{we're gonna photosynthesize & drink up the sunrise}

[kaberett]

First Charing Cross appointment survived as of Wednesday lunchtime! Barrett did an excellent job of walking the line of the non-actionable; he was determined to tell me lots of incredibly irrelevant anecdotes about his time working with youth offenders, but fundamentally I treated him like an incompetent and irritating supervisor who considered me incompetent and irritating, and this worked well. (Case in point: I successfully rendered him temporarily speechless by telling him very politely that naturally I understood that he had to take a conservative approach...)

Outcomes: I now ~understand~ that ~gender neutrality~ is like ~anarchism~ in that it is inherently unstable and will inevitably collapse into one of democracy or dictatorship (YOU'RE WELCOME); I note that "people find it too difficult to present as gender neutral in ~~~real life~~~" is not in point of fact an argument that gender-neutral identities don't exist, and you position yourself uniquely to believe that in fact they do not; "but what if in a decade's time you don't feel comfortable taking your shirt off on a beach!!!" is not in fact an argument against giving me top surgery now; etc etc. Not dreadful, nothing I couldn't cope with, and next time I possibly get to see Lorimer.


My mental health has improved markedly since starting the vitD, which is extremely pleasant. I am so, so much better; it's a great relief - I'm back down to PHQ-9 score of 8 (from 18 when we tested my bloods). (8 is operating-within-normal-parameters for me -- I am scoring quite highly on the fatigue questions because I've had a long lab stint, and have been in work every day yes-including-weekends since sometime early last week.)


Supervisor is plausibly pleased with me; MSci student has been doing well and it's been lovely to spend some more time with him. I accidentally couldn't teach Thursday afternoon (python to my freshers), so I've agreed to do one-on-one sessions for a student who missed several practicals due to illness, largely out of guilt and desire for lucre but in part because one-on-one is way the hell easier for me.


Lots of Strong Female Protagonist feels today: no glory but honour taps right into the bits of the the Vorkosigan saga that my hindbrain latch onto (I'm doing a reread at the moment because of reasons, and... yeah, I have so many feelings about loyalty and giving one's word on one's name and and and).


I am super enjoying this season of Elementary, having been a bit dubious initially; I intend to be very good and wait to watch episode 4 until sebastienne & my housemate & my useless ex are all in one place (which will happen tomorrow!) so we can go in a pile and watch it collectively (whereupon I will probably have a bunch more feelz at sebastienne as I try to unravel how I feel about these characters and their faces).


A useful articulation established in conversation this week: my nebulous issues about describing things as "dates" and about being marked are in fact about whether the things are about doing-the-thing-with-me-specifically-as-a-person as opposed to me just... being a useful human to do the activity with, with the activity being the main point. Which, you know, also explains my issues with surgery scars rather better than I'd previously managed.


On a completely different topic, facesfriend visited yesterday and we made a pile of food and talked more & it was great! Hurrah for silly grinning. (The silly grinning is quite possibly also helping with the PHQ-9 score, ngl.) (aaaaah terrible jokes and being generally a bit dreadful it is great it is making me so happy)


Awesome things that have arrived at home recently: the Enormous Fucking Whiteboard (A1) that my housemate, bless her, carried the mile home with a partner (having been refused entry to both the Tube & taxis); and the router sent by our new ISP, who is theoretically hooking us up on Saturday at which point I might have home internet again. (On which topic: I sadly described my current sharks to facesfriend, and they went "oh that'll be dhcp then", and then today I FIXED IT and now my laptop connects to internets again!)


More excellent food: Roti King, which the Graun thoroughly Columbused but which is absolutely fantastic, seriously, if you ever need cheap amazing food near Euston get the roti (I default to roti canai, roti cheese & roti kaya; but the roti tissue is also BRILLIANT and my favourite and there is somewhere I can trivially get it that isn't Johor, where I first met it). Also Kailash Momo [warning: flash website] in Woolwich, a Tibetan place whose main courses are pretty much indistinguishable from homefood for me (it's a mountain! it has cheese and potatoes! IT IS THE BEST) apart from the angry citrus Szechuan pepper; both highly recommended.


And -- aaaaah Vienna Teng, I am on a total kick. I want the storm inside you awoken now/I want your warm bright eyes/to never look away.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Case in point: I successfully rendered him temporarily speechless by telling him very politely that naturally I understood that he had to take a conservative approach...

heeeeee

gender neutrality is wait what now?

I'm trying to figure out the balance between "it is not my responsibility to make binarist people see me as nonbinary" and "I want to be legible as nonbinary". Thinking about gender presentation wrt clothes and jewelry mostly, though obviously presence or absence of secondary sex characteristics such as boobs tends to skew perception of gender presentation bc cissexism is a thing.

Hurrah for soon-to-be hometernet!

[littlebutfierce]

Yay for the clinic appt being okayish! Or copeable-with, at least, & hope for seeing a diff doctor next time!

[davidgillon]

Pokes narrative of Charing Cross appointment with long stick, wonders if he would advise an oncologist to use the beach analogy with someone needing a mastectomy, and if not, then doesn't that reflect on the suitability of using it on his own patients! The whole 'gender neutral must inevitably collapse...' narrative is incredibly Medical Model, 'your perception is broken and must be fixed', god forbid we might fix society instead. (Social Model vs Medical Model is one of my bugbears at the best of times)

Well done for surviving medical idiocy on that level without running amok!

I have so many feelings about loyalty and giving one's word on one's name and and and).

This. When the big blow up with Evil Aerospace happened, determination I wasn't going to be snowed under by the disablism, and not to let other people get away with lying about me was a big part of why I wouldn't let them get away with it. It might not have been the stress free option, but it was the option my honour could live with, and if talking about personal honour sounds odd to people, that's their problem, not mine. And Miles is a pretty damned good model of that, now you mention it.

And I'm definitely pointing people at that SFP page.

Yay for normal PHQ-9 levels! Damn that was fast! (Chokes on noticing the 'in which I am photosynthetic' tag, makes note not to mix reading Kaberett and eating nibbles)

[kaberett]

longstanding tag for a reason :-)

Also TBH it's significantly less bad than the vast majority of interactions I've had with medical ~professionals~ about trans stuff, so I'm more-or-less shrugging it off; I was genuinely kind of impressed by the extent to which he walked the line - lots of practice, clearly! - so I just responded with plausible deniability. ;)

[sfred]

Hurray for Vit D and improving mental health!

Glad you survived first Charing Cross appointment ~~lots of complicated thoughts and no words for them~~ - good luck with the next and the next.

[redsixwing]

blee blaa I'm a doctor who doesn't know not to invalidate people bloo.

On the up side, so glad the D is helping. Fixable medical problems are a long shot better than the other kind. (Fingers, helpfully, have designated them 'a long shat.' Not useful, but amusing.)

Obvs. need to read the Vorkosigan(sp?) saga. Like, a lot. I've now seen it referenced by three or four people who I'm pretty sure have excellent taste, and your thoughts regarding honor are really making me want to know what the fuss is about.

Yay, facesfriend! Yay, grinning!

[kaberett]

Be a bit careful of it - I fell head-over-heels in love with it around 4 years ago because actual representation of queers and crips, but I have since read a lot of vastly better stuff and am wincing my way through this reread. In particular it's kind of grim on the topic of intersex folk, on bisexuality (though that kiiiiiiiiind of gets fixed later), on Women Having Sex, and so on, and so forth. These days I pretty much suggest reading up to & including Memory, then abandoning canon for the AU fic I love best (though e.g. azurelunatic can't get into it), What Passing Bells, which does IMO more interesting things with sociology and politics with significantly better writing.

[redsixwing]

Mm. Thank you - I'll approach with care, then. (And probably with the assistance of the library.)

[quartzpebble]

Recently, I like it because it shows repeated fuckups that have consequences but that pretty much everyone gets up from and keeps going. Warts and all, they're still some of my favorite comfort/escape reading.

I've read most of ADS and couldn't really get into it either. I find Miles/Gregor fairly implausible at the best of times (family!) and am not really sold on it there.

[kaberett]

I think some of the reasons that particular bit of squick is obviated for me is that Miles explicitly reflects that Gregor and Miles were a bit too distant age-wise to experience themselves as brothers, in one of the earlyish books? But also - yes, people fuck up and keep on grimly going.

[redbird]

Well, that was my weekend's reading, and thank you.

[kaberett]

Glad you enjoyed! :-)

[redbird]

If I were talking to someone who was actually advocating "gender neutrality is unstable" rather than merely reporting having been told such a thing, I suspect my answer would be "And? So?" Because that being a bad thing makes sense only iff we stipulate that being either male or female is also a bad thing. And if I actually thought it was, I'd encourage people to see if they could get at least a few years away from that.

The other question I have for your doctor is, Does he think you're comfortable topless at the beach now? (I might be comfortable at a defined-as-such nude beach, based on my experience with skinny-dipping among people I knew, but not with going topless at a beach where women as a group were expected to cover our breasts.) He can't really think that the main reason you want the surgery is so you can be topless at the beach, can he?

[highlyeccentric]

I am very perplexed by the beach thing too. Surely if I'm ten years you do not wish to remove your top at a heavy, you will...swim in a rash shirt? How is that even a useful metric for what he's trying to gauge?

[highlyeccentric]

At a BEACH damn phone .

[ysobel]

The ~obvious~ answer is that while they may not be comfortable topless now, being nonbinary -- well, thinking you're nonbinary -- is ~just a phase~ and if they're allowed to ~do something permanent~ like surgery, when they ~come to their senses~ they will ~regret their life choices~ zomg.

(Sarcasm mode on, as well as speaking-for-idiots mode on, in case that wasn't obvious.)

[ex_we935]

That doctor has said something faintly ridiculous and I hope you're not stuck with him, though I'm glad things are improving otherwise. ♥

~K.

[kaberett]

I am indeed not stuck with him. He's head-of-clinic so I thought I'd best see him to start with when offered it (also I'd otherwise not have got an appt til like January-time, and this way I get my second appt in May - there's a six-month gap between them - rather than in June/July; so!) but I now have my next appt letter and it's with The Best Dude a couple weeks before my birthday. :-)

[quartzpebble]

Very glad you're feeling better and that you're navigating fuckery with grace and strategy.

[kaberett]

<3 This is at least fuckery I am well-equipped to deal with.

[mirrorshard]

After that glory/honour comment, I am now thinking Aral/Esme Weatherwax. Or possibly witch!Cordelia. Reward for a job well done, and all that.

[kaberett]

ooooooooooooooooooh

[davidgillon]

Esme: I can't be having with this kinging!

Aral: Um....

Hmmm, Barrayar's Russian heritage probably does mean they have legends about Baba Yaga.....

[kaberett]

They definitely do - Miles makes occasional reference to her.

[vass]

Belated kudos on surviving the Charing Cross appointment.

And I'm super glad about the vitD responding so fast.