Relationships and Internet Etiquette

The internet has made it easier than ever before to form and maintain long distance relationships. Social Networking sites like LiveJournal and Facebook make it easy to meet new friends, and quantify our real life friends into lists, networks, communities and numbers.

Relationships are fragile things, and the internet can harm them quite easily. I am not the only person to fly off the handle in response to a careless blog post or email from a friend. Its easy to be an arsehole to text on a screen.

When you’re Facebook friendslist is simply a list of every person you have ever met, even if it was just for a day, or an hour… unfriending your best friend is gonna gut them. They aren’t going to take it well, trust me. When your LiveJournal is one of your few tangible connections to someone, unfriending them is going to be noticed, and its going to hurt them.

Think a little about it. Don’t unfriend someone just for a fight. If you don’t want them to have access to your LJ while you cool down from a fight, create a custom group, but for gods sake, don’t unfriend too easily.
If someone is an arsehole online, and you’ve never met them, block block block! But if there is a real life relationship that is being maintained in large part through social networks, for gods sake, be careful when you are blocking someone. Don’t do it out of anger.

To be frank, I have had enough of being unfriended. Of being rejected, hurt, blocked, ignored. Its happened to me too many times this year. I’ve not always been in the right, but I’ve usually thought ‘Its ok, we’ll both cool down, I’ll contact them, we’ll talk and then everything will be ok.’
Its upsetting when I realise they’ve blocked my IM, unfriended my LJ, unfriended me on Facebook, and spring cleaned me right on out of their virtual (and by extension real) life.

Since I started coming out as Ryan… every step, not just as trans, but right from the beginning, at the end of 2006, when I decided to be me instead of someone else, I’ve been rejected left right and centre.
I know I’ve had growing pains. I’ve said, and done stupid things. I’ve hurt peoples feelings. I’ve been going through the emotional growth and maturing process that most people get 5 years in highschool to experience, in less than 2 years.

I’m hurting. I am hurting because so many of my good, close, friends… friends who I honestly thought would always be there for me no matter what, think I have gone too far this time. That they can’t be my friend anymore. I don’t know their motives. I don’t know if I’m too queer, too radical, too trans, too political, too argumentative, too arrogant… could be any of those, or something else entirely. I didn’t call often enough. I’m too busy, their feelings are hurt cos I didn’t visit them when I said I would.
I don’t know.
All I know is that when I reached for them, they weren’t their anymore. They said we moved too far apart. We have nothing in common anymore.

Its not just my friends. Its my family too. My biological family and my church family.

And I can’t take it anymore. I can’t sit around and let the rejection come, over and over and over.

Link Round Up: Health Edition

The World Bank is funding what strikes me as a rather fucked up incentive program in an attempt to halt the spread of AIDS.
My first thought was about rape victims being unfairly penalised by the system. Thoughts anyone?

This is really old… like 2006 old, but its the first I have heard of it. Scientists have grown a penis, in a lab. A rabbit penis, according to this story, but apparently growing a person-penis would be somewhat similar.

An article about health problems associated with Vitamin D deficiencies. My doctor last year told me that Canberra sees a ‘Depression Peak’ in the winter months because people here don’t get enough sun (its dark when people leave work, and its freezing in the morning). So with winter coming up, remember getting some sun, and the associated vitamin D is good for your health and your sanity.

BlogWarBot

This is very amusing.

Blogwarbot

Learning a New Language

I am currently reading Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, which was recommended to me by Rebecca, and Drakyn. I think it should be compulsory reading for everyone. Not because it says everything that there is to say about being trans. Not because it puts forward a universal transsexual experience, but because it is different to everything else I have read (offline), and has so much to say about femininity.

It also gave me a language to discuss trans issues with. In Man Made Language, Dale Spender puts forward the argument that the most effective way of silencing a group is to take away their ability to talk about their unique experiences, by forcing the language of oppressors upon them. We see that when women try to communicate in a male language, trans people try to communicate in a cissexual language, and probably most prominently in the cultural destruction that occurs when native people are denied the use of their mother tongue.

Transsexuals are forced to use the language of a usually hostile medical profession (think Gender Identity Disorder, think Gender Reassignment instead of Gender Affirmation, and so on), and the language forced upon us by the media that splits trans women into a ‘deceptive’ or ‘desperate’ dichotomy (and completely erases people on the trans male spectrum in the process).

The term that began bothering me long before I could express the same idea in other words, is the term ‘passing’. To pass is to successfully be seen as ones chosen gender. The term is loaded with the idea of deception, and that bothered me. The alternative is being ‘read’ as ones birth or assigned sex. Again the term is tainted by the idea of the ‘truth’ being that I am female.

In Whipping Girl, Serano offers up alternative terms which I much prefer, and have started using. I don’t ‘pass’ anymore… I am extended conditional cissexual privilege. I am not ‘read’, I am misgendered. The phrase ‘conditional cissexual privilege’ is kinda unweildy, but that is its only real disadvantage. I am still very excited when people correctly perceive me as male, however, I feel it is less worthy of mention than deliberate cases of misgendering.

I am currently gender ambiguous enough that the smallest hint either way tips the scale. Seeing ‘Mr Ryan S****’ written on my paperwork and I am extended the privileges associated with being male. I laugh, and suddenly I am a Ms, and probably a lesbian.
I feel bad when people accidentally misgender me. It sucks, if it happens too many times in a row, I get kinda depressed and into a real funk over it. However, when I am deliberately misgendered, when I am outed as transsexual, when someone disregards me, calls me by my old name, crosses out ‘Mr’ and replaces it with ‘Ms’. Wow, that makes me really mad.

Reading Whipping Girl has also changed my perspective on the words ‘transman’ and ‘trans man’. I think that I prefer the latter. I identify as a man (or boy) after all, first and foremost. Not as a transman, but a man who happens to be trans.

Endocrinology Disappointment

Two weeks ago I tried to make an appointment with Dr Stephen Thornley. The first appointment available was at the end of July, so I told the receptionist that it was alright, I could make an appointment at Concord hospital instead. She asked what the appointment was for, and I told her it was for gender reassignment. She said that she could understand that it was quite urgent, and recommended another doctor from the same practice, one Mirdula Lewis.

The day before my appointment the office called me to confirm that I would be able to make my appointment. I asked a few questions regarding the location, and the billing scheme, and they asked me for my referral details. I gave them the name of my GP, and told them again that the appointment was for gender reassignment.

Yesterday, the day of the appointment, I got up at 4.30 in the morning. I spent three and a half hours on the bus to Sydney, then an hour on the train to the suburbs. It was then half an hours walk to the doctors office from the nearest public transport.

I found my way into the building, and found the doctors office. The receptionist welcomed me, and asked me to fill in my paperwork while I waited. When I gave them my medicare details (birth name and gender) she proceeded to change everything with ‘Ryan’ written on it to my birth name, refer to me as ’she’ to the other receptionist, and call me by my birth name.
I thought that this was very strange, since I assumed that this office would have a number of TS patients, since I got their name from the FTM Australia listing of trans friendly doctors. I explained my preference to be called Ryan and asked for the receptionist to use male pronouns, but in spite of this, she continued to misgender and misname me.

The doctor came and collected me from the waiting room after about 20 minutes. She read through my referral in front of me. She looked up and said ‘Gender reassignment? Really?” in a surprised tone of voice.
I nodded, and she put down the referral.
“I don’t treat that. You’ll have to go elsewhere.”

I was stunned, I simply couldn’t believe it.

“What?!”

“I understand you’ve come a long way, but I don’t treat transsexuals. There’s nothing I can do to help you. You will have to leave now.”

“I don’t understand. I told the receptionist when I made the appointment. I took a day off work, and spent $100 on travel. You’ve completely wasted my time.”

“How about I don’t charge you for this consultation?”

“WHAT?!!! There is NO WAY I am paying for this! What have you done but sit there and say that you wont treat me?”

“I don’t do fertility treatments either. Its nothing personal, its not discrimination, its just a decision I have made professionally.”

At this point I asked her to put me on the phone to Concord Hospital to see if I could get an appointment at the Andrology Unit there, and told her to go see if any of the other doctors in the clinic could see me since I had been misled about the services offered by that clinic.
None of the others at that clinic would see me, and the endocrinologist at Concord has just gone on holiday, so I have to wait another 3 weeks before I can have my appointment.

I am really disappointed with the way I was treated. I am especially angry because it is clear that Thornley has treated FTM’s in the past, but that the ‘direction of the clinic has changed’ and the receptionists were not informed, and so I had my time and money wasted.

I don’t care if you don’t want to treat transsexuality cos of some fucked up moralising on your part… just tell me over the phone, before I travel and take time off work.

Now I have to get another referral ($69), take more time off work (2 more days out of my sick leave), and travel to Sydney again ($82).

Fuck. So angry.

Return of the Naval Gazer

I rode the bus home the long way tonight. I caught the 52, which meanders through Nicholls, Gold Creek, and Gunghalin on its way to the City. I like to look at the pretty houses in the affluent new suburbs.

I just wanted to sit and think for a bit, and reminisce a little. I’ve been riding that bus every few weeks for several years now. Maybe because I have never lived with it, but I find the idea of middle class security attractive, not boring.
I like the idea of being a middle class guy, with a wife, two kids and a Golden Retriever. Drinking beer in the pub with my mates on Friday nights, and watching my kids play soccer and netball on Sundays. Tinkering with a home network in the study, while the wife gossips with her best friend on the phone.
Thats the fantasy I indulge when I ride that bus. Its evolved over the years, from something hazy revolving around wanting to live in a place like that, to a detailed dream where I know what we eat for dinner, and the colour of the couch.

This post was going to be about how that lifes not really going to be for me though. About how I’m way too bent for such a straight life, that I know that as attractive as the dream is, my life will be something a bit different.
Now though, I am wondering, why do I think that? I’ve always yearned for it never believing I could have it. It occurs to me now though, that it could be mine, if I really do want it, and don’t just enjoy dreaming about it.
Contrary to popular belief, I don’t actually enjoy the instability of turning my life upside down every few months. The fact that my current job is secure means the world to me.

I don’t know where my life is going at this point. I know that I have my career, and I am about to start physical transition, and in a few years I’ll be able to blend into society. What then?

The possibilities are endless! I can dance till dawn in gay night clubs, I can climb rocks, lift weights, go running, read books, program computers, draw pictures, write blog posts, kiss my boy… do everything that I do now, but without the anxiety, without the binder restricting my breathing and movement, without the fear of misgendering.

Life will just go on how it is now, the only difference will be how I am seen by the world.

Hackers and other Geekery

I work in IT, and love computers, though I have been somewhat distracted from them recently. Its odd, but now that my first shot of T is so close (IT COULD BE TOMORROW!!!!) I feel more inclined to throw myself back into my career, into the world, to pull my head out of my belly button, and stop with the naval gazing.

So anyway, I was reading an article on internet security, The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security, and this quote is part of the fourth idea, ‘Hacking is Cool’:

Around the time I was learning to walk, Donn Parker was researching the behavioral aspects of hacking and computer security. He says it better than I ever could:

“Remote computing freed criminals from the historic requirement of proximity to their crimes. Anonymity and freedom from personal victim confrontation increased the emotional ease of crime, i.e., the victim was only an inanimate computer, not a real person or enterprise. Timid people could become criminals. The proliferation of identical systems and means of use and the automation of business made possible and improved the economics of automating crimes and constructing powerful criminal tools and scripts with great leverage.”

Hidden in Parker’s observation is the awareness that hacking is a social problem. It’s not a technology problem, at all. “Timid people could become criminals.” The Internet has given a whole new form of elbow-room to the badly socialized borderline personality. The #4th dumbest thing information security practitioners can do is implicitly encourage hackers by lionizing them. The media plays directly into this, by portraying hackers, variously, as “whiz kids” and “brilliant technologists” - of course if you’re a reporter for CNN, anyone who can install Linux probably does qualify as a “brilliant technologist” to you. I find it interesting to compare societal reactions to hackers as “whiz kids” versus spammers as “sleazy con artists.” I’m actually heartened to see that the spammers, phishers, and other scammers are adopting the hackers and the techniques of the hackers - this will do more to reverse society’s view of hacking than any other thing we could do.

(bold emphasis his, italicized emphasis mine)

Mostly I wanted to post this here cos of the “Hurr, hurr, hurr… CNN reporters are dumb, I am 1337 linux h@x0R!” element, but I do have a point as well.

My mum was much more careful about the amount of access I had to the internet after I downloaded Princess Maker 2, with its original japanese graphics patch (read: hentai), and accidentally made the computer boot into that game instead of the operating system (win95 back then) every time the computer was turned on.
It was pretty amusing. I wasn’t as much of a geek after that, cos of lack of access, but I still managed to muddle my way around the schools network, and befriend the computer science teachers.

By the time I left home though, I considered myself computer literate, but not much more. I bought DELL LAPTOP for gods sake. $2K on a piece of crap. *head desk*
Now days I am one of the more computer literate of my friends, and work in IT Desktop Support (You’re printer is jammed? I’ll be right there). One day I would like to get into network security and system administration.

Anyway, I have always maintained that certain personalities are attracted to computers for different reasons. I mentioned that to an academic here that studies communications, and she thought it was an interesting idea, and asked if I thought I could predict a persons personality based on the OS, software, and kind of computer user they are. I asked for her to try me.
Her son uses linux mostly, is a software engineer, and has no patience with her computer illiteracy. She added a few more details about his jobs specifics. I correctly predicted that he was arrogant about his own intelligence in spite of low social and emotional intelligence, and likes to use his knowledge of computer technology to make the people around him admire him and/or feel inferior.

(I don’t think that all linux geeks are like that… but there are certainly some out there. I sit next to a total unix geek at work, and he’s awesome. Just like not all Apple Geeks are evangelical dickwads, or all Windows users are dumb mainstream-culture consuming gamers.)

I don’t think that it takes a genius to observe that certain personalities are attracted to various careers. I think that it follows that certain people have different uses for computers, and so approach them in different ways.
I think that computers are primarily a social problem. Windows Vista, and Mac OS X are both fabulously secure computer systems… UNTIL YOU ADD AN END USER.

Its the bouncing bunny rule. The end user will do anything to get to the bouncing bunny. Click on anything, install anything, type in any password. Offer the user a bouncing bunny, and the system is yours.

You’re bias is showing…

I don’t usually post on global affairs, or even local affairs. I am tremendously self-absorbed, and don’t read the news. I decided yesterday to start reading the news, but I don’t know how long I will keep it up, given the SHITE that goes on in the world. It is just plain depressing.

News.com.au has this fabulous headline running today:

Four children ‘killed’ at Breakfast Table

Nice use of scare quotes in that headline huh?
My immediate thought was that the children must not really be dead, it must be some kind of ruse or something. If you click through to the article though, it becomes clear that no, the children are in fact dead. Four of them. They have names, and ages, and stuff.

Four children were KILLED at the breakfast table. Not ‘killed’, actually KILLED.

Altogether, 6 people were killed, and 9 wounded from that household, and a 15 year old kid that was walking by on his way to school was also killed.

They were killed by an ISRAELI BOMB that hit their HOUSE.

Of course, the Israeli military is looking into the ‘claims’. The article reads goes on to say:

Defence analysts fear Hamas will use the ceasefire to regroup and re-arm following months of heavy clashes that have drained ammunition and taken a toll on key personnel.

Because you know, its not like the Israeli’s didn’t just use the cease fire to ‘kill’ a family in Gaza or anything.

And people wonder why I ignore the media.

Age and Autonomy

I am 22 years old. I am an adult, have been for four years. I think that this fact hasn’t sunk in for some people around me.

I was packed and ready to leave home months before I was actually able to leave. Once I left I visited home as little as possible. I don’t even return home for traditional holidays such as Christmas, Easter or birthdays. Sometimes I see my family on those days, but usually not. I tried to remember to call my mum on this Easter, but got my holidays muddled and wished her a Merry Christmas in a confused voice message.

I’ve seen the people that were cornerstones of my childhood maybe a dozen times in the last four years. I walked out of that town, and I am never going back.

These people who were once so important to me abandoned me over and over, at times in my life when their support, help and input would have been valuable. I emailed only three people about my transition. Once I thought about it, they were all that I thought needed to know, and two of them were more for my mothers sake, than because I wanted them in my life.
The rumour mill of course has been at work, and I have received many emails now.

The thing that really stands out, is the amount of control and influence these people expect to have over my life. People that haven’t even seen me in over a year expecting me to not only listen to them, but admit that they are right, and I am wrong, about something as personal as my gender and sexuality.

At first I wondered. I thought that maybe its cos they are old (median age in the 60’s), or conservative (Christians, every last one of them). Then I came to realise, that its not that. Its that they see me as a child. Last time I saw them I was a mousey little girl who couldn’t say boo to a goose, did whatever she was told, went to church and bible study every week, sang in church, etc etc I was completely compliant. You didn’t even have to tell me to do something, you just had to suggest it might be good if someone did something, and I would do it. I was a praise junky, and terrified of conflict.

That I have ‘rebelled’ so completely since I left home has come as a great surprise to most people, none more so than my poor mother. I am the Black Sheep. On my middle class income, with caring friends, and a secure career, and most of a university degree (even if its on hold at the moment), I am The Shame. (My brother is a criminal. CONVICTED criminal, and yet I am still the black sheep. Go figure.)

So, many of these people seem to view this as simply the next step in my rebellion. If only they could see how far that is from the truth. How much it hurts me to have to fight, to go against the flow.

My mother spoke to me on the phone last night about a friend of hers, who ‘lived the bisexual lifestyle’ from her late teens until she was 29, when she met and fell in love with a Wonderful Man, and got Married. She went on to live Happily Ever After and have lots of Babies.

At 22, she said, everything seems urgent, but you really don’t know what you want.

Don’t I?

How long must I want it to know for certain? If I said that I wanted to get married, and have a baby, would anyone contest my wishes? Would anyone say ‘Wait until you are 30, then you can KNOW for sure’?

At 17 I knew for sure I was masculine identified. That hasn’t changed, not once in the 5 years since then. The only thing that changed is what I thought I could do about it.

I WANT MY LIFE! It begins NOW, but its paused, its moving in slow motion, as I make arrangements. This section of my life is dedicated to planning for the future. Its counting the years, its figuring out my career, and transition, and love life, and making sure that I can do this.

I want to live as a man, more than anything else in the world. I feel like shit every time I am misgendered. I hate it when my mother calls me by my birth name. I will transition. When I am given my script for T, I will buy it, and inject it. This is my life, my future. Don’t ask me to stay here in the fringes, being misgendered and misinterpreted.

I am an adult, and I will say it again… I don’t need anyone. I can turn my back on anyone, at any time. Don’t push me away by treating me like a child.

Am I cool with being gay?

So my boyfriend asked me what I thought was an odd question last night:
“How come you are so cool with being gay?”
My response wasn’t that helpful, it was along the lines of “With so much else to worry about, how can I worry about that too!”

I’ve been thinking about it a bit since then.

I spent most of my life thinking that I was a lesbian, and that explained me. Of course that fell flat the moment I investigated the lesbian scene, but that was an important learning experience for me. (Lesbians are women! Shock! Who knew. Even Butch Dykes are still women!)

When I heard the term Pansexual last year I adopted that sexual identity. Really pansexuality is a kind of bisexuality, but ignores the gender binary. I don’t identify as third gender, or outside the gender binary, but there are people that do, and I do find that attractive, as well as finding both men and women attractive.

I went back to identifying as lesbian for a while because I found out about physical transition, and somehow felt like I needed to make absolutely certain that I wasn’t a lesbian instead of a man. I also realised that all the relationships I had with men up until that point had been deeply unhealthy, and for very broken reasons, and assumed that any attraction I felt to men would be for similarly faulty reasons in the future.

Now I identify as ‘pansexual’, ‘queer’, ‘male’, ‘trans’, and ‘gay’. I am cool with being gay, just because it fits me. I like applying the term ‘fag’ to myself.
I’ve realised that yeah, my relationships with men in the past have been kinda fucked up, and I’ve entered them for fucked up reasons, but that doesn’t mean I am completely not attracted to men. I also acknowledge that part of my attraction to men is a fascination with the male body. I love watching men shower, and shave, and do other manly things that I just never saw in my house. (By the time my brother hit puberty I’d disconnected from my family).
I also know that there have been men that I have loved deeply, and passionately, and that they have made me feel hot around the ears when they’ve kissed me. (My ears get hot when I am turned on, is that normal?)

I’m currently in a relationship with another guy, and frankly, the only thing that matters to me is that he digs me as much as I dig him. What people think doesn’t factor much… except for one thing!
There’s only one thing I hate more than being perceived as a lesbian, and that is being perceived as a straight woman. I am misgendered less often when I am physically with him though.

I think that I can be rather blase about being gay, because my life contains two categories of people. People who’s opinion doesn’t matter to me, and people who don’t care that I am queer.
Others aren’t always that lucky.