Scratching the tranny itch

    "Q: Why do transvestites move to the Manchester area? A: All they want is a Wigan address! ". They don't make jokes like they used to, do they.

    As a deeply closeted youngster my tastes in female clothing sometimes ran into the world of costume fantasy. I had no wardrobe of my own, but that didn't stop me lusting after the clothing I saw on TV in films and costume dramas. I guess like teenagers everywhere the things I wanted had to have the maximum of bells and whistles. 

    Perhaps fortunately, rural England in the 1980s was rather short on flamboyant historical costume. I'm guessing many closeted trans youngsters experience something similar, and probably like me such thoughts recede for them as they grow up. I mean, I'm sure it'd be fun to swish around in a Victorian ballgown once in a while, but you wouldn't wear it to Tesco, would you.

    But it's important not to be ashamed of such thoughts if you've had them. Guilt and shame are the things that imprison us in the closet, and just as it's important to cast them off it's important to realise that natal women feel no shame in their costume fantasies. A while back I visited the historical costume museum in Bath with a friend. I found myself feeling the familiar slight shame as I viewed the lavish gowns on display, before realising that I was sharing the gallery with about thirty natal women who were having exactly the same thoughts as me. There's no shame in that.

    Recently I had the opportunity to exorcise a clothing desire from my adult closeted years. One you might wear to Tesco, but not one that suits someone my shape so I'll draw a veil over the specifics. The sartorially sensitive might be reading, after all.

    So there I was in the mirror, a facsimile of the smart and professional woman I'd wished I could have been years before.  No shame or guilt, very comfortable except for the shoes, but that's always the way. But nothing special, just me looking back at myself. An old itch scratched, and finding it ceased to be an itch long ago. Which is the point really, one of becoming comfortable with myself and no longer needing the desperate crutches of clothing obsession I once had.

Oil control

    Wonderful stuff, Redex. Never heard of it? It's one of the great row of Magic Bottles of Stuff you'll see down at your motor parts store, all designed to make your car's engine run smoother, have more power, or attract more girls or something.
    Redex though really does work. Its job is simple, removing "coke", built-up deposits of carbon and whatever else is left behind in your engine, and you can either put a bit of it in your fuel tank or pour it directly into your air intake.
    Or in my case, directly into a cylinder. Number three on the Wreck has been isolated as the cause of the huge clouds of smoke that have beset the vehicle since I put it back on the road a couple of years ago. Or more specifically, the oil control ring on number three. It stops stray engine oil finding its way into the combustion chamber, or in this case it doesn't.
    A long conversation with the World Expert on Wrecks resulted in the suggestion of using Redex in this slightly unusual way. It seems Wreck engines are notorious for oil control rings sticking if you leave them standing, and the Wreck stood for quite a few years before I put it back on the road.
    So yesterday in a very welcome day of February sunlight, I squirted a shot of Redex into cylinder number three. Then tightened the fan belt. And sheared off one of the dynamo bolts, resulting in an hour's sorting out a replacement bolt.
    The car will sit for a week, then with luck when I next start it there will be a huge cloud of smoke as the Redex and all its associated crud blows away, then there will be no more oil problems. Alternatively I'll have to have it apart and replace number 3's oil control ring, something I don't fancy at all.
    I remember the days when I didn't care about ingrained oil under my fingernails. A long time ago.

Only when I larf

    I don't know about you, but for me the first few weeks of the year have always been the pits. Back in my school days they were the endless term of freezing cold and mud, nothing to look forward to except exams. I'm not a fan of exams, having been the victim of a school culture that placed an unhealthy amount of emphasis on them.
    So this year I've succumbed to a three-week cold at the same time as a bit of a setback in the personal stakes, my wife has had a major wobble. Despite spending most of her social life in the company of a couple of her friends from the transgender community and telling me I should transition, she announced she couldn't take it if I transitioned and would leave me. Not entirely unreasonable for someone in her position, but one that's floored me somewhat given the messages she'd been giving out previously. I won't do anything that'll cause her to leave me.
    So that's that screwed then. Life's shit, innit.
    What now? Just keep going, worry about the GIC when I see them in September. I don't think I'll be doing a "change in the GIC bog" transition, so I'll probably be discharged. #TransDocFail indeed, ours must be the only condition in which they give you the boot if you refuse to divorce.
     Funny, it's opened a door into somewhere I rather hoped I'd left behind. I'm thankful for our UK gun laws, if I was American I might have turned my constitutionally protected comfort blanket upon myself by now. It's funny where your idle thoughts take you at moments like this.
    Still, at least I can keep plodding along, knowing I may not have left the starting gate but at least I ain't got it wrong yet. Someone else of my acquaintance whose lightning fast transition has been perfect to the point of protesting too much turns out to be falling apart. Part of me feels a shot of vindictiveness, for this is someone who has at times been very nasty towards people she considers to be less Real Women than her, but everyone deals with this mess their own way and even if hers was at times a bit nasty she deserves sympathy.
     So there you go. A friend in this sphere's blog is titled "Don't be like me". I can empathise with that.

A call for a bit of perspective in language policing

    It was interesting to watch the British journalist Laurie Penny last week. She used the word "Lunatic" in a piece about misogynistic abuse of women online and in doing so inadvertently offended some people. For some sufferers of mental illness, the word is a slur.
    To her credit, she responded immediately with an eloquent apology. Ms. Moore and Ms. Burchill could learn from her example. She may at times be a typical product of the left-wing London-centric media bubble into which she was admitted straight from university, but it seems she hasn't quite yet been sucked into it enough to consider herself infallible.
    Personally I think she got it right to apologise because though the word "lunatic" is a rather archaic in a pure mental health sense it is still within living memory. When I was young our local mental hospital was informally referred to locally as "The loony bin" for instance, so it's entirely understandable that for some the word is still a slur.
    But here's the problem. Words change their meanings over time, and "lunatic" has acquired some non-offensive senses in common speech. I'm guessing that through being painfully right-on Ms. Penny is more aware of offensive words than most people, and her considering it acceptable to use was not entirely unreasonable in the context of those senses.
    There was a good parallel example of a language shift causing controversy on Radio 1 back in 2006. The DJ Chris Moyles described a ringtone as "gay" which prompted calls of homophobia, yet he was simply found to have been using the newer sense of "gay"; "Foolish, stupid or unimpressive". Reach your own conclusions about Chris Moyles' general misogyny or homophobia, but here this was probably linguistically correct. You don't have to spent long in the company of someone young enough to be a Radio 1 listener to gather that this sense of "gay" is not used in a homophobic context however annoying it may be. It's not impossible to conceive that this sense of the word might even become the dominant one in future decades.
    The BBC programme complaints committee reported on the Moyles incident thus: "The word 'gay', in addition to being used to mean 'homosexual' or 'carefree', was often now used to mean 'lame' or 'rubbish'". The irony of their using "lame", in itself seen by some as a piece of ablist language, would probably be as lost on them as that of the annoyance to the older generation at the use of "gay" as a synonym for "homosexual".
    Highlighting the use of inappropriate language will unfortunately be necessary as long as there are unpleasant people who will push the boundaries of its use. But I can't help feeling that sometimes those who do it can be a little too zealous in their pursuit and often do more harm than good. For the best example of this we should look no further than the multiple controversies surrounding the word "niggardly" in academic speech. It is simply a word which sounds like an offensive one, it has no sense related to the word it sounds like and it was in no way offensive in meaning. Yet the controversies have given new life to what was a rather archaic and rare word, and an entirely new sense as a dog-whistle word used by racists who wish to enrage others with the use of a 'non-racist' word. Well done, language police! (slow hand clap)
     I feel there is a lesson here that everyone can learn ( Especially some people rather close to home who should know better! ). If I take offence at something, I should consider for a moment the nature of what I am taking offence at. Is it something anyone like me would find offensive or am I in a minority of one? Is the word being used in an offensive sense, or indeed is it even an offensive word in the first place? Careful consideration of both those questions before complaining would I think lead to a much better targeted and more effective management of the use of offensive language and far less of a sense of crying wolf. If an archaic or marginally offensive word acquires a new, non-offensive sense that is to be celebrated and encouraged, for that is the way that offensive senses become forgotten (See the early etymology of 'nice' for a good example.). By attempting to halt this process when it is already under way we risk two things: breathing new life into the offensive sense, and simply alienating people whose use of the new sense is entirely innocent. We want people to use language in a particular way because they see it as the right thing to do, not because they have been told to use it in that way which they then resent.

On the fashionability of houndstooth tweed

    About ten years ago I remember a conversation with my friend C in which I predicted  fashion trend. Not usual for our conversations which tend to be somewhat geeky.
    My prediction was a simple one: that within the next decade we'd see a return to fashionability of houndstooth tweed. Think about it, ten, twenty or thirty years ago did you see anyone wearing that fabric?
    C works in the television business. He writes software that runs digital TV studio equipment, you've probably watched TV that passed through his code somewhere. Our conversation was about one of the projects he was working on, as an electronic engineer who started with scrap TV sets it's a subject of interest to me.
    At the time the UK and other countries were on the cusp of moving from analogue to digital TV. For most consumers this probably meant more channels, a better picture or high definition, but for us it also meant the end of the analogue colour encoding systems, PAL, SECAM and NTSC.
   Analogue telly was sometimes referred to as compatible television, meaning that a colour signal was compatible with a black-and-white receiver. The colour information coming from the studio was split out from the luminance information and cleverly encoded such that it wouldn't show up as noise when viewed on a black-and-white set. The PAL, SECAM and NTSC colour encoding processes each took different approaches to the same problem, but shared the same aim.
    PAL was developed in Germany in the early 1960s. We Brits got it in the late '60s, on our third TV channel, BBC2. PAL tackled some of the problems found in the earlier American NTSC system, but in doing so it introduced a few quirks of its own. The one you'd have seen from time to time is the so-called Hanover bars, colour noise appearing whenever any close-together stripes appeared on the picture. It's one of the reasons PAL test cards have striped regions.
    As you've probably guessed, houndstooth tweed produced intense Hanover bars on a PAL TV, resulting in a riot of colour noise on the picture. As a result, the pattern disappeared completely from the fashion scene sometime in the 1960s.
    So why my prediction? Digital TV has its own picture quirks that you can spot if you look carefully at some of the lower qualty channels, but it doesn't use PAL. Instead, you get the full unadulterated colour signal, so Hanover bars are a thing of the past on a digital set now PAL has been turned off.
    And as if by magic, houndstooth tweed has made a reappearance. You won't see me wearing it as it's never been a favourite of mine, but there it is on the High Street. Technology influences fashion.

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.

Complaining to the PCC over Julie Burchill's Guardian piece

    Lovely day here in the UK. Bright, cold, sunny. Frost on the ground, ice on the puddles. And a deeply offensive piece concerning the UK transgender community on the Guardian website from the feminist writer Julie Burchill. I won't link to it here because I feel it doesn't need to generate any more advert income, but if you really want to read it then Google is probably your friend.
    In my mind, it crosses the line from journalism or comment into outright hate speech. And as such I feel it should not be allowed to stand.
    Fortunately there is somewhere I can complain, the Press Complaints Commission. it's something of a toothless tiger, but it's all we've got and if they receive a big pile of complaints about an article they have to take a look. I'd urge you all to consider complaining too if the Burchill piece has offended you.
    The text of my complaint is reproduced below:

The Guardian (web site)
13/01/2013
"Transsexuals should cut it out"

Please explain how you believe the Code of Practice has been breached
                 
I believe the Code of Practice has been breached because of the use of prejudicial and pejorative language with reference to the transgender community. As a gender dysphoria patient I feel that this article is likely to result in increased likelihood of my exposure to hate crimes as it perpetuates an environment in which such language is deemed acceptable and thus incites further attacks against people like me.

In particular the following language used in the article is problematic:

1. "dicks in chicks' clothing", using offensive language to imply that transwomen are in fact men. This amounts to incitement to commit hate crimes, as transwomen are often attacked for using female spaces such as ladies lavatories.
2. "women – real and imagined", yet again implying that transwomen are not real women.
3. "having one's nuts taken off" and "To have your cock cut off". Repeating the damaging fallacy that the only concern of gender dysphoria patients it to have their genitals modified, something very far indeed from the medical truth. This causes great distress to those of us who are going through the medical process of gender dysphoria treatment.
4. "trannies". As a language specialist by trade I have researched this word extensively. It is used in both offensive and non-offensive settings but this article is definitely trying to use it in a pejorative sense.
5. "shemales" and "shims". These two words are unambiguously offensive when used in relation to the transgender community and this article repeats them in a manner that can only be seen as pejorative.

Please add the clause(s) you believe to have been breached
                 
Section 12 (i) "The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual's race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability."

Kinky boots

    Regular readers of this space will have seen my never-ending quest for female-appropriate footwear in my larger-than-average size. Sadly there is precious little to choose from, but I will never give up. Google is my friend in this matter, and it has rewarded me with more than one unexpected find.
    A case in point is the pair I found last week. Flat heeled Mary Janes, available not just in my size but tow sizes above that. Nothing fancy, but entirely appropriate for example for smart office wear or a going-out ensemble. Made-to-order in Thailand, and available via mail order from a supplier catering for the TV Little Girl market.
    That's right, the model is pictured wearing LG white socks and enough pink frills to keep the worldwide satin industry alive through the recession.
    It's funny, I'd never considered looking into that market for everyday footwear. I have LG acquaintances and I've encountered LGs at events like Sparkle, but I guess I'd never really looked at their accessories and noticed that some of their shoes are surprisingly normal. Unexpectedly it is the footwear intended for the more flamboyant members of our wider community that's often most available in my size, I could have several pairs of thigh boots, outrageous heels, or things with buckles, padlocks and zips all over them if I so chose, but in the words of my late friend Dawn: "You wouldn't wear them to Tesco".
    So I've ordered a pair of LG Mary Janes and I should have them by the end of the month. Paired with a conventional outfit they will not attract attention, only I will know their unexpected origin.
    A rare victory I think, worth celebrating.

Dodgy docs and fail hashtags

    I can't say the last few days have been good for the cause of transgender medicine here in the UK. You see, the papers have picked up a story that's been rumbling along quietly for a while now, that of the General Medical Council investigating Dr. Richard Curtis, prominent trans man as well as the go-to doctor for private treatment of our condition. As I understand it there's the usual crowd of regretters claiming that they never wanted to transition really, and blaming their doctor.
    The news coverage has been predictably depressing. Short on news but long on sensationalism and outright transphobia, it's as though the Leveson Inquiry never happened. The trans community, seeing the whole debacle as something of a witch hunt against one of their own and reminiscent of the circumstances surrounding the departure of Dr. Russell Reid a decade ago, have reacted with anger. There's a hashtag on Twitter, #TransDocFail, which is full of the staggering ineptitudes and failures of duty of care felt daily by transgender people in the medical system here in the UK. It's depressing stuff, but it needs to be said as a response to the rather obvious misinformation on the subject.
    The trouble is, I'm not entirely comfortable with the battle lines here. I think there are serious shortcomings with the way transgender people receive medical help here in the UK and I've been happy to write about them here ad infinitum over the last few years, but my personal experience of the GIC system has been mostly pretty good. I've been unimpressed a couple of times by psychiatrists modifying their responses to me because of my background and occupation, but the fact is my course through the system has been exactly as advertised. And on the other side, I'm not entirely at ease with the haste with which some people I know have passed through the private system. The screwed-up ones in my experience tend overwhelmingly to have transitioned very quickly through the private route, and I can't help thinking less than eighteen months from hairy panty wearer to post-op is just a little irresponsible on the part of an attending doctor.
    So rather than black-and-white I see grey on both sides. Overwhelmingly though I see the most fault in the relative scarcity of professionals involved in our field and their concentration in a fairly small number of places. I can't help thinking that the best way to fix the #TransDocFail would be not to go after individual doctors or clinics but to broaden the availability of treatment over many more centres.
    Transgender medicine is not rocket science, surely it can't be that difficult to make it better!

Hang 'em an' flog 'em...

    I have a friend who is vehemently opposed to capital punishment. In every way, no compromise, wherever in the world and whatever the crime.
    Sadly I can't find myself fully agreeing with her, not because I don't find it unsettling and abhorrent, but because I really can't say there'd be no criminal whose end at the noose wouldn't concern me. Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely glad that we abandoned hanging many years ago because it means there can be no more shocking cases like that of Derek Bentley, it's just that I can't honestly say I'd be too upset if I heard that they were going to hang someone like Ian Brady. It would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise.
    So what's brought on this train of thought? The recent tragic and distressing case from India of the young woman who was gang-raped and who subsequently died from her injuries. There have not surprisingly been huge protests at the Indian police's lack of serious handling of the issue, as well as demands that the perpetrators be hung. Can't honestly say I'd get too upset at that prospect, as I've said above.
    It has been interesting however over the last few days to listen to the right-on chorus of Usual Suspects as they rightly go to town on the issue of rape, but fail to make their usual noise over the prospect of someone receiving the death penalty. Maybe they need to examine their stance, or admit their hypocrisy.