An Unexpected Transition Milestone In The Dutch Sunshine

    It's the height of summer, and in the circles I move in, that means it's hacker camp season. I think I've mentioned hacker camps before when I talked about last summer's EMF Camp, for the uninitiated they're akin to a music festival but with the music replaced by the accumulated works of a large cross-section of the hardware hacker and maker community.
    So a couple of weeks ago I made the trip to the Dutch polders for several days in the sun with Europe's hackers for SHA Camp, the latest iteration of the four-yearly Dutch hacker camp. As always it was an amazing experience, I'm still in festival comedown, and life seems like a wasteland until next year's return of EMF Camp. It was my first trip to the Netherlands, I met my friend Stace for an afternoon coffee and pancake, and it was very good to see her looking so happy. Our last face-to-face meeting had been when we were both pre-transition, so there was a lot of water under the bridge.
    At SHA Camp, I found myself unexpectedly in demand. I should explain why, as I've never really brought my everyday life and identity together with this blog because it has its origins in the days when I most definitely inhabited a closet, but now I've been full-time for so many years and am reasonably comfortable in my existence there is little harm in lifting a little of the curtain. I'm self employed, but these days a large proportion of my income comes from journalism, in particular my role as one of the editors of an extremely popular website in the hardware hacker and maker community. If you're wondering why I write a little less here than I should, it's because all my writing-fu is consumed by writing for hackaday.com, and I lack the creative energy after pouring it into that. As the only electronic engineering graduate on the planet whose literacy has been honed by years working for the dictionary you probably have on the shelf, I was uniquely qualified for this work, and have taken to it with enthusiasm over the last couple of years. I get paid to play with tech and write about it, and I still can't quite believe it.
    So as an editor of a website with a huge reach in that community, I find myself in a very novel position indeed. Mine is a name my peers have increasingly heard of, and coupled with my being a very distinctive extremely tall British trans woman, this gives me something of a personal brand in my world. I thus found myself being welcomed into hackerspace villages, shown all the cool stuff, offered cool beer under the Dutch sun. For the first time in my life, I was in demand.
    I was never one of the popular kids at school, and in general as a rather depressive and withdrawn closet trans person I have not been the life and soul of the party over most of my lifetime. So I am unused to this kind of attention, and am at a bit of a loss. It's great to be a part of the vibrant and happening community of hardware hackers and makers, and great to be accepted as who I am. Nobody here knew the pre-transition me, so all they know me only as Jenny who writes for Hackaday.
    And that touches on something else which has vexed me slightly for years. The trans community has its fair share of journalists, but am I speaking out of turn when I say that I find some of them to be a little hard work? So many trans journalists aim to become trans celebrities in their own right, to be the sole voice of what it is to be trans. They are invariably fast-transitioners who have no obstacles in their path because either they pay to go private with all the mod-cons or the NHS doctors ease their passage because they know it'll be written about, and often their perfect transitions are then presented as "the trans experience" without ever acknowledging that for most of us it's very hard work. Their whole brand is built on their being "Trans whoever", "Whoever who transitioned", or "Whoever who used to be another name".
    I'm very pleased to have avoided that, to have become a successful journalist in my field post transition, and to have done it on the strength of my skills outside being trans. I'm not "Jenny who transitioned", "Trans Jenny", or "Jenny who used to be [old name]", I'm just "Jenny who writes about tech", and I value that immensely.
    So in a way, SHA Camp represents an unexpected transition milestone. Not in any medical sense, there's further to go there, but in a socialisation sense. After quite a few years living the life and getting on with it, I've arrived and found my place completely independently of my pre-transition life.
    And it's a good life, after all that's what it's all about, isn't it.

Nun better

    Ooh look, it's the last day of the month, and Jenny's feeling guilty again that she's not written anything! Truth is, writing for a living consumes all of my muse, and several times I've sat down only to have my inspiration evaporate. As though I have a certain number of words within me on a given day, and once I've used them all then that's it.
    We're not supposed to enjoy wearing the clothes, are we. It's the discipline imposed upon us by the medics, scared of regretters they insist that those of us who transition must not be cross-dressers, and certainly must not be doing it because they like the clothing. It's a completely crazy distinction, because the nature of our condition means that identities are fluid. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with enjoying wearing something, as many natal women will tell you.
    So I found myself last week in the odd position of breaking that particular Golden Rule. It was a Halloween party organised by a community organisation of which I'm a member, and I'd made my own costume. As realistic as I could make it, a mediaeval nun. I had an old Army tent that had gone into holes, made from dark brown canvas, the perfect fabric. A lot of research, and raiding my mother's worn-out-sheet box for some distressed white linen, and I had made a startlingly good costume. Tunic, scapular, St. Birgita's cap, wimple, veil, outer veil, and belt and crucifix. Sorry, no pictures, but it was definitely not the fake nun costume they were expecting.
    Unsurprisingly I have never worn a wimple before. It's a tapered fabric tube that ends in a face-sized hole. You cover your hair with the St. Birgita's cap - a fabric cap that starts on your forehead and ties at the back of your head - and put your head through the wimple so the wide end of the tube covers your shoulders - mediaeval nuns didn't have the big white collars, they came later - and adjust the narrow end so it goes under your chin and pulls tight somewhere on the top of your head. There are a couple of tapes you tie behind your head to pull it taught, and there you are, forehead covered by the white fabric of the cap and cheeks and chin by the wimple. The veils then fit over the top of your head and are then either pinned in place or in my case tied by another set of tapes behind the head. This would have been standard wear for any mature woman until about the 14th or 15th centuries, though it is a garment that has only lingered on in holy orders since then.
    The surprise for me was that not only was it a very comfortable garb to wear, it also felt secure. Your hair is out of the way, your forehead's covered, no worries about gaping necklines. It's almost like the security of retreating under the bedclothes as a child, you are no longer exposed having retreated inside the veil, and your view of the world is framed by it. Quite a powerful effect, and unexpected.
    The costume is now folded up in a drawer, and will no doubt be forgotten until some random time in the future at which it will be discovered and exclaimed over. As my friend Dawn used to put it usually when referring to outlandish frilly creations sported by our more adventurous friends, you wouldn't wear it to Tesco. But I'm not ashamed to say it was something the wearing of which I found surprisingly pleasant, even if it does stray close to that Golden Rule.
    The really amusing part is that also present was another friend who I also know through my church. an LGBT outreach that crosses denominations. Now all of them will know of my moonlighting in a habit, and I'll have to patiently explain that low-church rural Anglicans don't do that kind of thing.
    At least, not on Sundays.

Indian Summer

    One of the sweetest things we grow here is a pear, a variety called Fertility because its pollen will fertilise all other pear varieties. My mother I think had the idea that we'd have more pear trees in the orchard than in fact we ended up with. Its pears are small and they don't keep, but they are juicy and very pleasant to eat. I've spent today doing a bit of cooking with these pears, and have reduced a jug of very sweet and sticky pear syrup and used the resulting pear pulp in a cake. If you've never used apples or pears in baking, you should give it a try.
    We're enjoying an Indian summer here in Southern England. The nights are drawing in and there's a suspicion that frost can't be far away, but the days are bright and sunny with temperatures warm enough to wear a t-shirt, if not to make you sweat. It's summer's last hurrah before the descent into damp and cold, mud and rotting vegetation.
    So this'll be my first full winter at my parents place in quite a while. At home most of the time as I'm working for myself and conserving my money, the rural idyl can become an oppressive prison of crushing loneliness if I'm not careful. I should be used to it after forty years, but I remember the period when I came back from university and felt as if my life had been cut off. I'm not without friends locally so it's not all doom and gloom, but sometimes a rural winter can be hard going.
    In a couple of weeks I'll be off to Cambridgeshire, my friend C's newborn is to be baptised. If we're lucky the Indian summer will still provide, but it's more likely to be a thick tights and boots kind of day. Welcome really, what with no longer working in an office and that it's been so long since I went to anything like this I've not had the excuse to dress up for ages.
    At least I've not reached that point of any rarely-worn nice clothes I own having become unfashionable.
 

I'm sure that everybody knows...

I'm sure that everybody knows how much my body hates me
It lets me down most every time and makes me rash and hasty

    When I was an earnest young sound and light engineer, that Billy Bragg song was a standard of the student cover bands. Probably because Billy does not have the voice of an angel so is easy to copy, and his politics fitted very well in the left-wing ideology of an early '90s student union. You may recognise the red-haired backing singer.
    For some reason the song was my earworm the other day, driving up to a east Midlands town to see some friends. Not just any friends, the lesbian couple I am helping to start a family. Too Much Information, or what!
    Plotting a traffic free route round the hell of Northampton, going up the A5. An 18th century superhighway laid out for the fastest stagecoaches of the day by Thomas Telford, and now almost empty since the motorway has taken all its traffic. Oddly parched July vegetation against a summer rainstorm. A favourite road of mine, all fast sweeping bends.
    It's odd, seemingly being a free agent. Three months since my wife and I moved apart. Still good relations between us and I wish she'd come back, but it isn't going to happen.
    A lot of regrets, but what can you do in a no-win situation? I am very glad we tried, I think it has had the odd effect of making our current relationship much stronger than it might be.
    So, off on holiday with my friend R. We're going to sit on a beach facing the North Sea for a week and do nothing. Nada. Sod all. Which is a lot nicer than you might imagine, we've picked a very nice North Sea beach. We've both had a very hard time of late, her with family and me with work, this is essential recuperation.
    Where now then? When we return from Norfolk life will go on. Same stresses at work, still on my own. Part of me would jack it all in and move on. Move out of the flat, move in with my dad and settle into the life of a rural freelance geek. As any former dotcommer does I have a pile of startup ideas in my slightly specialist line, I certainly wouldn't be idle.
    But that would be failure. One doesn't deal with a hard time by running away, one deals with it by engagement. So on to the next step in the ghastly charade, until we reach the level at which it all has to be taken seriously. It comes back to being a dotcommer, forged in the hard world of collapsing startups I'm uniquely unafraid of adversity. Whatever is thrown at me, I've seen worse.
    Which isn't the best note for a blog post, but there you go. Back to Billy Bragg again for a final word:

But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand

One more step along the road

    The things you'll do for your friends. Standing in an unheated Norfolk church in something a little too insubstantial for the end of November, then braving an icy breeze outside for some photographs.
    So C and J are married. And despite the predictable run of minor disasters, it all came together in the end. I saw some friends for the first time since transition, learned news of people I've not seen in a decade.
    On the mat when I returned home: a letter from the GIC. My referral to the fertility clinic, the voice therapist, and the endocrinologist. The latter unusually without a second consultation since going full-time, in part due to all the counselling I'd previously had and in part because I'm exercising Patient Choice to use my local clinic rather than the GIC for HRT.
    It's odd, really. When you are suffering in the closet you imagine HRT is Where It's At. At least I did, for some others it appears to be The Surgery wot does it. But from where I am now I realise that living full-time is Where It's At, after all if this isn't about living in your preferred role what is it?
    So the prospect of HRT surprisingly is rather alarming. How will it affect my wife if it changes me, for example.
    I don't expect to receive it until well into the New Year. Which is not really a problem as it's better to move slowly and get it right than quickly and regret afterwards.

Winter wedding

    My long-term friend C is getting married next Saturday and he's asked me to be his best woman. He was our best man. His fiancée is a very lovely lady and we're extremely happy for them both.
    It's something of a challenge though for a fairly recently transitioned transwoman, to perform such a public role. It's the bride's day and she does not deserve to be overshadowed by anything. So "Are you sure about this?" was my first question.
    The marriage will take place in the parish church opposite C's parents house in a Norfolk village. A very small Norfolk village with a huge medieval flint church built for its population pre-Enclosure. The church bears the visible scars of centuries of vandalism in the name of faith, a sharp contrast to the ornate medieval wool churches of my own county. Norfolk it seems was very puritan, back in the day.
    One unexpected feature of the church is a lack of electricity. It has gas lights fed from a huge propane cylinder, but no heating. During the rehearsal it was beautiful as the late afternoon sunlight streamed in - very little stained glass, damned Puritans! - but freezing cold even to us wrapped up for a late November day. C and I have the task of sourcing a propane space heater before us to save the congregation from getting too fidgety in the cold. Let's hope the vicar doesn't see it as an opportunity for preaching!
    What to wear is something of a challenge. The bride and her party will be in big dresses, but I have to fit in with the suits of C's party. I've decided to go with what I'd wear at work if one of our million-dollar customers was in the office, a smart workwear dress and jacket.
    So it'll be something of a break from the norm, but I think it'll be a good day. I simply have to deposit C sober in the front pew, and make sure the rings land on the vicar's Bible when he holds it out. Oh, and make a speech at the reception in a nearby country pub. Thank the bridesmaids, say how gorgeous the bride looks, wish them luck, tell a mildly racy story about C's past to scandalise the older generation, that kind of thing.
    If I wasn't all done up for a wedding I'd be itching to climb the church tower :)

One step at a time

    Tuesday was a good day, I guess. A trip to London with my mate C. To the GIC among other destinations. First GIC trip as the girl, dressed for the cold in a black wooly jumper and jeans. I'm indebted to C for the company, not to mention a lift in a nicer car than mine, and his finally meeting the girl was a milestone in itself.
    Not an easy appointment, though the visit itself went very smoothly. Being told by my wife I should move forward has been difficult.
    So, time for the chat. I can't honestly see myself still as the scruffy bloke this time next year but I can't say it's a path I relish. A failure of sorts, if you will. So I set   a timetable. I still have a few bloke things to put away and I need to really be sure my wife is ready for the reality of my transitioning. I'll be back to the GIC in the summer, meanwhile I'm in a sort of ghastly limbo.
    The whole experience has left me drained, lethargic. Work hasn't come easily and I've found myself letting personal things slide. I have one or two tasks in hand that are important, and somehow I'm just not making much progress at them.
    It's all part of the journey, one step along the path. Better this that move too fast and get something wrong.

Life goes on

    In a couple of years writing here I don't think this has happened before. A hiatus this long, that is. Truth is I've had plenty to talk about - the Wreck, cider pressing, my relationship, fighting the girl and all - but not the time, or indeed the inclination, to commit it to print.
    You've probably seen me referring to my friend Dawn here. She's been a true friend to me and my wife these last few years, providing humour and support just when it has been most sorely needed.
    Now it's her hour of need, as the cancer she beat a few years ago has returned. Metastasised, not a good word at all. Her decline has been swift and alarming, as from accompanying us to Sparkle in July she moved to difficulties with mobility, then fluid retention and the indignity of incontinence. First a council home help, then regular visits from the district nurse and finally a Marie Curie nurse with her overnight before a move to our local hospice.
    The fluid retention has gone, aided by a drain and a big plastic bag that filled surprisingly quickly, the nurse taking its volume as she emptied it. Eighteen litres, try picking up that number of soft drinks bottles and imagine a sick old lady walking around with that.
    The hospice is a masterpiece of design with amazing standards of care. A very specialist hospital ward, its atmosphere is as close to that of a home as they can make it. For a week after the fluid had gone we had the old Dawn back, grumbling about the food and shocking the nurses with her make passport photo, beard and all. I bought her in a seafood pizza by request one evening and ended up sharing the half of it she didn't eat with her daughter.
    But the inevitable decline continues. Fortunately there seems to be little pain, but she's nearly always asleep, and her lucidity seems elusive when she's awake. Medical staff do not make lifespan predictions for hospice patients, but it's becoming obvious that we should not expect many more weeks. However as I said to an acquaintance who was being something of a defeatist on the matter, I'll give up on Dawn when I'm following her hearse to the crematorium.
    As the friend who lives closest, I've been to visit Dawn rather a lot over the last week or two. It's the right thing to do, her family are widely spread and she needs to know she's not alone. It's easy enough to nip up to the hospice and sit by her bed for an hour or so.
    What shocks me though is how little emotion I've felt while some others are having difficulty containing theirs. I think it's the effect of antidepressants, they suppress such things, but it's engendered almost a feeling of guilt. Should I be showing public grief? Not if it's as false as that of a crowd of North Koreans at the death of the Dear Leader.
    So yes, life goes on. Rather a lot of it, at the moment.

Decline of a friend

    How far can you intervene in the life of a friend? When you are watching someone you care about enter a terminal decline, how can you help arrest that decline without invading their privacy and trampling on their dignity?
   My friend Dawn hasn't been doing so well lately. Without going into too much detail a medical condition has left her feeling increasingly weak, and thus ever more unable to take care of herself. Add a few other factors to the mix, and she's in a bit of a pickle.
   As Dawn's friends, we were only able to look on. Because to intervene in such a situation requires the person at the centre of it to acknowledge their situation. And Dawn took some time to reach that point. As a friend you can advise and help, but as a non family member you can't intervene. As someone with five children you'd think Dawn would have few problems there, but aside from the one who lives furthest away who's been very good at keeping in touch they've barely visited her in months. I'm unimpressed.
    The crunch came unexpectedly, wearing a tight shoe damaged her big toenail which started to go septic. Not serious you might think, but she's diabetic and diabetics have to be very careful with foot injuries. Suddenly as well as being weak she was in danger of losing a limb. My friend R and I felt intervention was unavoidable and got her to the doctor for professional wound care and antibiotics. R has some professional experience in these matters and knew exactly what to ask for; before long an army of social workers and care assessors were on the case. Now she's got the district nurse coming every day to dress her foot and someone form Social Services coming in to ensure she's eating properly. R and I are cooking frozen meals for her to give her a varied diet.
    It's partly why I've been a little absent from blogland for the last week. Running around chasing all this stuff takes a surprising amount of time.
    Her family do not come out of this very well at all. They've got their own lives and she's always been deceptively bright on the phone, so they didn't suspect anything was wrong. But considering that two of them only live within twenty miles of her the fact she hasn't seen any of them for months leaves me distinctly unimpressed. They're completely at ease with her being trans so it's not that, they just can't be bothered.
    Could I read them the Riot Act? Very tempting, but I can't. I'm just  a friend. A friend who's visiting and feeding Dawn, something they should be doing. It's another case of something in which you're not supposed to intervene. Maybe I should be a little subtle, suggest that if Social Services arrange her care there won't be much left in her will for them. Hit 'em where they care.
    Life's crap, isn't it. If R and I weren't here, Dawn's immediate future would be very bleak indeed. I don't cleave to the Who lyric "Hope I die before I get old", but I do hope I have more to look forward to than that.

Three days of peace and Sparkling

    Last weekend saw the annual Sparkle transgender celebration in Manchester. I was there as I was last year and met my sister, except that this time my wife came too and we stayed for the weekend. And as last year our time wasn't just spent in the relative closet of Sackville Gardens but in the wider world of Manchester City Centre. It's a city that has changed beyond recognition in the last couple of decades, now it has the feel of an international city but when I first encountered it back in the days of the music scene of the early 1990s it was something of a dump.

The Alan Turing memorial in Sackville Gardens

    Everyone comes to Sparkle for different reasons. Clubbing on Canal Street isn't my thing at all, but for others it's their only such outing of the entire year. It's a shame, some members of our broader community are repelled by the sight of some of the more outrageous among us, but the truth is Sparkle is what you make of it. I was there as a tourist with respect to the bad trannies in their painful heels, ill-fitting miniskirts and lank wigs, or the beautifully turned out French Maids and LGs. Their path is different to mine, so I have no discomfort at a fleeting association with them by attending the same Pride celebration as them.
    In the last year, I've come a long way. Beard lasering and a female-appropriate hairstyle have given me a much more natural female appearance, and my confidence in female presentation means that the blending I never imagined possible has at last come my way. Three days as full-time girl in a big city, in the motorway services, shops and restaurants of the wider world of muggles, albeit with an interlude at a transgender Pride, and I'm left feeling rather let down on my return to a more scruffy existence.
     I bumped into my friend A a few weeks ago, she about whom I've blogged before. She's now settled down, a very attractive girl, but firmly retreated into a closet of her own making. We went for a meal together, and she felt she had to inform me that she would have to drop me like a hot potato if I transitioned. As I suspected, and a shame because she rather evidently still has massive issues that she's failing to run away from. She looks very nice, but her voice isn't quite right and she has that cookie-cutter face you only get from FFS - both together a dead giveaway if you've ever met any trans people. Yet she's scared of her own shadow, and trying to erase her past hasn't made that any better. I wish I could help, but all I can do is be there for her should she need me.
    It is because I don't want to become like A that I like going to events like Sparkle. If I can face that and laugh and enjoy it then I'll have won, if I am constantly running to escape an unshakable shadow then I'll have comprehensively lost, because I will never be happy.

That's the trouble with partners of transvestites...

    "That's the trouble with partners of transvestites, they can be such a problem".
    I looked at the speaker, slightly shocked. Dawn, our host, widened her eyes in disbelief. I wasn't that bothered at being called a transvestite even though we were talking about my progress through the GIC. That was par for the course from this particular source. But calling my wife 'a problem'? She was extremely lucky that my wife wasn't there to hear it
    I should have expected it. Not many years ago the speaker was a bloke in his mid fifties. Older then me, with wife and grown-up kids. Since then she's transitioned and reinvented herself with a rather preposterous back-story ignoring a hilarious number of inconvenient truths. Now she's married again, to an inoffensive transvestite who she's banned from dressing. The hypocrisy meter is on overload.
    Quite simply she's the most deluded trans person I've ever met, and that's from a pretty strong field.
    Hers is probably the most blatant example I've encountered, but I've noticed a consistency among a significant section of our community in forgetting where they came from.It's simple and self-evident: if you are an MtF trans woman then you too once had a life as a bloke, and probably a depressed one at that. No shame there, after all, you've escaped him, well done!
    The reaction of such people to those among our community who still have something of the depressed bloke about them is very telling. People who are secure in their own skin do not react in such a way. I'm thinking in particular of another acquaintance, a rather pretty early-40s transwoman with a slight, feminine build who is paranoid about those around her outing her to the extent that she outs herself by drawing too much attention her way.
    It's funny, I have another acquaintance who is a full-time TV I would judge to have something similar to the sexuality of a gay man - tried hormones, but I suspect gave them up when her bits stopped working. My two acquaintances above are a lot more at ease with her than they are with me, it's possible that people like me remind them too much of where they came from.
    How people behave is up to them. But I have evolved a very short fuse on these matters. It's easy to damage a trans person pre-transition, we're a vulnerable bunch. I'm happy to be friendly and supportive to anyone I meet in this community, but if I'm likely to be damaged by their actions then I'll drop them like a hot potato and make it very clear why I have done so. My store of second chances is exhausted.

Real

    Pink fog. It's a worry that persists as you navigate the shifting sands of gender ambiguity, that you might be caught in it. Wanting to spend more time as girl, wanting more, is it real or is it the pink fog talking?
    We have all no doubt heard cautionary tales of those whose pink fog took them a little further than it should have, so the idea it might happen to me has been of some concern. Time to test myself for pink fog with several days as normal girl, doing normal girl stuff as far as possible and sticking to the kind of wardrobe choices any woman my age might make doing the same things. If the novelty fades and it isn't fun any more, then that's the pink fog talking.
    So, a few days after coming back to being a scruffy bloke again I have a moment to reflect on the experience. I spent about three days in the real world as female. I'm used to driving, shopping, eating out and a host of other normal things as female, but until now they have all been individual events snatched as evenings out or similar, or else in the company of others. I've always had either my companions or the scruffy bloke to fall back on, so part of my aim was to leave those props completely behind and face the world in its entirety as female. I am much indebted in this endeavour to Dru for my couple of days in Bristol and Nikki for my day in Wiltshire.
    It would be tempting to write a diary piece, but the minutiae of such outings soon becomes irksome. Suffice to say I entered a whole lot of new territories and came through unscathed.The rite of passage afforded by a first solo trip to a shopping mall for instance seems something of a cliché, but it is no less daunting a challenge for that.
    Highlights of it all were my parents seeing me as girl for the first time because I changed at their house (My mother said I looked very nice, probably being diplomatic), being shown the graffiti artwork of Stokes Croft by Dru and an early morning trip out on Bristol Downs without makeup to hide behind.
    Driving home I was struck by not having been troubled by gender issues during the time. It worried me for a moment, then I realised that this had simply been me feeling unencumbered by them. In the real world. Pink fog not an issue. Real.
    I'm not used to that. Definitely entering new territory here.

Letter to a friend who went deep stealth

Dear A,
    Earlier this year, you had your GRS and promptly disappeared. You dropped all your friends and moved house. I wrote a blog post about it at the time, about my sense of hurt and loss.
    I'm told that the other day you unexpectedly visited a mutual friend. You now live only a few miles away, you've changed your name again and nobody in your new life knows your past. Our mutual friend tells me you'd like to meet in town sometime, maybe have a coffee or something.
    Y'know what? I'd love to renew our friendship, I really would. But before that happens I need to know which A I'm getting to know again. You see, I'm in a somewhat fragile state, just as I was in April. I'm on hefty anti-depressants, I need medication to sleep, and the slightest upset affects me deeply, makes me cry and ruins my confidence for days. You may remember this, it's a side-effect of living with a condition called gender dysphoria. I've been fighting it for a very long time and though I'm not giving up it's a battle I may lose.
    So if I'm going to meet an A who feels quite happy knowing a scruffy bloke but would drop me like a hot potato if I turned into an oversized woman, then no. You've hurt me once by doing that, and I'm not going to willingly set myself up for another shot. Run away and have a nice life in your closet.
    But if the A I'm getting to know again is here for keeps, then I'd love to welcome back the attractive and funny girl I last saw in April. If you're going to be there for me no matter what, then so am I for you. When the inevitable happens and someone figures out your past, you've got a local friend to hold your hand if you need it, I'm not going anywhere else in a hurry.
     So which is it to be? If the latter, then mine's an Americano, black.
Jenny
 

A walk in the fog

    As somehow befit the moment, today was a dim and foggy one in Southern England. Last year I spent a while sitting in silent contemplation of TDOR in the parish church I was christened in, this year I passed on that one but  took the same long walk with my mother's dog.

    Happy mutt, fog must bring out the doggy aromas or something.

    So, fog inside and out. A lot to think about. I passed the tree that was in front of me when I heard that Grace had died, its leaves a pleasant coppery colour. The fog blocks the ever-present noise from the main road a couple of miles away, so the dog and I were alone in a world of muted shades, with ghostly trees looming in the distance.
    I thought of Andrea Waddell, and then of a friend of mine who has taken up sex work - I have no idea why, her day job earns her crazy amounts of money! - and ended up as I did last year, angry with the world.

    Don't like anger. It's the testosterone wot does it. Damn stuff should be banned.

    Here's a tip, next time you're likely to be down, take a walk with a happy dog. You're never alone with a dog, and she won't judge you. Plenty to interest her in the leaf litter. I was reminded of the time she put up a muntjac deer which set off at a rate of knots, the dog following on her too-short legs and being left in the dust.
    In an odd echo of last year, I bumped into our neighbour, walking her two dogs. Old friends with my mother's mutt, three dogs ecstatically happy to see each other, tearing off down the field.
    Our neighbour is a close friend of my mother's, and my mother has taken her into confidence about my gender issues. We hadn't talked about it, but after exchanging pleasantries she complemented me on my hair. It's grown out to the point at which the same wave my mother and sister have is beginning to show.
    It was a slightly odd conversation, a scruffy bloke and a middle-aged woman talking about all this while walking through a field of next year's oilseed rape in the fog. I showed her my photo from Sparkle on my phone - not the one I put on this blog but another with my sister - and saw the usual double-take. But no negativity, as she had been to my mother she was nothing but supportive.
    I'm not sure that a similar conversation could have taken place thirty years ago. On TDOR it can be easy to forget that however slowly it is happening, we are still moving forward.

Perspective

    I spent Saturday morning diving through some bins in one of my town's less salubrious suburbs. Yeah, I sure know how to have a good time. Not my usual weekend entertainment as I'm certain you'll understand, I was retrieving some property belonging to a friend.
    R is a friend of mine. Not trans or anything, just someone I know through having been a friend-of-a-friend. She's a couple of years older than me, and she has battled mental illness on and off for most of her life. In the last few weeks she's had a particularly hard time due to an anniversary of a family death, so she missed some of her medication and found herself tipped over the edge. She somehow came to the conclusion that having anything old or green in her flat would cause her to be sectioned (detained in a mental hospital) so she proceded to throw out anything that might possibly fit those descriptions.
     Personal documents, clothes, heirlooms, valuables, the lot.
    She's safe now, with other friends who are getting her back on the road. But a group of us knew that she'd chucked out half her life and would be heartbroken at the losses when she returned to her senses, so our mission was to rescue her property.
    Fortunately she'd been methodical in her turn-out, so things were neatly packaged and bagged. My small hatchback with its rear seats down was filled to bursting-point though, and we had something of a headache sorting it all out and storing it.
    It is worth learning the lesson of perspective at moments like this. It would be easy to sink into the mire, but an annoying dose of GD is not as bad as some of the things people can suffer from. Important not to forget that.

Slow pressing

    A happy day spent wielding apples yesterday, as our two friends from the antipodes came up from London to join the fun of pressing cider.
    In fact we spent rather less time pressing cider than we might have, after a morning picking apples we cooked a rather huge veggie shepherd's pie and apple crumble which along with a bottle of the 2010 pressing left us all a little relaxed for the afternoon. Still, we managed enough juice for both cider and pasteurising, and I had the chance to blend a high-tannin wild apple with dessert apples to make what I hope will be an interesting cider.
    So I think we showed Nix & DB one of the better slices of the British rural autumn. We even had near-perfect weather, dry and temperate, neither too hot nor too cold.
    A couple of pressings down, maybe a couple more to go, I think.

Indian summer

    Here in Southern England, it's apple harvest time. And it's a good one too, the cold winter followed by a late spring gave the trees a decent dormancy so the yield this year is huge.
    So as we get a final burst of warm weather - the Indian summer of this post's title - I'll be spending a while in the next few days picking apples and pressing juice.
    There s a comfort in the stability of the rural calendar. Whatever happens elsewhere, you know what to expect at home. On Sunday I was passing the spot where I was standing back in March when Dawn told me her friend Grace had died. That tree is in full leaf now, just starting to turn. Life goes on.

Tell someone

    By now if you knew her, you will probably have heard that Melissa, of 'Melissa's meanderings' fame, has passed away following a fight against cancer. I'm not very good at writing tributes because I always have the feeling that anything I write sounds trite and hollow, but others have penned eulogies for her that both celebrate her life in this sphere and express the sentiment of our community. Rest in piece, Melissa.
    As is so often the case in our world, Melissa kept her female life and her online life separate from her family life. As I understand it her sister was quite accepting of her but her mother, while aware, was not. Thus when the end came none of her online friends were aware she had passed away, and now the news has reached us there is no way for any of our tributes to reach her family, or for her family to be aware of how she was respected in our community and perhaps gain some comfort from it.
    Following a conversation on this theme with the other bloggers behind T-Central, later today I'm going to have a word with both my wife and my sister. I'm going to give them instructions that in the event of my untimely demise, they are to both announce it here and introduce both this blog and my wider involvement in this community to those among my scruffy bloke friends and wider family who are unaware of them. In that way while my oversized girl might come as an unwelcome surprise to some of them, my writings and  the friends I have made here might also bring them some comfort.
    Of course, it's easy for me. I'm quietly open about all this. Anyone close to me already knows about Jenny. I appreciate that those of you who are deeper in the closet might not have the luxury of a handy person to have that conversation with but I urge you to think about it, would it be worth telling someone and leaving instructions for the handling of your dual lives after you have gone? Because once the unthinkable has happened, it will be surely too late.

The perfect crime

    When something dodgy happens once, it's unfortunate. When it happens twice, it's a coincidence. When it happens three or more times however, nobody could be excused for smelling a rat.
    T is a homeless bloke, a friend of a friend. An honest bloke who takes pains to keep out of trouble with the law, he lives on a piece of wasteland somewhere in my town and sells the Big Issue to support himself. My friend trusts him, and so do I.
    For a while, he used to have a flat. A tiny cubicle in a large house subdivided by a dodgy landlord into as many units as possible to milk the benefits system, but it was somewhere to call home after years on the street. His housing benefit was paid directly to the landlord, he never saw any money directly but since the flat was of more value to him than the money that suited him fine.
    After a few months in his new flat, he was evicted. Why? None of his benefits had been paid to the landlord, leaving him in arrears. The system had failed him. To add insult to injury, the benefits people claimed he owed them money because they'd overpaid him. Money he'd certainly never seen, as neither had his landlord, that is.
    He's a lot more positive than I think I'd be in his position.
    You might say T's case in unfortunate. But as the aftermath of recession tightens its grip, it's a story I'm finding rather familiar. Take my friend R, for instance. She's living at the moment in her caravan, parked next to my parents' cow shed. A year ago she lived in a small house with her two children and had a decent job, then she was made redundant. Yet again, she claimed housing benefit to be paid directly to her landlord and her landlord never saw a penny of it.
    She was evicted early this summer.
    Touch wood, she'll find herself back under a roof fairly soon now. Unlike T, she has the children to take care of, so her case will have higher priority. It's been no less stressful or disruptive to her life for that though.
    T's case followed by R's case, you might say they are just a coincidence. But I could relate several more very similar tales from my pool of friends and acquaintances, all of whom have claimed housing benefit which has been processed by the system but has never reached its destination. And I am just an ordinary person with a pretty normal life and social group, I don't move in any circles that make me more likely to meet benefit claimants, these are just normal people like me who have fallen upon hard times. It is not a huge stretch of the imagination to interpolate the experiences of my acquaintances across the entire benefit dependent population and reach the conclusion that this must be happening to a huge number of people.
   When something dodgy happens three or more times, I smell a rat. This is public money, taxpayer's money - My money - being spent on the safety net that protects us all, and it's being processed by the system but not reaching its destination.
  I sense a scam, money doesn't just disappear. I think our housing benefit system would benefit from a significant audit, because somewhere along the way a lot of money is being diverted from its intended recipients. It could be that the system is so incredibly incompetent that  mere non-payment is the norm, but since we are not hearing politicians crowing about unexpected surpluses in our benefit budget it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that significant fraud is involved. Whether this is the work of many small-scale fraudsters within the system or fewer fraudsters working on a larger scale doesn't matter, both as taxpayers and as potential benefit recipients we're being ripped off, and that is not acceptable.
  It's the perfect crime, if you think about it.The benefits people are uncaring and inefficient so hardly bother what happens, and the victims are largely people at the very bottom of the pile to whom nobody will listen to. The amounts of money involved in each case are fairly small, perhaps a few thousand pounds, so there is never enough money disappearing at once to raise an alarm. And even if an alarm was raised, our tabloid press have made such a good job of demonising benefit claimants based on the outrageous few rather than the deserving many, that there is no political capital in it being pursued. Diabolical in its cleverness, you might say.
    There was a time, many years ago, when I might have looked upon this issue with a "So what?" attitude based on youth and inexperience. Sadly in my town at least, compassion fatigue is the norm as the public view of the homeless is one of aggressive beggars, alcoholics and drug-addled criminals. But that is a dangerously naive view, as a long career in the tech business featuring several lengthy spells on the dole has taught me. It's getting crowded on the outer edges of society, and the crowds are formed not of a demonised feral underclass but of normal people like you and me who have fallen on hard times. As well as short changing the taxpayer, this disappearing money hits those who can least take it, and in most cases they were also taxpayers once.
    I'm afraid I don't expect to hear any time soon that they've fixed it though. 

The Wreck on parade

   Time for an outing into petrolhead country. I took a look back to the post I wrote a year ago about the regular trip to a car show C and I make at  this time of year. I was struggling with a noisy girl and worrying about keeping its effects from my wife.Nothing much changes, does it. This week has been especially annoying as we've had a major product launch at work, with all its associated stresses.
    Anyway, never mind all that! It's time for that car show again, and this time we're not going in C's transporter, C and I are going in our respective automotive follies. His is both newer and faster than the Wreck, but then he's got further to drive in the day and since he gets frustrated by being stuck behind slow vehicles I don't envy him his sports car. The Wreck does the same speed as the trucks, which makes for restful long-distance motoring.
    I can't say I'm looking forward to a weekend of hiding the girl. It's not about presenting as female, but having to keep the bloke facade up. At work for instance I'm my everyday big scruffy bloke, but because most of my female colleagues know all about me I no longer have to pretend. Unfortunately this weekend I won't have that luxury and I must be careful not to let it get to me. Much weak Continental beer will no doubt be drunk and much rubbish will be spouted on the subject of automotive tat, so with luck I'll manage to keep my brain occupied. Interestingly I've seen some amateurish crossdressing at previous events, I wonder whether they've heard the adage about people who seem to do it a little too often.
    So my peers get to see the Wreck in all its faded glory. It's an unusual model of a well-known British car so it should attract some attention from the cognoscenti. It'll be rather good for once to have my own car with me, it seems like a very long time that it's been "It'll be ready next year".
    On Sunday morning I'll emerge from my tent, looking a mess. One thing's new, previously I haven't had long hair. Better pack the shampoo.