I was thinking here about how menstruation had affected my life as a girl and woman, the fact that trans women don’t menstruate, and the differences and similarities that make up the spectrum of feminine experience.
An early post – not one of the ones I was most happy with – but I’ve included it because it seems to me that human minds fall back into binary thinking even when they’re consciously trying to move beyond it. We have two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs and two hemispheres in our brains. How easy it is to divide thinking into us/them; this/not that. It’s so difficult and so important to imagine otherwise.
I was thinking here that I often get ideas about what is ‘big’ and what is ‘small’ back to front. The details of my life are enormous – the emotions of my kids and of myself. ‘Small’ is the administrative stuff & the institutions we engage with. Lately I’ve practised mindfulness & it seems to help me maintain this perspective – and my sanity.
Memories of a special weekend . . . thinking about non-human connections and different ways of being married.
I usually write subjectively – and this piece is not an exception – but I wanted to explore the common but specious claim that 80% of ‘trans’ kids ‘desist’ at puberty. O is now nearly 13 – and I still think about the issues that I’ve written about here just about every day . . .
A tribute to a special human being.
I don’t remember much about what I wrote here – but yes, grief is always with me. I didn’t experience it for some months after O came out, but any transition is going to have its losses. It’s part of all our lives now.
This feels dated now. Where would trans activism be without the internet? Would O have discovered the possibilities of gender identity as a pre-teen without the help of Google? Probably not – but at this point, who knows?
Climate change is a far more urgent issue than gender/sexual identity for the future of my young ones and all our young ones. I try to articulate this here.
I think this was an early post. I miss O’s birth name. Does a rose of another name smell as sweet? Yes – but a sweet and sad scent lingers . . .
I’m glad to be the parent of a transgender child, and I’m glad to know other parents but it is, as we say, complicated.
In which I decimate ‘Welcome to Holland’. Maybe a bit unfairly, but I still fucking hate it . . .
This post used to get the most hits. It’s not my most interesting one – honestly! Penises – why is everyone so obsessed (including O)?
Hmmmm. I think I was confessing to my fascination with a beautiful lifestyle blog here. But it’s not my beautiful life. It never was, thank goodness.
I couldn’t work out why I didn’t like this word until I went back to some of my childhood fiction (The Secret Garden was one I looked at) and saw that ‘queer’ always meant being odd to the point of making others feel queasy. I think the word has been successfully reclaimed now, but it took a while for me to shake my former associations. I don’t think I’m very queer – and neither is O. We’re still doing norm core. Goddess knows why.
This was written just before I stopped my blog. I thought maybe I could quash individual ambitions and just live for O and his sister for a while. I couldn’t.
This word sums up what I think of US bathroom bills
A bit of creative writing, thinking about what it means to be a woman in this patriarchal society. I can’t believe I wrote about it before the ‘pussy grabbing’ thing. Why has every female, everywhere, got a story about pussy grabbing. WHY? Anyway, mine is here.
Urghh. Twitter. Enough said.
An old piece of writing from a former time in my life, when I was grappling with the possibility that I might go blind.
Raising Orlando 