The Gender Construction Kit has come on a long way since the last time I visited. If you’re looking for info and resources on transitioning in the UK then it’s a good place to start:
“An authoritarian party, which aims at capturing power to impose its ideas, has an interest in the people remaining an amorphous mass, unable to act for themselves and therefore always easily dominated... But we anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.”
- ibid
trans feelings, hindsight, 1/n
It’s true for some people, but I didn’t “always know” I was trans. With hindsight, though, there’s stuff I missed, or ignored, or explained away over the years that I can interpret as trans feelings now, and I think it might be helpful to write about that. There’ll be a little biography involved but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.
trans, uk, private hrt cost
(Private hrt cost me about £800 to set up, in two instalments, plus another £150 every six months for monitoring appointments. They have a shared care agreement with my GP so prescriptions and blood tests are on the NHS. That’s not a negligible amount of money, but it’s possibly more affordable - or crowdfundable - than you might think from hearing about American medical bills.)
(This thought brought to you by Daniel Lavery and “you are God’s only boy and you will wear fire before you wear a dress again”. Which hits me in the feels every time but doesn’t actually stray far from the regular version.)
huge space crone energy (cc @platypus) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00503-3?utm_source=twt_nft&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=futures
UK PEOPLE CHANGING NAMES
•
you do NOT need a "proper" deed poll to change your name. you can do it online for free, just print it off & do all the signing stuff
if ANYONE give you shit, they can not. this is legal & perfectly fine
SO ANYONE IN UK WANNA CHANGE NAME, GO HERE
The food’s gone now, anyway. And it looks like the robins have decided to nest somewhere else - sensibly enough, if this is magpie territory.
The dynamic seems to be wood pigeon > magpie and squirrel > wood pigeon, but the magpies are quicker and less afraid of the squirrel so they’ll dart in when the squirrel drives off the pigeons and grab some food before the others notice them.
TIL the first science fiction convention was held in 1891, in the Albert Hall, and involved Bovril:
THE MISSING STAIR
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
RPGNET ON BANNING TRUMP SUPPORTERS
https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/new-ban-do-not-post-in-support-of-trump-or-his-administration.835849/
(the whole thread is a good read)
Internet Greybeard Community Management Thread Continued!
Some more required reading for anyone thinking of setting up any kind of geeky/nerdy community, and how it can all go wrong. Forewarned is forearmed!
FIVE GEEK SOCIAL FALLACIES
https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
THE WRATH OF CAT PISS MAN
https://web.archive.org/web/20060212205816/http://www.savantmag.com/16/retail16.html
FF7 FANDOM MADHOUSE
http://www.demon-sushi.com/warning/
trans, England, GIC stats
Courtesy of some Freedom of Information requests, info on four of the English GICs. I wouldn't place any value on the stated "current waiting times" - at best, they're likely to be referring to the period people being seen now have waited, but in all cases, that's grown much worse, and can't be used as a meaningful indicator of how long a /new/ referral will be stuck waiting.
https://old.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/lxnlc0/i_got_sent_this_today_by_my_gender_therapist/
...and done. I feel lighter for that, even if it was only hanging around in the attic out of sight.
one more school thing to get out of my system (-)
If you’re wondering how the avuncular posh prep school worked out... I have better memories overall than the boarding school I went on to, but also a very vivid memory of sitting in an end-of-term assembly listening to a speaker talk about how memory erases the bad parts and magnifies the good, promising myself that I would at least remember this moment, and that I hated my time there.
Sample contents. “Inky”, incidentally, was the headmaster - the school’s avuncular schtick involved calling teachers by official nicknames. (For those unfamiliar with the system, this was a school for boys up to the age of thirteen. Prep for fancy private schools, not college.)
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(Underneath it was what turned out to be a zine put out by my sixth form classmates at boarding school. And now I’m triggered 😐)
Older. Trans. She/her.