Weekly Catch-Up

It’s been a bit of a busy week for me all round, so here’s an update on some of what’s been happening.

Danny’s “decided” that he’s going to start on Testosterone. Probably.

He has an appointment with an endocrinologist later today and we’ll Skype when he wakes up this morning to talk things through a bit more. I just want him to make the right decision for him and not worry about other people.

He’s also been thinking about what name he wants to be known by when everything becomes official, and he’s settled on Cameron for the moment. I like it, but it’s going to be a bit confusing for me in the intervening period. 😛

My bestest T-Girl friend from Second Life, S, has finally come out to a friend in real life!!! WOOT!! 😀

Up until now the only non-medical profession person she’d told was her (ex) girlfriend, but since they separated she’s been getting much bolder and more confident, with little wobbles.

There was a lovely girl, J, at the place she works who had always been very accepting of S’s nuances with regard to her appearance and protective of S’s right to sit with the girls whenever the people from work went out for a few drinks. J herself had come out as gay last year and moved in with her girlfriend. S had been privy to the information along with a couple of other trusted “girls” and J had always seemed to be the ideal person for S to pick as the first to share the news with.

Well, J had moved on to another company a week before so S, now desperately needing to start coming out, finally bit the bullet during the Friday evening get-together and told J there was something important she needed to talk about in private. J said “Sure, no matter what it is, we can get together whenever you want.”, and so they met up on Saturday and S spilled the beans. J was, as I’d always known she would be, absolutely over the moon for S and 110% supportive.

S was absolutely full of it on Saturday night, as you can imagine, and as she was getting ready to log out I said “Sleep tight”. Her response was “I will, like a little baby girl”. Bless! 🙂

Since my last appointment at the GIC I’ve been waiting to hear about when I can expect my first jab with the T-Blockers. It was supposed to be this month. Eventually I rang my doctor’s surgery to check if they’d heard from the GIC and they said they had, but reading though the letter they didn’t think it was down to them to actually do it. I got back to the GIC with this and they confirmed to me that it was, indeed, my doc who should be doing it and that they would write to them making that clear in words of one syllable.

Good job I chased it up!

Another thing about wanting to get started on the T-blockers is that I’m hoping it will help to calm me down and stop me reacting angrily to some things. I don’t like anger and I see it as a very “male” emotion, or at least the knee-jerk release of it.

There have been a couple of blogs I’ve read this week which have caused me to “explode”.

The first, written by someone who is horrendously trans-phobic, resulted in me writing a 4,000 word plus forensic dismantling of their blog. Their facts were totally askew and they contradicted themselves so often that I “rose to the bait” and wanted to nail them to the nearest cross.

Fortunately I ran out of emotional energy shortly before completing the process and so the item remains unfinished and was never posted as comment on their blog. I may, however, use what I have as the basis for a future blog post on the particular issue they were arguing about as it is a difficult and emotive area and the exercise has at least been a way of me crystallising my own thoughts on the subject.

The second was a new blog in which the opening few posts seemed to be a blatant attack on the transgender community. In this case I did comment quite forcefully and the author has subsequently added disclaimers and also written other posts which help to provide a more balanced picture. However, I feel that the author phrases things in a way that is open to misinterpretation so we have taken the discussion about my concerns “offline” and I’ll explain to them what I mean in some detail later.

As I said though, I don’t like reacting in this way to things. I don’t consider it right to just explode like that. Hopefully the T-blockers will help to calm me down and not get so riled by such things.

About three weeks ago I started writing a “potted life history” for an American college student who wants to give an outlook on what it means to be transgender. She’ll do a feature article on her blog about me once it’s complete.

I’ve reached a point where I need to summarise some very personal experiences and I’ve stalled a bit on this because … well, just because. I’ve not written any more of it this week as I need to be in a certain place emotionally in order to get the right slant on it, even though in her final piece it will only be allured to and not described in any detail, and the things mentioned above have taken a lot of my time and put me in a place where I’m not sufficiently in tune with myself. It was a part of my history that I had described to the psychiatrist at my first GIC appointment and I think it made a big difference in getting my diagnosis so quickly, especially as I feel it was my own reflective realisation about it that really shone a spotlight on my dysphoria.

I’ll be settling down to writing that part for her this week.

On Tuesday I went along to the LGBT Health and Wellbeing AGM.

I could hardly hear a word any of the speakers said because of the acoustics in the hall, but it was a chance to meet up with a few people, especially A who was the lead on the needs assessment project for my area earlier in the year.

Friday I went to the Women’s Group meeting in Edinburgh for the first time. It was good!

I think I was the only T-girl there, but that wasn’t important. There were about 20 of us all in all and they were quite a friendly bunch. Some I already knew from the Monday Drop-Ins and other meetings I’d been to.

We were treated to some good live music and poetry readings, and I took a ton of things along for the Food Bank as I’m always forgetting to get things for those.

Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to get along to more of these meetings. 🙂