with their proprietary system (on Firefox she couldn't see me and on Chrome I couldn't hear her...), she eventually just sent me a Teams link and that worked okay eventually. I asked her to just send our next meeting's link to my work email so I'm less worried about the tech going wrong next time. I still don't know what she got out of seeing me during the voice exercises, except that at one point she told me not to do something as I moved that I wasn't in fact doing.

I turn out to be fantastically bad at some of the basics of these exercizes, which luckily is a fact I could approach with curiosity rather than judgement or negativity toward myself but it is very funny to me.

I also continue to not be judgemental about the pitch of my voice; she said many things to pre-emptively assuage concerns that I didn't turn out to have at all. So it's nice that there are other pitfalls I'm avoiding even as she was visibly surprised at e.g. my inability to hold a hum on one pitch for a whole exhale, heh.

Between this and yoga and The Thing I'm Still Not Writing About and exercise generally, I am thinking a lot more about breathing and moving and how everything in my body is doing, and I am not sure I am coping with this very well. Right now I'm weary of being aware of my body in these ways. But also when I feel myself being too much in my brain or my body I tend to try to lean into the other for a while, and I'm just way too tired to read or write or think much lately. I just feel. And even that, too much.

I had the worst migraine I can remember for a while yesterday evening, only slept four or five hours all night, and got through work today mostly by virtue of it not being a very demanding day. As soon as I turned off my laptop I crawled upstairs and into bed. I dozed a bit but woke up feeling worse. Luckily, the migraine symptoms seemed to depart as suddenly as they'd arrived 24 hours earlier, just in time for me to make a very easy dinner and do a Tesco order to get here tomorrow (and I just remembered, twenty minutes too late to change the order, that I didn't include more burgers to replace the ones I made tonight; what a rookie error!).

I was left with a ton of anxiety (not unusual for me post-migraine) that I'd normally take to the gym and lift some weights about, but my mom said she'd call tonight since I missed her last night with the migraine, so I hung around waiting for that but never heard from her. It felt like such a waste of an evening. I tried to salvage it with sorting out some little things that have been annoying me -- ordering a new phone case because mine's broken, tidying up my work desk the tiniest bit -- but it's been an uncomfortable, unsettling end to an unsatisfying day.

I met someone tonight called Ambrose.

Despite the misery of getting there, the conference was worth attending. Thanks to D's help I got the bus I needed, I wandered in the direction I thought I was supposed to go from the bus stop and immediately was spotted by someone calling my name; it was one of two event organizers who'd recognize me. That felt very lucky.

My keynote speech was the second of three, which meant I didn't have to deal with all the technical failures of the first one and I wasn't the last thing in the day so I could decide after little sleep and long days in hot rooms and trains that I could leave early. My travel home was much smoother (if sweatier) and being home at dinnertime instead of bedtime did wonders for me.

The conference only had a couple dozen in-person attendees but apparently seven hundred online. I forgot the whole introductory section I had worked so hard on, but it went fine without it. There was still good discussion in the room during the Q&A bit, people are saying nice things on LinkedIn, and I was able to make friends with the first keynote speaker over lunch and she's a very useful work contact for me.

Yesterday at work was rough. I slept through my alarm -- something I never do -- and when I turned on my laptop an hour late I already had missed a call from my manager who'd had to route around me not being available when his manager tagged me to do something. So that was stressful but I was able to complete the task in a reasonably timely fashion, and while it is not my best work I think it ended up being one of those things that we didn't end up needing anyway. It was a slow day at work otherwise.

Unusually for a Thursday, there was no Doof so D and I decided to go to a queer social that we usually miss because it's every Thursday. He'd also invited a person new to the local discord and it was great to meet them too. We stayed out late (for us: he had to do his last-minute before-midnight duolingo lesson while we were waiting at the bus stop to go home!) and had a great time.

Today, the editing process my report has to go through was finished unexpectedly early, so I had to decide whether to accept or reject thousands of track changes. The editing was a weird process last time which we tried to streamline this time because we're up against a tight deadline. I tried to write to the style guide (now that I've laid eyes on it! I didn't know there was one before), but the style guide sucks and the editor I have to work with isn't good at using it. He also thinks all his own opinions and foibles are "just general grammar" and twice lately he mentioned "not using the passive voice" as if that was a) desirable or b) well understood by people who claim to care about it. I cannot cope with someone who doesn't know the difference between what's "correct" by even the widest interpretation of that word, what's a matter of register, and what's stylistics.

After work I had two startling and unsettling things happen in the space of about 15 minutes, the first of which I won't talk about here but the second of which is that I'd forgotten about my mom mentioning that some family friends were traveling to England on vacation and "are going to be somewhere near you." Of course I asked where and of course she didn't remember. She wanted to know if she should tell T to call me when they got here, "...if their phones even work there..." FFS. She should know their phones won't work here because hers and my dad's phones never work when they are here but of course she hadn't thought about it that deeply. She just is a boomer so would call. Well we're millennials so we can email!

I forgot immediately about this of course, in the sea of parental nonsense. T is an anglophile and a history teacher so tends to come to London and Canterbury and whatnot with school trips of teenagers. At least one other time, before covid, we vaguely arranged to meet up when she was here on a vacation but she was in London then and I think it was around Christmas so the trains were all fucked up and I was too poor to go to London on short notice anyway.

My mom might think they're "close to me" when they're in Ireland or something so I wasn't worried about it. But it turns out they are close to me! D and I now have plans to go see them on Sunday!

This does bring up the awkward point of how, if at all, I'll hide my life from them. My parents exhibit untold levels of oblivousness but surely other people might think my beard and voice and everything are surprising enough to be remarked upon when they get home!

I made the plan like normal but am not sure how to approach it now.

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.