A Lucid Moment

It might be time to shake things up properly again.

To be honest, the very thing that's prompting this might be a very good reason why now is not the time to do it. I've been getting more and more hormonally out of whack pretty much since surgery, which is something I hadn't realised until I had a really good think about when this all started. I've had flat and off key patches which haven't really coincided with situational stuff and they've been getting worse until I'm now at the point of randomly fighting off context free tears and adrenal surges, especially at work. So I effectively got progressively escalating PMS that's been going on for months now. So this is the perfect time not to make life changing decisions because they may not be the most balanced ones. But I'm going to lay some groundwork and start thinking about it in earnest.

It mostly involves work. Even taking wobbly endocrine systems into account, work feeds me depressing stories every day and I'm increasingly starting to feel like I'm complicit in some appallingly bad management of people who need help far more than they need a sheriff's officer turning up on their doorstep. So the plan is to take some leave. I have a consultation on the 29th to get a referral to a trans friendly endocrinologist so hopefully this will resolve ongoing issues but in the meantime, if I take the time to re-evaluate how I want to live, talk with some good friends, assess alternatives and just have some relatively undemanding time then my life just might start shaking itself out in the way I've been waiting for it to do. It seems that I have to be the one who does the shaking. This is also very much about getting back to the process of moving out of my comfort zones. I'm not doing that anymore and it's a productive, empowering, transforming thing that I really ought to have as an ongoing part of my life.

So I will look and thing and talk and write and then once I've dealt with the body beating me about the emotional head and shoulders I can get serious about actually rejigging the parts of my life with which I'm dissatisfied. I have the ability to do this. I am surrounded by some of the most amazing people I can conceive of who support me and want me to achieve things. I've demonstrated to myself that when I have a purpose and lever myself out of ruts, I can actually make things happen. It's time to stop believing that I can't actually do anything significant or worthwhile because I realise that's actually what I do think now that I see it all set down in words.

I've given myself time to move on from surgery and now I'm going nothing. I should stop doing nothing.

Well that was a really quite unpleasant day. There was not a lot in the way of external things to make it so but clearly this is one of those times when my body decides to do things in response to the hormones that I dose myself with daily which result in me being miserable. There were hints of it last night but this morning I really didn't want to get out of bed or shower or dress or anything else that goes with a usual Monday. I did it anyway and work itself wasn't a problem at all.

I suspect that the skating I did over the weekend was a step or two too far. My knee is achy although nothing beyond that but sufficiently to make me keenly aware that I still have very real limitations in that regard. Those limitations and a strangely out of control appetite mean that my weight is starting to creep upwards which I very much do not want. The control I had over my body has been dented substantially and I really do not like that.

I also came across a post on Facebook today from someone who's intersex and experiencing levels of frustration with the Tasmanian same-sex marriage bill in ways that hadn't even occurred to me. It's bad enough being told that you're not able to marry your partner because you're the same sex as them. Imagine being told that you can't marry anyone ever because your sex doesn't exist as far as marriage legislation is concerned. I don't know what the requirements are to be assigned a gender with which you don't identify to start with but I doubt that the process is easy, cheap or dignified. Moreover the implication is that if you don't submit to that then you're not a real person, you're not part of the community and you can't possibly have a real relationship. This is debasing and dehumanising. Genderqueer and intersex people are marginalised even more than trans people are. The very idea that someone might be neither male nor female seems literally unthinkable to some people. This simply isn't good enough though. We cannot say to real people with real lives and real relationships that they don't exist simply because it's inconvenient and uncomfortable for the tinier minded amongst us.

I'm really really fucking angry about this. I get little tastes of social and cultural erasure here and there that leave me feeling like there are places that I cannot go and do not fit but which are available to everyone else but that pales in comparison to this. I can't really imagine how it must feel to be that disenfranchised but I can have a good try at guessing and it's frankly a bit scary. It you don't fit into the gender binary then our culture has no mechanisms for coping with you and that means you either get ignored or demonised. At least I'm recognisably *a* gender even when my right to identify that way is questioned or ridiculed so people have a way in which to contextualise how they deal with me. I have had a few times when people haven't been able to gender me and they don't like it. It's remarkable how reliant people are on being able to gender someone even simply to talk to them. This is how our entire culture works and the idea that we can collectively pretend that part of our community doesn't exist is sickening.

So I'm angry. I'm also weirdly heartsick in a way that I can't define but which is probably in no small part hormonal. I feel like I want to simply curl up in someone's arms and rage at them about All The Things until I'm utterly exhausted and either cry or fall asleep. I really hope I feel more human tomorrow.