[embodiment] achievements... unlocked?
Feb. 25th, 2025 11:11 pmIn Which I Have Adventures In Menstruation.
( Read more... )
[surgery] crafts
Nov. 25th, 2024 10:04 pmIt dawned on me this evening that a thing I can do to make my hospital stay more pleasant is: big ol' sign with my pronouns on to stick on the whiteboard above my bed, plus wee cards to hand out with pronouns on the front and, on the back, a short blurb to the effect of "I know this is genuinely (neurologically!) hard if you're not already used to it, but it will mean a lot to me if you try to use gender-neutral language when talking about me. Don't worry about making mistakes -- please just try to catch it, correct yourself, and move on."
... so yeah I'm rediscovering that graphic design is hard.
(I'm also kind of baffled that this sort of thing does not seem to already exist on Etsy? And, yeah, part of that is going to be that I'm going for conciliatory -- but that's a deliberate conscious choice and application of weaponised good faith in service of ambassadorship/outreach/education... so, I dunno, depending on how it winds up working maybe I want to set up an Etsy for it...)
[A footpath divided by an iron railing leads up a short hill. Against a blue sky and a bare tree, a sign attached to a lamp post points the way to the Freud Museum.]
[music] amusement of the day
Dec. 28th, 2021 11:59 pmI have talked before about Frank Turner, and about how he has (and I say this very fondly) relatively recently Discovered Toxic Masculinity and also Invented Feminism and generally very clearly been doing a lot of work on himself. I sincerely hope he is doing as much better as the music makes it sound, right.
But. But.
Adam found me an NME article about him. Specifically, about his trans parent, whom he previously thought of as his father.
And. Well.
I've spent a lot of today making A, and also various other people I know who like his stuff, listen to Father's Day (lyrics).
Because goodness me.
But. But.
Adam found me an NME article about him. Specifically, about his trans parent, whom he previously thought of as his father.
And. Well.
I've spent a lot of today making A, and also various other people I know who like his stuff, listen to Father's Day (lyrics).
Because goodness me.
... it's a census year.
Mar. 6th, 2021 11:44 amAnd, look, I do in fact recognise all the work involved in arriving at inclusion of a question about gender identity with a write-in field, but I still mostly want to scream and also cry.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Alright, so. The collected works of Becky Chambers.
A caveat: I can, sort of, see the appeal, if I squint. I can see how they might be just right for someone's id. I even, mostly, look at the core idea and think oooh, that's interesting, I am interested in the exploration of this-- and then the execution, for the most part, leaves me anywhere from indifferent to frustrated.
As such, there's a serious risk that this post constitutes squee-harshing, so please approach with caution, because it is in fact okay to love things I dislike (and I won't think less of you if you do!).
Content notes for discussions of transmisia, medical gatekeeping, and (unrelated) gore. Spoilers for To Be Taught, If Fortunate, plus discussion of a key worldbuilding point in record of a spaceborn few.
( To Be Taught, If Fortunate )
( record of a spaceborn few )
A caveat: I can, sort of, see the appeal, if I squint. I can see how they might be just right for someone's id. I even, mostly, look at the core idea and think oooh, that's interesting, I am interested in the exploration of this-- and then the execution, for the most part, leaves me anywhere from indifferent to frustrated.
As such, there's a serious risk that this post constitutes squee-harshing, so please approach with caution, because it is in fact okay to love things I dislike (and I won't think less of you if you do!).
Content notes for discussions of transmisia, medical gatekeeping, and (unrelated) gore. Spoilers for To Be Taught, If Fortunate, plus discussion of a key worldbuilding point in record of a spaceborn few.
( To Be Taught, If Fortunate )
( record of a spaceborn few )
shout-out to UK trans adults
Jan. 31st, 2020 01:32 pmA new project, Improving the integration of care for trans adults, has recently launched and is seeking survey responses from people whose gender does not correspond (partially or completely) with the gender they were assigned at birth, who are over the age of eighteen, and who currently live in the UK.
I know and am happy to vouch for several of the (trans!) people running this.
I know and am happy to vouch for several of the (trans!) people running this.
adventures in titles
Nov. 23rd, 2019 11:31 pmThings the Nationwide building society will happily offer me as a title include, but are not limited to: Admiral of the Fleet! Air Vice Marshal or Air Vice Marshall! Cavaliere! Contessa and Countess and Contessa De and Countess of! Dow Marchioness! Eur Ing!
Things Nationwide will not offer me as a title: Mx.
Honorific Nationwide is now using to address me, selected from their almost-but-not-quite-exhaustive list: Dom.
Things Nationwide will not offer me as a title: Mx.
Honorific Nationwide is now using to address me, selected from their almost-but-not-quite-exhaustive list: Dom.
Ann Leckie & Turkish & pronouns, oh my
Oct. 29th, 2019 10:21 amAs I occasionally mention, I'm learning Turkish on Duolingo, partly for interest (second non-Indo-European language! agglutination! vowel & consonant harmony!) and partly because it's turned out to be rather more useful in my day-to-day life than I anticipated when I started (for reasons various).
One of the things I find really very soothing about Turkish is that it's a language that doesn't have grammatical gender, and doesn't have gendered pronouns. Unfortunately, Duolingo hasn't quite caught up with current usage, which means that translations of the third-person singular pronoun "o" get marked wrong unless you use "he" or "she" (rather than "they"); obviously I stubbornly default to translating as "she".
I am also, As We Know, really very fond of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, which "she" as the universal gender-irrelevant third-person singular.
Taken together, this means I'm occasionally catching myself defaulting to gender-irrelevant/gender-unknown usage of "she" in English, and possibly drifting slightly more towards third-person singular "they" as indicating a specific gender space.
I am, as you might well imagine, rather facepalmy over the Entire Situation.
One of the things I find really very soothing about Turkish is that it's a language that doesn't have grammatical gender, and doesn't have gendered pronouns. Unfortunately, Duolingo hasn't quite caught up with current usage, which means that translations of the third-person singular pronoun "o" get marked wrong unless you use "he" or "she" (rather than "they"); obviously I stubbornly default to translating as "she".
I am also, As We Know, really very fond of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, which "she" as the universal gender-irrelevant third-person singular.
Taken together, this means I'm occasionally catching myself defaulting to gender-irrelevant/gender-unknown usage of "she" in English, and possibly drifting slightly more towards third-person singular "they" as indicating a specific gender space.
I am, as you might well imagine, rather facepalmy over the Entire Situation.
tiny braveries: a miscellany
Oct. 1st, 2019 10:32 pm- Today was our first lab meeting with the new students, and we ended up going around the room doing brief introductions: name, years through degree, rough thesis area. So I gave my pronouns like it was no big deal and moved calmly on to making the room laugh by giving a deadpan explanation of being in my sixth year of PhD (three to four years is normal). Nobody else followed my lead on that, alas, but I did it and the world didn't end.
- I've dealt with all the necessary paperwork (bar actually showing up with proof of address) to regain Reader status at the BL, in order to place a request for a 1966 paper published in the Journal of the Faculty of Science, University of Tokyo, Section II, which has not at all been digitised and exists online only as a citation. The BL, bless them, apparently have a copy in their off-site stacks, so on Thursday I get to go in and find out how little of it I can read. (It's almost certainly almost entirely in, well, Japanese, but I am mildly hopeful that table headings will be in Roman script such that I can extract the two bits of data I want with minimal additional screeching.) I feel Awfully Grown Up to be requesting materials delivered to SCIENCE - 2.
- Rather to my own astonishment, I am impatiently looking forward to my supervisor meeting on Thursday. I've not Finished All The Prep For It, even, and yet I want to Talk Science instead of mostly experiencing a creeping sense of dread. (It's a sense of dread that's much reduced since 2011, which is a victory in itself.)
- I have, in the past week, experienced two buses breaking, of which one went entirely out of service, during "normal" operation of the ramp. I managed, at least outwardly, to behave as though this was not in any sense my fault, and as though I was at least as inconvenienced by the failure of the bus company to adequately maintain their fleet as everybody else who was taking the bus. I am particularly proud of myself for this one. (I didn't apologise to anybody.)
- I did a small social during the tea break at orchestra on Monday night. I! Chatted to people! And enjoyed it! I've been being standoffish and withdrawn and Defensively Reads A Book with two Very Small exceptions basically since I started going, but all of a sudden this week I... socialised??? WELL DONE ME.
facetious geometries of gender
Sep. 18th, 2019 11:29 pmEarlier:
Which is how I got to, well, this:
The image is a terrible MS Paint-style sketch, showing two objects.On the left is a tetrahedron, with the top vertex is labelled A; the bottom left is labelled NB; the bottom right is labelled F; the bottom front is labelled M. On the right is a triangle, similarly labelled: top left NB, top right F, bottom M.
The context is that I explained that a ternary diagram is something I use in geochemistry, and I get quite Catholic about trinities, so clearly trinary was the way to go.
... but wait, I said, now I want to draw a diagram of a triangle with the appropriately labelled vertices!!! obviously this has the perpetual problem of reducing gender to a component-based system but I'm still really amused by it!!!
The idea being, right, that at the base of the tetrahedron you've got a plane. If we (this is facetious) categorise any given gender as some combination of female, male, and non-binary, that can be represented as a coordinate in said plane. This is similar to how we represent the chemical composition of feldspars: you make a ternary diagram, with the vertices labelled as K2O/orthoclase & microcline (top), Na2O/albite (bottom left), and CaO/anorthite (bottom right), and you get a solid solution that hugs the left-hand border of your triangle: in this band, a stable mineral of that composition (with those proportions of potassium, sodium and calcium) exist, and outside it they don't and you instead get a mixture of different minerals. For bonus points, the solid solution is temperature-dependent: at "low" temperatures (less than about 700°C), there's a gap between albite and K-spars (orthoclase and microcline) where there's no single stable mineral and you again end up with a mixture of different minerals. (They're very pretty under the microscope!)
And then sometimes you actually want a fourth vertex, so instead of sticking to a 2D representation you shift to 3D, and a tetrahedron, and this is mostly deployed for what's called CMAS in geochemistry terms, but the point is that A Single Plane might not be enough to represent what's going on; you might want vertical distance too.
ENTER THE GENDER TETRAHEDRON.
I propose (still facetiously) a model in which we've got the base plane of female-male-nonbinary, along with another component, agender. The closer to any vertex your gender experience lies, the more dominant the influence of that vertex. So, for example, you might be up near the agender vertex, with only weak influences from everything else; or you might be on the agender-female edge; or you might be on what's thought of as the "traditional gender spectrum", the male-female edge. Or if you're genderfluid but definitely experience gender you might lie somewhere on the M-F-NB face on any given day, or perhaps your gender amplitude fluctuates but you're definitely never a man, and you wander around the A-F-NB face.
Or maybe you occupy some other plane through this gendered space! Maybe your gender is temperature-dependent! We can take different slices through the tetrahedron at different heights, such that the total gender area corresponds to the total gender strength!
This is thoroughly silly and absolutely not intended to be A Complete Theory Of Anything, but it was an excuse to combine (1) geochemical representations of the world, (2) nerding about gender, and (3) dubious art, so, you know, that's been a very pleasant diversion for me this afternoon.
sebastienne: But yeah I thought v-pillows were an obscure pregnancy thing and here's one in Dunelm for £18
Which is how I got to, well, this:
The image is a terrible MS Paint-style sketch, showing two objects.On the left is a tetrahedron, with the top vertex is labelled A; the bottom left is labelled NB; the bottom right is labelled F; the bottom front is labelled M. On the right is a triangle, similarly labelled: top left NB, top right F, bottom M.
The context is that I explained that a ternary diagram is something I use in geochemistry, and I get quite Catholic about trinities, so clearly trinary was the way to go.
... but wait, I said, now I want to draw a diagram of a triangle with the appropriately labelled vertices!!! obviously this has the perpetual problem of reducing gender to a component-based system but I'm still really amused by it!!!
The idea being, right, that at the base of the tetrahedron you've got a plane. If we (this is facetious) categorise any given gender as some combination of female, male, and non-binary, that can be represented as a coordinate in said plane. This is similar to how we represent the chemical composition of feldspars: you make a ternary diagram, with the vertices labelled as K2O/orthoclase & microcline (top), Na2O/albite (bottom left), and CaO/anorthite (bottom right), and you get a solid solution that hugs the left-hand border of your triangle: in this band, a stable mineral of that composition (with those proportions of potassium, sodium and calcium) exist, and outside it they don't and you instead get a mixture of different minerals. For bonus points, the solid solution is temperature-dependent: at "low" temperatures (less than about 700°C), there's a gap between albite and K-spars (orthoclase and microcline) where there's no single stable mineral and you again end up with a mixture of different minerals. (They're very pretty under the microscope!)
And then sometimes you actually want a fourth vertex, so instead of sticking to a 2D representation you shift to 3D, and a tetrahedron, and this is mostly deployed for what's called CMAS in geochemistry terms, but the point is that A Single Plane might not be enough to represent what's going on; you might want vertical distance too.
ENTER THE GENDER TETRAHEDRON.
I propose (still facetiously) a model in which we've got the base plane of female-male-nonbinary, along with another component, agender. The closer to any vertex your gender experience lies, the more dominant the influence of that vertex. So, for example, you might be up near the agender vertex, with only weak influences from everything else; or you might be on the agender-female edge; or you might be on what's thought of as the "traditional gender spectrum", the male-female edge. Or if you're genderfluid but definitely experience gender you might lie somewhere on the M-F-NB face on any given day, or perhaps your gender amplitude fluctuates but you're definitely never a man, and you wander around the A-F-NB face.
Or maybe you occupy some other plane through this gendered space! Maybe your gender is temperature-dependent! We can take different slices through the tetrahedron at different heights, such that the total gender area corresponds to the total gender strength!
This is thoroughly silly and absolutely not intended to be A Complete Theory Of Anything, but it was an excuse to combine (1) geochemical representations of the world, (2) nerding about gender, and (3) dubious art, so, you know, that's been a very pleasant diversion for me this afternoon.
some good things make a post
Sep. 13th, 2019 11:05 pm- I am continuing to really enjoy all of the changes testosterone is making to my body. ( Read more... )
- Bog mummy continues the best hairstyle I have yet tried for Getting Labwork Done with minimal sensory argh, and I can just about get it brushed & back up again in the time it takes to get from Oakwood to Finsbury Park (where I change from the Piccadilly to the Victoria, because it's very slightly faster and, more importantly, it means I only have to deal with one lift at Green Park.)
- I spent a bunch of today thoroughly settling in with Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), during the sitting-and-waiting parts of lab, and I continue astonished by how immediate and vivid and real all of her writing feels.
- Paper continues trundling along; need to make a few more tweaks following feedback from primary supervisor, and then we'll be circulating around (potential) co-authors early next week to solicit feedback/comment/etc. (If they have substantive contributions they're welcome on board; if they mostly just want a bit of a discussion in passing they will get gratefully acknowledged.) I'm feeling pretty good about the shape of the science there.
- I have been really enjoying your collective enthusiasm for the What Do I Even Do All Day post. <3
- We've had a run of excellent sunsets: good illuminated clouds yesterday, and then today the sky was completely clear and the colour gradient to the west was stunning.
- I've taken to carrying a small pot of rosebuds with me, in addition to the travel mug, so that I can have a Fancy Warm Drink when out & about should the mood take me, which is how I came to spend some of my afternoon drinking rose tea and wrangling references while on campus. It is exceedingly pleasant.
- A changed the bedlinen, night before last, and I have been very much enjoying - and am now very much anticipating - curling up and savouring it, with bonus points for I Didn't Have To Make It Happen.
- Past!Alex made me lots of treats: dinner was a slice of toast with peanut butter, from this morning's bread, plus the end of the butternut squash risotto I made earlier in the week, plus a scoop of the apricot-and-soured-cream ice cream. Thank you, past me. <3
- Dinner with wonderful ex-housemate C last night, post-lab, at Sagar, where I did not get the paper dosa but did nevertheless eat dosa; heading to Kew with her tomorrow to spend some more time looking at Chihuly.
ten good things
Jul. 19th, 2019 11:16 pm- I bought myself flowers! Because I do this, occasionally: mostly stripy tulips, but on this occasion as I was wandering around looking at other reduced bits, an enormous bouquet of sunflowers and white roses got further reduced from £5.79 or thereabouts (from an original £15) to £1.79 and I pounced, and now it is in a vase on the dining table and making me happy.
- Both supervisors have now signed off on my second data chapter, to the tune of "Yeah, look at it again when you're finalising the writing up but this is currently in better shape than a lot of chapters we've examined, well done you". There was even some good-natured joshing about my proclivity for semicolons.
- Paperwork has been filed with a partner institution requesting the samples I'm aiming to work on for my final portion of the project. I was pointed at the existing publication on the samples; I decided how I wanted to shortlist them and why; those are pretty much exactly what we've requested, in the end. (We dropped a couple, but haven't added anything, which feels pretty good.) And I advocated for a reasonable work pattern that my supervisor was a little dubious about, so, y'know, let's see how much lab time I can cram in between now and December.
- I have also actually done a sterling job of talking myself down from some PhD-related rejection hypersensitivity, to the tune of being able to offer myself plausible alternate explanations essentially immediately and mostly actually hold onto them (with a few wobbles) over the course of a Somewhat Stressful Day (lots of it eustress, but, as M points out in my head, That's Still Stress).
- Testosterone. ( Read more... )
- I am -- finally! -- starting to settle into and enjoy the current short story collection, not least because it turns out they're doing the thing of being less standalones and more interlinked and slightly overlapping; main characters at one life stage in one story show up as background characters at quite another time of life in another, which is letting the bit of my hindbrain that finds short stories (and especially short story collections) Difficult relax a bit.
- Being back in the old labs is (we have two clean lab suites) is Interesting but, I think, on balance good: on the one hand everything's rather older such that e.g. there's a slightly alarming amount of rust in some places, and there are fewer mod cons, and I've got a rather less convenient arrangement of cupboards to store my miscellania in, but on the other everything is a sort of creamy beige instead of SCREAMING WHITE and as a result it... hurts much less to exist in, as a space, and that's a relief. (I mean, I knew I was keeping most of the lights in the new labs off, given the option, and I knew I was finding it a Difficult environment, but I think I'd managed to lose track of quite how difficult, because they "ought" to be easier to work in, see also: mod cons.)
- Other mental health work paying off: no noticeable spike in separation anxiety this evening, and a whole lot of buffer to be kind to myself with if it had, in spite of the Everything.
- All of the ice cream mix has now been churned, which shifts fridge space to freezer space and also means there is now apricot ice cream both with and without raspberry ripple (and I really must get to the allotment for long enough to pick a pile more raspberries and turn them into cake/lemonade/etc).
- Quiet evening largely curled up on the sofa and gently socialising via the magic of the internet, yes good.
[healthwork] T+4 weeks; gym
Jun. 28th, 2019 11:25 amI started testosterone, as one pump per day of Tostran, on the first of June. ( Read more... )
Last year, at the beginning of July, post-top surgery, I got my act together to join my local gym and resume doing rehab physio per UCLH's instructions. I talked about this a bit last August, and it is actually useful for me to review Progress I Have Made, so I'm going to do that. Numbers below the cut (relating to resistance/reps/etc, no bodyweight). ( Read more... )
Last year, at the beginning of July, post-top surgery, I got my act together to join my local gym and resume doing rehab physio per UCLH's instructions. I talked about this a bit last August, and it is actually useful for me to review Progress I Have Made, so I'm going to do that. Numbers below the cut (relating to resistance/reps/etc, no bodyweight). ( Read more... )
two photos of my chest
May. 23rd, 2019 09:44 pmThe t-shirt I wore to cast my second vote today:
(I was a proxy. It didn't occur to me until after I'd already cast my first vote that of course this was the most appropriate clothing I owned for the occasion. For your amusement: the album title is Fixed Ideals.)
Beneath the cut, a very similar photo, minus the t-shirt. It's exactly one year since I got top surgery. NSFW, probably.
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(I was a proxy. It didn't occur to me until after I'd already cast my first vote that of course this was the most appropriate clothing I owned for the occasion. For your amusement: the album title is Fixed Ideals.)
Beneath the cut, a very similar photo, minus the t-shirt. It's exactly one year since I got top surgery. NSFW, probably.
( Read more... )
Until May 28th, 10am PDT. Hat-tip to armaina; my interest in this is primarily people enthusing at me about how gender is handled. :-)
(Criticism also welcome! But mostly I want squee. I... cannot afford to disappear into A New Timesink right now, but A has downloaded it, so maybe at some future point I will pootle around in his copy.)
armaina; my interest in this is primarily people enthusing at me about how gender is handled. :-)(Criticism also welcome! But mostly I want squee. I... cannot afford to disappear into A New Timesink right now, but A has downloaded it, so maybe at some future point I will pootle around in his copy.)
- I engaged in kind and gentle enquiry on the topic of Brexit. (Draw parallels between the People's Vote and Erdoğan all you like, but I will ask you to explain to me why that's a better comparison than, say, Switzerland. Because I do not, in fact, get it.)
- Today in Alex vs Bureaucracy: I have made a GP appointment for the end of the month. I will probably start getting HRT shortly thereafter. (!) I have also e-mailed the council (after they failed to pick up the phone) explaining that (i) I do not have a key to the toilet block on site, and if my plot is being rated as Grade A presumably I should have one, and (ii) given that at least a third of my plot is covered in carpet AND THEN RAISED BEDS I would very much appreciate it if they would either give me a rebate on rent for the year or arrange to help me clear said carpet, which was evidently laid in contravention of a previous plot-holder's tenancy agreement. A key has been put in the post, and my rent for the year has been waived.
- A is dyed and shorn; my todo list for the week includes actually taking some photos of him and making a list of the dyes I've used for future reference. (It turns out I did remember all the colours I'd used, but it'd be nice to be a little less uncertain next time around.)
- hello how are you I am really enjoying and appreciating how much you all are commenting <3
not braining content notes for this but There Are Some
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Stubborn positivity:
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Stubborn positivity:
- A came home via the big supermarket the other evening, bearing gifts: specifically, cut-price nonsense geometric chocolates in a variety of flavours. I had in fact been eyeing that very box up every time I went past and feeling like I couldn't possibly justify getting it, so it was a Very Nice Surprise.
- Movement: my knee is still coping with increased resistance + cardio at gym, and I'm starting to feel like I'm getting meaningful exercise out of it, as well as increased stability/physio work.
- Kew is putting on a massive bullshit sculpture trail this summer, which I found out yesterday, and I am really looking forward to it. I am intending to make at least one evening-opening visit, along with hopefully multiple daytime visits. (Specifically, it's bullshit abstract glass sculpture by the dude responsible for the V&A chandelier, which I'm enormously fond of.)
- I have used up all the ravioli filling... and still have an eighth of the dough left, so that's going to get turned into another batch of tagiatelle, I think. (Dinner was ravioli. It was good.)
- M posted new fic and I spent Some Time rolling around in it and asking yet more questions.
- A is making great strides towards (i) sorting the Piles such that we can meaningfully get rid of them and (ii) putting things on Freegle (after Freecycle didn't bite). Order is emerging from chaos and it is doing my brain a good.
- I managed to leave the house today while it was actually still light -- down to the end of the road for a Pokémon raid (hiiii Shinx). AND on the way back from the gym we got a NEW SPECIES, which, yes hurrah good there had never previously been one of those spawned that I could actually get to.
- w8rose does a raspberry-and-passion-fruit cheesecake, it's currently cut price, and it's exactly what I wanted.
- I do in fact have a bunch of useful How To Humaning-related expertise, and I am in fact managing to help people make their lives better using it, and they are in fact learning principles and frameworks from me such that they can work more of this shit out for themselves independently, and I am pretty fuckin' proud of them.
- I am, very shortly, going to go curl up in a bed that doesn't actively hurt me, underneath an anger blanket, with a hot water Adam, and I am going to sleep.
