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.

Mid life crisis

    Seasoned readers may have noticed a slowdown hereabouts in the last couple of months. This isn't the usual progression of bloggers in this sphere going hell-for-leather at a transition goal and then dropping everything like a hot potato when they consider themselves "done", instead it's a mark of how much I have going on at the moment. I'm holding down three jobs at once, a full-time electronic design contract, writing technical articles, and servicing my own electronic business. The good news is that this means I have some money coming in and I should achieve my immediate aim of having a year's reserve in hand should everything dry up, but the bad news is that it's left precious little time for anything else. This isn't the only thing that's suffered, there are several other projects that have gone on hiatus as a result. No doubt when the contract is over things will return to normal.
    In a few months I'll have another birthday. Not a particularly special one, but a point at which the feeling of an inexorable slope towards 50 becomes palpable. This isn't something that I find welcome, I have no need to hang onto some wild and crazy youth but I can't escape a disappointment that there is so much I have not managed to do. I've written of my need for a family in the past, now that is hanging over me in an ever more pressing way. Ten years ago when I was married to someone who turned out in the end never to have wanted a family in the first place there was always a sense that it might have happened tomorrow, now I can't escape the feeling that tomorrow is here and nothing has been done. Where the last twenty years have gone and what I have to show for them is a mystery.

    Staying alive I guess, an achievement in itself.

Mae'n anodd

    So many things in life are difficult. Getting it right with your loved ones, turning an idea into a business, staying healthy, staying sane, staying trim, learning Morse, even as you might guess from the title, learning Welsh (The double-d is pronounced like the "th" in "heather", by the way).
    You can't succeed at everything you try. Sometimes the things you fail at are real belters, things that profoundly affect the course of your life, other times they're pretty minor, things that while disappointing aren't going to make much difference.
    So I've had a few wins over the last month or two, and this week it looks as if I'll have a fail. Not serious, at the product level rather than the enterprise level. Something I've put some effort into may well not come off. It brings to mind one of the things that differentiates Silicon Valley startup culture from UK startup culture, over there business failure is seen as valuable experience while all too often here it's seen as a stigma. This has certainly been valuable experience, and it's fortunate that it's come in a way without too much collateral damage.
    Yeah, it's difficult.

Language Spy

    At the developer conference I wrote about in a previous post, I had the usual name badge on a lanyard round my neck. Under my name: "Language Spy".

    A significant number of the people I talked to assumed it was my job title. Pity, that, as it's the name of my startup.

    Some time in early February I moved on from the place I called work for four and a half years, gave notice on my flat, and set to coding. As a dotcommer I never move away from the startup mentality, so to me it seems like the most natural thing in the world to be doing.
    I'm a geek-of-all-tech-trades, but I work in the language business. I came to it via a very convoluted path through electronics, computer games, the web, and then search engines. What I'm doing now builds on one of my fascinations, hobbies, and side projects of many years standing, the statistical analysis of large bodies of text. I gather huge amounts of language, tell my computer to make observations on it I couldn't possibly do myself, and then write code to render the result in a human-readable form.
    I've got several products in the pipeline, but my first is live on the web and involves time-series political data. If you want to know which of the party leaders is making waves in the UK election campaign, or which of the 2016 US presidential hopefuls is most affected by whatever banana skins Fox News toss at them, it's the tool for you. I am waiting for the general election with interest, because it'll allow me to test my theory that I can use corpus data to call the result.

The URL? http://www.languagespy.com

    I kinda wish I had adopted it as a job title now.

Almost the only girl in the room

    If you visit the loo in a department store before Christmas, there'll be a queue in the ladies a mile long, and no queue in the gents. Truth be told it's a situation you'll find any time, but never mind, it's a cameraderie thing.
    There's one place where the situation is reversed though. Visit the loo at a software developer conference and the queue for the gents is five miles long, while the ladies is just walk right in and pee.
    Yes, I've been milling around with about a thousand geeks and learning about cool new software tricks in a cavernous warehouse-turned-Evangelical church that hires itself out on weekdays for relatively Godless geeks to hear their technological prophets impart their pearls of wisdom.

    One thing had changed though since the last dev conference I attended. The first thing the organiser opened with was a statement of a code of conduct.

    This is an important and welcome change, and it's one that has its roots both in developer and startup culture, and in a couple of stories that made the news last year.
    It's probably safe to say that the majority of software developers are men. And it's probably also safe to say that the majority of software developers who work in the startup scene are young men. There has therefore historically been something of a macho culture among developers. It's even spawned a word of its own: brogrammer.
    Last year the industry received something of a wake-up call over the undesirable side of this culture. In March a female developer at PyCon Tweeted a picture of two men seated behind her making sexist comments. One of them lost his job, and after a significant fuss, a denial-of-service against her blog, and a lot of very nasty abuse, so did she. And in August there was the so-called "Gamergate" controversy, when a group of women in the video game business criticised sexism in their industry and received a horrifying sustained campaign of online abuse as a result.
    I can't say these incidents sat entirely comfortably with me from either side. I don't think job losses were a good outcome for anyone, and as someone who's ex-game-industry I didn't quite recognise the space I used to work in. But then again Middle England was always going to have a different gamer culture from California.
     What I can say though is that there was an undercurrent in coding culture that needed addressing. And if it took the certain knowledge that any twattish behaviour would be Tweeted in secconds to do it, then I'm glad to see the culture's reformed itself.
    I spent an evening after the conference drinking Stowford Press and discussing random startup plans with other People Like Me. No hassle, no bother.
   And that's just the way it should be.
   

All the freedom, none of the leisure

    It's nearly 10pm on a Saturday, and I'm working. Drinking cheap-ass Aussie wine as I hit the keyboard, but still working.
    I remember once not so long ago, I used to work in an office. It was full of really clever people who did really cool stuff, and it had acres of flickering fluorescent lighting. Then I moved on and created a small software startup, and set down to enjoy the freedom of a 7-day week as a coder. Better lighting, a far better view and a woodstove, but lousy hours. I oughta complain to my boss.

    You will I hope see my products mentioned here before long. I hope they're worth the wait.

I've had a few

     At my workplace, there is a three-storey-high atrium that divides the centre of the complex. It joins a substantial Victorian building to one built in the 1980s so it follows the '80s architectural fashion of exposed painted architectural steelwork and glass with the odd bit of mildly tacky gold trim.

    On the ground floor, seating and a coffee bar. The first floor mezzanine, comfy chairs and glass coffee tables popular for informal meetings. The top level is much smaller at the top of a grand flight of stairs, a single coffee table and chairs, an impressive view across the city skyline, and only an '80s-style glass and tubular handrail between you and a sheer three-storey drop. Jump off that and you'd hit the floor next to the diorama of technologically outdated machinery from the organisation's industrial past in somewhere about a second and a half.

    It's an unfortunate function of our condition, the tendency to notice things like that. I like the view from up there, but the edge is too close for comfort.

    So, regrets. Like that damn song lyric, I've had a few. If you had none during transition, you're lucky.

    You have to sort things that happen into two piles. "Stuff that could have been caused by transition", and "Stuff that would probably have happened anyway". My past 16 months have not been the best of my life, but for example I can't blame losing my mother on transitioning. Or even parting from my wife, deep down I am guessing that could have happened anyway even if not this year. Relationship issues aren't the sole preserve of trans people. Given the three trouble-free years before transition working down a corridor from that atrium though I can't imagine work would have gone sour for the scruffy bloke. Never mind, reap the whirlwind and all that.

     I will never shake one regret though, that I couldn't make it as the bloke. Not that I ended up transitioning, but for the bloke I never was. I know some people never look back, sadly it doesn't work that way for me.
     It's tempting given a new year to talk about grandiose plans. I think I'll avoid that one, just concentrate on getting through it in one piece.
   
     

Cacophony

    It's a cold day here in southern England. Of course, that's a relative term. A Canadian would laugh at our -2 Celcius, while a Jamaican might see it as a *very* cold day. Not the best time to be fixing a boat engine, but at least it isn't raining.
    I feel at the crest of a huge wave that's about to break. Not one of crystal-clear blue water but of murky brown sludge, all my travails of the last year and a bit. Losing a parent, being comprehensively sidelined at work, losing my wife, and doing my RLE for an extended period without HRT due to fertility treatment. I don't think anyone could come through all that without effect, and though I've probably managed better than some people would I'm starting to feel the strain. This week I had to make an urgent trip to the doctor for a carbamazapine prescription, my atypical facial pain flared up. Peculiarly intense, that.
    So more hearings, phone calls with union lawyers, and honestly rather depressing stuff. I have to make as much fuss as possible though, for the sake of those who come after me. Even if it does little to make me Employee of the Month, and especially even if it means I'm out of work at the end of it. As a debt-free dotcommer with no dependants that holds no fear for me, my only question would be which startup idea to pursue first.
    One way to close the door on the past is to move out of my flat. Probably go back to my dad's place, a 40-something living with her parent. But the flat while great for two is a bit much for one, I'm much better off out of it.
    Which kinda brings me to my boat engine and its leaky fuel pipe. I lived on this boat, once. I wouldn't go back to those days, not least because I'm not in a residential mooring, but it is something I will now have more time and money to devote to. This river has been the backdrop to a lot of my life since I was a teenager, and in a time of trouble it's a fitting place to return.
    Next month the river will be in spate, a boiling mass of angry brown water with the boat lashed to its mooring to avoid it being washed away. By May though all that will be a distant memory; the water lillies will be coming through and the fish will be hanging lazily in the oxygenated stream from the weir.
    I'll still be here.

Motivation

    I want to go back to bed. A general statement, as I'm typing this sitting in bed having had a lazy breakfast. But it's true, right now I'd prefer to spend my day in bed rather than go into work and do stuff with bits of software.
    Truth is, I've lost my mojo over the last year. The combination of a series of stressful events and the side-effects of hefty antidepressants. I have the feeling of needing a month off, something that is sadly not practical.
    You might think transition would have caused this, but surprisingly that's the part that's worked. Despite everything I have none of the crushing regret I had as the scruffy bloke, of not being female. Yes. Transition works, at least in that sense.
    As has been the case in the past, my mind seeks a release in engineering. Making stuff. I wrote a post about dressmaking a while back but that's just one of the avenues at my disposal. Which is in itself dangerous, as a former dotcommer I know the perils of startup business so idly working out how I'd conquer the Internet of Things or spot financial trends through news corpus analysis rather than pursuing an unexciting career in publishing is folly.
    So despite all that I'm not going to stay in bed. Get up, face the day. It's a Bank Holiday weekend coming up here in the UK, so maybe three days away will help.

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

Give an engineer a machine tool

    I never expected to find myself in a difficult position post - transition at this particular employer. I'd better not name them, but I work for a large publishing company whose atmosphere and ethos as I experienced it over the three years before I transitioned gave me confidence that I could so it without worry. As I wrote a few months ago though it hasn't turned out like that.
    It's called constructive dismissal. Force a person to leave by undermining and marginalising them. And in my case it started a few weeks after transition and it's following the textbook. Even to the point that today I will have a new colleague who I find has been hired to do about half of the job I thought I had before I was marginalised out of it.
    It ain't going to work. With twenty years in tech startups behind me I've seen far worse and I've stopped running. Without going into too much detail, I will not go down without a fight. If the legal bill I can cost then weren't enough my job involves the mechanics of internet publicity, and I honestly can not tell the world that they are a good place for an LGBT employee to work.

    It's the stress and demotivation though that's the killer. Which brings me to the title of this piece. The machine tool in question isn't a lathe or a milling machine, it's my sewing machine. In engineering terms as a computer controlled device whose needle can move side to side as well as moving the fabric, it's a 2-axis CNC machine tool.
    So I've gone back to making stuff as a cathartic. In this case I'm doing it from first principles, making my own patterns to my own designs. In the past few months I've made several pieces and I have no shortage of future ideas. I'm still not good at doing zips though.
    Making things has always been my release. Software, electronics, furniture, you name it. And that I'm doing it so much now is a symptom of my work problems, until last autumn my needs were fulfilled by creating products. If you looked up my employer in the app store you'd find their most downloaded product is one they simply wouldn't have had I not come up with the idea, created a prototype, and bought it to market.
     I guess their loss is my wardrobe's gain.

Is it happening to me?

   I've not been around here much these last couple of weeks. Sorry friends, I've not been around your blogs either. I've not had the best of times, I'm suffering from acid reflux and my insomnia has returned with a vengeance. Crossed fingers that my atypical facial pain doesn't get triggered, that's nasty.
    Unfortunately the cause of all this lies at work. About the same time as I changed my gender my manager retired, and the new one's style of personal management has fallen significantly short of what I had come to expect from the organisation. It's not appropriate to go into detail, suffice to say it has been the cause of some serious stress and I have been in conversation with the HR department about it.
   But this post isn't about what is or isn't happening between me and my manager, instead it's about the elephant in the room. The inevitable question I have to ask but I simultaneously hate asking. "Is it because I'm trans?"
   I have no desire to become a Professional Transgender Person to whom everything that happens to them is because of their trans status. We've all encountered members of minority groups who do that, and they do no favours to the rest of their groups. And nobody's said anything at work, made any references to my trans status, disparaging or otherwise.After all, nobody is ever transphobic, are they!
   The problem is, the timing is a bit suspect. As the scruffy bloke I worked for three years and got very good ratings all through, as the girl suddenly it seems I can do no right despite having a couple of very conspicuous successes on my plate.
   That elephant in the room suddenly seems very real indeed.
   What I have done is fire a shot across their bows. In conversation with HR I have made it very clear indeed that I do not wish to have any turmoil, and in that aim they should be in complete agreement with me. Employee turmoil is very costly for an employer, not to mention embarrassing. I made it very clear that in our community a lot of people face employment problems after transitioning so it is something of which I am very aware. I then asked them to nip it in the bud before  anything they'd later regret happens, because all I want is a quiet life.
   Did I get it right? I hope so but only time will tell. I had to do something, after all I have nearly 20 years experience in dotcom-land behind me and one thing that experience has left me with is this: I sure as hell am no doormat.

The bog

    My week really hasn't been the best one I've ever had. My mother's in hospital so I've been running backwards and forwards to see her, and my sisters seem to have lost all pretence of sanity in a storm of extreme unpleasantness. With the things they're coming out with in respect to me I'm wondering whether they're making some kind of play for my parents wills or in fact they just are batshit crazy. I know my mother is strictly egalitarian on that matter, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
    That's not really the point of this piece though. The icing on the cake - no, the cherry on top of the icing on the cake - came on Monday morning in the form of an email from a friend of mine. I thought I'd escaped The Toilet Issue because I am lucky enough to work for an extremely enlightened employer and my colleagues have some of the cleverest and most interesting people I have ever worked with  among them but no, it seems some of them are concerned about the Man in the Ladies Menace.

A typical scene in the ladies' loo, yesterday.

    My friend works for a sister institution to ours. She has quite a few distant colleagues of mine among her other friends, and she was sending me a heads-up about some of the things they were saying about me. The usual stuff - that my anatomy means I am a threat, that my interest in using that facility is unhealthy, and that I should be using the men's room instead. My friend characterised them as saying "I've nothing against transgender people but...", that cliché phrase of casual hate language.
    I have to say, I'm disappointed in whoever they are. I'm assuming they're a minority as my direct colleagues have all been extremely supportive. However I'm guessing they are also ignorant. Uncharacteristically so it seems for an institution famous worldwide for numbering some of the most well-educated people on the planet among its staff, but if the dunce's cap fits then I guess they'd better wear it.
    So for the benefit of my less enlightened colleagues I'm going to open the lid on that holy of holies unknown to half the world: the ladies' loo. I think those who haven't been in a ladies loo imagine it to be like the scene depicted in Boticelli's Venus, but the reality is far more mundane. It's just a room with a load of sinks on one side and a row of toilet stalls on the other. Cleaner than the men's room, more mirrors, and of course no urinals. When I use it there seems hardly ever to be anyone in there, I go to a stall, do my business in private, come out and wash my hands, then go on my way. If a colleague is there I don't stop or even make eye contact, I just do what I'm in there for.
    That's it. Mundane, isn't it. Nothing to see here, move on.
    I had a chat with my HR representative about this yesterday morning. UK law is unambiguous on the right of transgender people to use the loo appropriate to their presentation and she admitted she has received some approaches on the subject and had firmly appraised them of the law and sent them on their way. In fact the law does apply to toilets, but not on a gender basis. Under indecency law if anyone does anything inappropriate in either loo they're committing an offence. This protects all: men, women, cis, and trans alike from sexual predators and other miscreants, while allowing all to use the loo for its intended purpose.
    I didn't expect to have to write this piece, I thought my colleagues weren't going to be like this. As I've said above, most of them aren't. I'm going to send this link around work and I hope some of the people I'm writing about read it and realise that as well as letting down my more enlightened colleagues they've turned a mundane part of everybody's day into a very anxious experience for me.

Final note: I'm on a short fuse at the moment and I'm going to moderate the living crap out of any unpleasant comments on this post. Not my normal policy but this time I have little tolerance for idiots.

'er in waiting

    It's something of a limbo, the period immediately before going full-time. A lot of doubt alternating with desperate need to move forward. One minute I'm making a big mistake, ruining everything et cetera, et cetera, the next I'm ready to go. I have seen many others run headlong into this without any such concerns. The pink fog is strong in some people, but such as it was it left me a very long time ago.
    Such doubts are inevitable. Healthy even. But far more stress than I need at the moment.
    Last night I left the scruffy bloke behind and went out with my wife. She's not entirely at ease walking with me as the oversized girl, for which I don't blame her. However as the evening progressed and I attracted no adverse attention I sensed she relaxed. We go out together surprisingly rarely as our different jobs restrict our time together, so fortunately she has plenty of time during which she will not have any such worries.
    I was pleased, looking at myself in the mirror. A very narcissistic thing to say, but also a moment of necessary appraisal. My hair has settled nicely into an unambiguously female cut which frames my face well and helps lose its male shape, and I was dressed as any other 40-something woman might be. In short, I was not someone who would attract attention other than through my height, which I can't do anything about.
    I spent decades thinking I would never be able to look like that.
    At work, another meeting with HR. All the policies, steps and hoops to jump through. Very positive, nothing unexpected or unpleasant. Then the point later in the day when I fill in a stat. dec. form with my new name, and there it is in black and white. All the doubts return, and I don't take it to the solicitor's office.
    In an odd juxtaposition, I've been shopping. On one hand a few female clothing essentials, on the other a box of parts for the Wreck. This weekend I'll be getting my eyebrows done before going to my parents place and tackling a rusted-in stud. I won't be doing anything to my nails until after that's finished, you can be sure of that.
    In a few months time, this'll be ancient history. I'll have settled into the regime of my life as a woman, and I'll know the answer to all my worries about my wife. I'm sure it'll have been easier than I expect, but meanwhile I wish my current angst would go away.

...I've said too much.

    So you're in a conversation with a natal female friend, and she mentions something in passing that relates to fashion, or clothing. You know, girl stuff. And you forget for a moment that to her you're just another scruffy bloke, and venture an opinion that owes something to experience rather than to guesswork.
    Or as happened to me this lunchtime, you're sitting in the main public thoroughfare at work with your colleagues, and a colleague who has made a spectacular sartorial faux pas walks by out of earshot, and without thinking you say "Oh dear, wrong skirt!". You've said too much.
    It's funny, because most of my female colleagues know all about me. My male colleagues though don't, and must be in danger of having me pegged as something of a meterosexual by now. Scruffy, into cars and bikes, married to a gorgeous wife, yet long haired and notices women by their clothing rather than their other attributes.
    I have to watch that people watching thing, it'll be my undoing. Mind you, it's not as if that matters, in my industry nobody will care too much. I do have to consider how far I want it to go though.
    I don't care, I'd happily be girl all the time by now, but I have to think of my wife. To her it matters, she's been great all along but I could so easily puncture her buffer zone.
    Today being Halloween, I'm sure some of my American friends will have taken the opportunity to unleash their female alter egos on the world. We don't do that, so no funny costumes today in the office. But something struck me about it earlier that made me laugh. If we did the Halloween thing here, I wouldn't be taking part, it's too close to home. Silly, ain't it.

The bottle and me

    A few days ago we had the perfect summer evening here in my part of the UK. Warm air, just a bit of cloud and a spectacular sunset. I spent it in the garden of a local pub, looking out over a river and a patchwork of flood meadows.
    My tipple of choice? Weston's Country Perry, a dangerously quaffable still perry (For the uninitiated, perry refers to cider made with pears instead of apples). At the end of the evening I had a clear head, but the perry had definitely gone to my legs and I was ready for bed.
    I don't think I'm alone in finding a drink helpful in dealing with the aftermath of a bad day. It's a worry that I could make a habit of  cracking open a beer or cider when I come home form work. Just the one would turn into a couple, and before I'd know it I'd be getting through a crate of bottles in a week. It's not a coincidence that I know more than one person in this sphere with a drink problem. One or two of my acquaintance have in my view allowed it to wreck their lives.
    My medication bears the warning that alcohol is best avoided while taking it. Since I prefer to sleep I think that's the factor that has saved me from getting into the drinking habit. But like so many demons that lurk below the surface of the gender dysphoric, I know that one could make itself felt.
    It might seem odd therefore, that I make cider in near-industrial quantities. But I have made cider for many years without over-imbibing and the cider-making rather than the cider itself  is an escape from some of my troubles. Or an argument could be made that my cider is so dangerously unpalatable that one could never drink enough at a sitting to risk one's health, I dunno.
    But it's a serious issue. I suspect I have this in common with many other gender dysphoric people, a lifetime of this has left the GD as just one of several problems. I know more than one post-transition girl who's realised that all they've been through hasn't cured their depression, and if that happens to me I don't want to find myself using the bottle as a crutch. Because at the end of an annoying week in which the noisy girl and a lot of high-powered work meetings have left me worn out I know that the world as seen through the green glass of a cider bottle could look mighty attractive.
     And I don't need to be told that tomorrow morning or indeed any morning thereafter, that wouldn't solve anything.

Another coming out story

    I had cause to come out to my boss today. My new boss, that is, my old boss who I came out to last September sadly having moved on to pastures new.
    My new boss is at a higher level in the organisation, an extremely efficient and fearsomely intelligent lady who runs our entire product division. And since I have a pile of absences in my calendar for medical appointments, my counselor, the GIC, and my gender psychiatrist I needed to explain them to her. Fortunately she's someone who has a reputation for standing up for her employees and I am happy to be quietly open about my gender issues so coming out to her didn't present a problem for me.
    Unfortunately when I asked for an extra chat as part of our first weekly meeting she expected something completely different. It seems I've made something of an impression over the last few months, I've delivered the goods in doing my little niche job and she's rather pleased with the results. I've also made no secret of my past in the dotcom-era so she expected me to say I'd found another job and was about to move on.
    So I think my telling her I was gender dysphoric came as something of a relief to her.

    Damn, I should have asked her for a raise while I was at it.

Marketing toys to boys and to girls

    Here's a link that came my way today at work. Crystal Smith is the writer of The Achilles Effect, a book examining the messages of gender and masculinity in popular culture, particularly as they relate to young boys.
    As part of her research, she's examined the language used to promote toys to both boys and to girls, and produced a pair of eye-catching word clouds showing how such promotion reinforces gender stereotypes. I can never resist a pretty infographic so I'd like to direct my readers to her blog, which given its subject matter I am sure many will find interesting.

New vista

    I am beginning to appreciate the difference between the small companies I have worked for over most of the last two decades, and the very large one at which I have been working for the last six months.
    As a dotcom survivor I've had a chequered career. My full CV would run to several pages, such is the number of places I've earned a living. Most of them are no longer in business, one gave me the sack due to personal differences - the boss was a semi-criminal arsehole who IIRC was later barred from holding a directorship - and one had to let me go abruptly as a financial crisis threatened the very survival of the business. That last one was particularly bitter-sweet as I was and still am part-owner of the company so you might say I had in part to make myself redundant. Even the large companies I've worked for, among them one of the largest companies in the world whose products you and I all use, have not fully equipped me for life as a staffer because I was employed by them as a contractor, a specialist on a fixed-term contract.
    Regular readers of this blog will notice that my output has reduced of late. This has two causes: the girl has been  rather noisy causing me some sleep issues, and I've been throwing myself into maintaining my performance in the workplace. I'm out to some extent at work and work is trans-friendly, but I don't want the girl to hinder me there.
    I now find myself in an unusual position for someone at mid-life. Most people have at this stage set out the path of their careers. They spent their twenties learning their craft and by the time they reach my age their course is set, if a field-marshal's baton is lurking in their knapsack then it has had plenty of time to show itself. My contemporaries are mostly at this stage in life, they are mostly occupying the same offices that they did five years ago. My career though has been a little different. In tiny companies the prospects for advancement are often meagre. In an office with five people in it it is simply not possible to promote them all (One previous employer of mine seemed intent on bucking the trend with six directors, three senior managers and two employees, but they really *were* a bunch of nutters!). Thus in the world of small tech companies if you want to move up, you move on or risk being seen as a sucker willing to toil forever for a pittance to pay for the founder's second home and company Jag. No real problem with that, those are The Rules in that arena.
    But I've left that all behind by moving into a large organisation. My extensive experience of new workplaces has taught me that it takes six months to really get the measure of a place. The masks slip and you see what really lies beneath. In the case of this place what I see is rather interesting. For the first time in my career, I have Prospects. There is a career path open to me if I am prepared to jump through the hoops, and I am anxious to take it. It's a new experience, the feeling that a job might just be for life.

Spend Jenny's tax refund

    Woohoo! I have just received a cheque from the taxman! Nice, until you realise it was my money in the first place.
    Over two years ago I had a period of gardening leave, the company I was working for at the time downsized rapidly in the recession and I found myself out of work. A lean spot for us, my wife supporting us for a few weeks before I found a bit of freelance work. I didn't bother with the dole, calculating correctly that the chance of freelancing would serve me better.
    The resulting upset to our finances has taken those two years to iron itself out, and my tax overpayment from the job I found after freelancing is only now being refunded. It's not a fortune but it's more than a packet of crisps.
    So, I have a little bit of spare cash and two things I might put it towards. Do I eventually spend it on beard lasering or a custom last for my outsize feet? The former means losing the scratchy beard growth, the rashes, sore skin and spots, the latter means being able to source any shoes I desire in my otherwise almost unobtainable size. Tough choice.
    What do you think?