Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Nick Kiddle's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
11:45 pm	Laughter at bedtime Every evening, to stop Andrea stressing out while I get her ready for bed, I amuse her by pretending not to know what happens next. So as she's getting her pyjamas on, I'll say, "Next we have to put shoes on, coat on and go to the station to catch a train." Once the pyjamas are on, I'll say, "Now you're going to have a cup of hot tea...a glass of Coca-Cola...some water..." until she sets me straight and tells me she's having milk. Tonight, the conversation went like this: Me: And once you've got your pyjamas on, you can have a cup of coffee. Andrea: Glass of coley-coley! Me: *helpless with laughter* I also told her a knock-knock joke, which she found riotously funny. Even the "knock, knock" part. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
9:35 pm	If I'm incoherent, it's because this upsets me This story is everywhere at the moment. It's about a kid called Bradley who used to play with dolls and hang out with girls. Bradley's parents were worried - with good reason - about Bradley getting bullied by the gender police, and sought professional help. This is where the story gets horrible. The professional they consulted told them that Bradley had a horrible scary condition called gender identity disorder and needed immediate intervention to teach him to be a proper boy. They trustingly followed his recommendations and started making Bradley give up the dolls, a few each day. When all the dolls were gone, Bradley just didn't play any more; instead, Bradley drew pictures of the forbidden dolls and other girlie things. The parents then asked Bradley to draw boys instead; once shown what a drawing of a boy looked like, Bradley dutifully complied. Slowly, Bradley is learning how to lead a double life, secretly and shamefully playing with dolls every time an opportunity presents itself and repeating the accepted answers: "No, NO! I'm happy being a boy." Part of me just can't get past the toy-confiscation. Throughout my childhood, that was literally the stuff of my nightmares; my dolls and other cuddlies were my treasured companions, and if anyone had tried to make me give them up, I think I would have turned homicidal. And if they had followed up by telling me, when I tried to soothe my pain by drawing my lost friends, that I was doing it all wrong and ought to draw something else... It sounds to me like a recipe for screwing up a small child pretty thoroughly. But hey, it's better than Bradley ending up a tranny, isn't it? Because that's what it's all about. The professional in question is quoted talking all about how sooper-scary trannyhood is, as if the only options are forcible masculinisation or eventual transition. It's not possible a boy could play with barbie dolls and grow up a well-adjusted guy with plenty of feminine side1. And certainly, telling a boy that pink and dolls are only for girls isn't going to convince him that transition represents his only chance to be his authentic self. Not to mention how trannies only turn out that way because their parents encourage them... 1I played with barbie dolls for most of my childhood. OK, I hardly score highly for well-adjusted, but what I'm saying is, it didn't turn me into a girl. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 12th, 2008
11:42 pm	Timing difficulties Yesterday, I had my usual telephone discussion with Jen at 1530 Eastern Time. So I rushed around like a blue-arse fly trying to get Andrea settled in bed for half past seven, just managed it, dialled Jen's number and got voicemail. I checked the email, then thought to google "time zones". I discovered it was still only half past two Eastern Time. Today, I had an appointment at the doctor's at 1610. I managed to fall asleep during the afternoon, and woke in a panic thinking it was half past four already. I grabbed Andrea out of her cot and rushed round to the surgery to grovel. The following conversation ensued: Receptionist: What time did you say your appointment was? Me: Ten past four. Receptionist: Umm, it's only half past three now... Me: *headdesk* On the bright side, an hour early for everything beats the hell out of an hour late. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 9th, 2008
1:59 am	Pictures Because it's been too long since I posted some cute pictures, and because she got a funny hat out of the cuddly box and put it on all by herself, and because it made her look so sweet I reached for the camera... ( Have some pictures of Andrea ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
11:46 pm	Dragon007 snippet/scene I'm really not sure about this scene: ( 1k scene behind the cut ) I'd welcome anyone else's opinions, particularly on the relationship between Gellaznim and Ciznougloth. Also, Lindsay thinks the way Canlazloth is talking reads like "We'll tighten security, but first we'll have a cup of tea." I think it just reads like he's explaining to two civilians who have to authorise anything he wants to do, but that could be me making excuses. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
4:15 pm	Why I can't be a girl who likes football This question arises out of an assumption that my logic went something like: "Boys like football." "I like football." "Therefore I am a boy." The argument is a fallacy; the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises; if that was my logic I'd be in big trouble. Luckily for me, it wasn't. In fact, it was more like: "Boys like football." "I want to be a boy."1 "Therefore I need to start liking football." You can take exception to the premise that liking football is an essential part of boyness, but you can't fault the argument structure here. If boys do indeed like football and I want to be a boy, it follows that I need to make myself like football somehow. Now everyone who's met me since 1992 (in other words, the vast majority of readers) will be scratching their heads. Clearly I do like football. Well, I love Scunthorpe United, and that amounts to pretty much the same thing2. I didn't need to make myself like football. Well, hard as it may be to believe, looking at me now, I didn't step through the turnstile at Blundell Park3 and immediately fall in love. Football fans intrigued me, and the trip up to Scunthorpe was an exciting departure from everyday routine, but what happened on the pitch was a fairly boring procession of things I didn't understand all that well. It didn't help that girls played a strange game called skittleball in games lessons, which meant I didn't have any exposure to football other than watching the Iron. My sister and I must have tried my dad's patience sorely at games in those early days. We fought over everything, especially who got custody of the programme. It was full of incomprehensible technicalities, but any printed matter was a welcome escape from boredom. The content of the programme could provoke quarrels too: the title of this blog came from one. He sat between us, but that only meant the squabbles went on across him. I remember sitting for 45 minutes with the ends of my scarf firmly gripped so that I could easily raise it above my head when we scored. Naturally, this meant we didn't score in the first half; at half time I wised up and put the thing round my neck, and I think we scored in the second. Another time, I had a can of drink which I wrapped in my scarf to keep it cool. I was in agonies about how I would join in with the usual ritual if we scored before half time. Apart from standing up and cheering goals, the only part of the matchday experience I took any interest in was the singing. "What are they singing?" I kept asking my dad. The tunes were familiar - hymn tunes and traditional songs - but the words were twisted into something Scunthorpe-related. Some songs, like "With an S and a C and a UNT" were easy for him to repeat, but he tied himself into knots when the crowd piped up, "Who's your father, referee?"5 It wasn't until Jason White blasted a penalty into the Wembley sky that I became obsessed with Scunthorpe. That was the summer of claret-and-blue cakes and Iron fists all over my rough book, as I tried to ease the pain of shoot-out defeat by immersing myself in essence of Scunthorpe. The obsession faded eventually, but the love remained; it put down roots in my psyche until some people started to doubt that I have any interests unconnected with it. But it wasn't always that way. 1For a standard "transsexual narrative" I should have said, "I am a boy. Why won't anyone believe me?" All I can remember thinking is, "I want to be a boy." Deal with it. 2One of these days, I want to blog about the difference between being a football fan and being a Scunthorpe fan. 3If you're surprised that I first met Scunthorpe United in Grimsby4, you obviously haven't read my userinfo. 4Cleethorpes, for the incurable pedants out there. 5I wouldn't care to repeat it to Andrea either, since the last line is, in my dad's words, "You're a [then they say a naughty word], referee." It confused me for many years, because the only swear word I knew was shit. A shit referee made some sense, but I couldn't see the connection with fathers. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
10:29 pm	Watford 0 Scunthorpe 1 On Friday afternoon, a Concerned Person asked about my plans for the weekend. I explained that I was going to Watford for a football match, and the Concerned Person demonstrated that the ways of football fans are unknown to her. "Are you looking forward to it?" Of course I wasn't looking forward to it. I fully expected we would struggle as badly as we have in every other match I've seen since last October, emerging with no points and yet another blow to our pride and goal difference. We set off in good time for the station, and it was only while we waited for the train that I realised I'd forgotten to copy down the directions from Watford underground station to the ground. Still, we would be arriving in plenty of time, and there was sure to be someone we could ask or follow. When we arrived at Kings Cross and discovered that the Metropolitan Line wasn't running to Watford, something like panic set in. There were replacement buses, but would they get me there in time? Why did I bother, anyway? Dragging Andrea on and off trains, up and down stairs, not to mention the hell on earth that is replacement buses through London traffic, is hardly my idea of fun. Next season, I decided, I would save my money and my energy and stay at home. When the bus finally got into Watford, I started having second thoughts. I found the way to the ground by the time-honoured method of following someone in a yellow shirt, and the signs for the stadium parking restrictions warmed my hardened heart. The finding of new grounds was still fun, at least. The travelling Scunthorpe fans were another reason to think again. The prevailing mood was that since our time in the Championship was coming to an end, we'd better make the most of what we had left. So there were a few last choruses of "Championi" - the new League One champions were still uncrowned, pending a legal challenge by Leeds - taunts for the home side that they were staying down, and the truest summary of our feelings, "Going down, we're taking the piss." The sun shone, the chants ranged from light-hearted to surreal, and I realised I was having fun again. On the pitch, we produced our usual feeble attempts on goal - at one point, I wondered how much the Watford keeper was being paid to pluck our soft shots out of the air - but it didn't matter. The worst had already happened, and we were free. Relegation is a wonderful thing; everyone should try it. The by-now-customary opposition goal just before half-time failed to happen: the score after 45 minutes was 0-0. I texted the codhead with a couple of chants I hoped would amuse him and spent half-time swapping anecdotes with Karen. I was high enough on the atmosphere to applaud the Scunthorpe players out for the second half, and the chants continued. And then, a glorious thing happened. Scunthorpe started to play like a team full of confidence. We passed the ball, we went on runs, we created chances the keeper had to work to save. We won a corner, flicked the ball this way and that around the box, lashed in a shot - an agonised "Oooooh!" as it went the wrong side of the post. "You see that?" I told Andrea. "That was nearly in the goal." Another shot, a few minutes later, went just as narrowly wide. But Andrea, of all the travelling supporters, wasn't interested in the match. She wriggled, scrambled on and off my knee and finally irritated me so much that I lifted her into the empty seats of the row behind and let her run up and down. For a moment, I thought I would instantly regret it - Watford went down the other end and gave Murphy something to think about for a minute - but we were soon back to attacking and I could concentrate on the action. Another attack. Forte ran the ball in on the left, whipped a cross into the crowded box, someone connected with it - the ball was in the back of the net! I think you have to go back to 2004 to find a goal I was as nakedly pleased about. I grabbed Andrea from the row behind so she could join the celebrations. The goalscorer's name was announced: Paul Hayes. Three in two games - he's almost living up to the song we burst into: "He gets the ball and scores a goal, Paulie Paulie Hayes." For a little while, we looked so gloriously in control that I almost believed we'd improve the scoreline and bring some respectability to our goal difference. We began to fade as the match wound down, and Watford - who are still chasing a play-off place and really didn't need to lose at home to us - started pressing. But what did it matter if they equalised? We were down, and we were free. The fans started singing "We're proud of you", and a song that brought tears to my eyes even as I sang along: "We're going down, we're coming back." Four minutes of stoppage time saw us running the ball into the corner and doing a reasonable job of holding on to possession. There were the obligatory nervous moments, but the referee finally blew for time - greeted by a roar from the away end. We stood to applaud the players, didn't stop clapping until they'd all left the pitch. If only we could have managed a few more performances like that before we got relegated. The return journey to Kings Cross was no less tedious, but I was too happy to care. I was floating on rosy waves of victory. I had a song in my heart, and the song was "We're going down, we're coming back." I won't hope for anything, not yet. But it's a good song to sing. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
12:53 am	More on sexism and ableism Yet more things to piss me off. The comments here are pretty uniformly dreadful, but this one set a new low: Should we learn tomorrow that an ever-so-slight alteration in maternal diets - say having a cup of tea every day at breakfast - would eliminate congenital deafness (or blindness or intersex conditions or low-functioning autism or Downs' syndrome or.....) that would be a very happy day indeed. Precision tea-drinking would quickly become a more-or-less mandatory feature of pre-natal care. It would be widely praised for its salvific effect on abortion rates, and 'Hippies' who insist on having tea-unsystematized 'natural' pregnancies would be widely condemned. Consider the flack pregnant women currently get for having so much as a cup of coffee or a glass of wine while pregnant, then exponentiate it. I don't think anything that leads to massively increased shaming of pregnant women who don't live up to the other people's standards of fetal care could ever be described as a very happy day. When I was pregnant, I took a couple of multivitamins one day. My motive was, ironically enough, to make sure I was getting enough folic acid that I wouldn't have a disabled baby, but I'd forgotten that multivitamins also contain vitamin A, and excess vitamin A is badbadbad for the fetus. I worried, on and off, for the rest of the pregnancy, that I'd done something horrible to my baby. I didn't fully relax until Andrea was a couple of days old. There were two parts to the fear. One was pretty much ableist: Oh my god, I might have a disabled baby! How would my child cope in an ableist society? How would I cope with the "burden" of looking after them? (Scare quotes because seeing disabled people as a burden is a pretty hefty dose of ableism in itself.) The other part was guilt. ...and it would all be my fault! It's a strange feeling, to know that everything you do to your body is having an effect on another person. I believe very strongly that a pregnant woman1 has value other than as the container the fetus is developing in, but on the other hand I wasn't finding it easy to value myself that way. Not to mention, plenty of people were happy to reinforce the guilt. So, yeah. If we discovered that by doing some supposedly-simple thing, pregnant women could make sure no more disabled babies were born ever again, this would actually be a sad day on at least two levels. 1"or trans man" being understood here. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 21st, 2008
4:38 pm	A muddled post about disability and caregivers Some of the comments on this post are depressing the hell out of me. Any time I hear about "those people", the ones who shouldn't breed because "what kind of life would the child have anyway", I start feeling sick, because I'm one of those people. No-one's ever told me that depression made me permanently unfit to breed (temporarily unfit until it magically cured itself would be another matter), but depression was the main factor making me poor before Andrea was born, and plenty of people think being poor disqualifies you from breeding. It's one of those things that cuts too close for me to be rational about it. It isn't OK to perform surgery on a disabled woman, against her clearly expressed wishes, just because what if she had a baby. I don't care how you slice the arguments, it isn't OK. The other thing that bothers me is all the "think of the caregivers" stuff. Because certainly, looking after someone who can't look after themself is hard work. I know a bit about that, too, although I won't pretend having an able-bodied toddler is the same thing as being guardian to a disabled adult. And yes, when I read about the Ashley treatment, I do wonder what I would do if I knew Andrea wasn't going to grow up to take care of herself. I like to think I wouldn't stoop to carving her up for the sake of my convenience, but I really don't know how I would cope. The thing is, there's this idea that taking care of children and disabled adults is something that any given relative (but mostly, let's face it, the female ones) can do, unpaid and without much in the way of support. I can't work out whether that's more insulting to the women or the people in need of their care, but it's not like there isn't enough insult to go round. If we - as a society - respected disabled people, taking care of them wouldn't be shit work that can just be pushed off onto some woman and forgotten about. There would be proper functioning systems in place to let disabled people have as much control as possible over their own lives without putting a strain on their families. I don't know how it would work, but if we made it a priority we could make it happen. That it hasn't happened says a lot about how much we respect disabled people. And we don't really respect caregivers either. There's just some lip-service concern for how much work they have to do, when it's convenient to justify treating the people they're caring for like objects. Once we've established that we're just thinking of the caregivers, we can forget about them again and let them struggle along without any help. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
6:26 pm	Differences of opinion Which of these statements is not like the others? a) The final movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony is the most beautiful piece of music ever written. b) Pizza is not complete without black olives. c) Transsexual men are men, even if they get pregnant. d) Nigel Adkins is a reasonable manager who was hopelessly out of his depth this season. ( Think long and hard before you click for the answer ) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
11:12 pm	Cleverer than Mummy already Me: OK, now jump down onto the ceiling. Andrea: No, onto floor. Me: Onto the floor, that's right. Mummy was being silly again. Andrea: Ceiling up there. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
11:41 pm	But on the bright side, we've got Izzy Iriekpen's shirt Our time in the Championship is over. Now that it's confirmed, it doesn't feel as bad, somehow, as when it was just hanging over us. I suspect that's because I don't have all that stupid useless hope clogging up the works. Oh, what am I saying? There's always hope. Hope that we'll win the league again next year and bounce straight back. Hope that we'll hang out in League One for a few seasons until we're ready to make the step up. Hope that in another 43 years, we'll hit the comparative big time again. Hope's like that. So I cried. I cried when we were playing like crap and I cried when we were being brave and defiant and I cried when I redefined relegation so we're not down until the season's over. And I'm crying now because I've redefined my way to victory - or at least not-defeat - but I can't find words to explain it that don't sound either melodramatic or plain stupid. And because I know, if I would only face facts, that redefinition is as thin a facade as hope. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 7th, 2008
12:34 pm	My life in a nutshell: should I go to Crystal Palace? Reasons not to bother: 1. Three direct debits come out of my account this week and I will just barely have enough money left to pay for utilities, groceries, Andrea's nursery, train fare and tickets. Unless there's something I forgot to account for, in which case I'll go overdrawn. 2. Lindsay's going. He will be all cold-blooded and reasonable and say things like "Relegation is all we ever expected, it's not that bad," until I want to beat him over the head with the pushchair. Reasons to make the effort: 1. If I can't stop us getting relegated, at least I can show up and bear witness. I made the effort to be there the day we won the league, so what kind of a fair-weather fan am I if I can't be there the day we slip back down? At least this way I'll have company in my pain (although see 2. above). (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 6th, 2008
10:01 pm	Autocomplete Me (singing, to the tune of John Brown's Body): Glory, glory, Scun... Andrea: Thorpe! Me: Scunthorpe... Andrea: United! Me: That's right! But when we're singing this song, we call them Scun United so that it fits the tune. Me: Glory, glory, Scun... Andrea: Thorpe! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 4th, 2008
11:45 pm	Learning from mistakes Sort-of following on from the comment beamtetrode left on my other post, I've been thinking about the idea of learning from mistakes. Andrea's not very good at learning from her mistakes yet: she'll run on an uneven pavement, fall splat and weep copiously, then two minutes later she'll be running on a different bit of uneven pavement. But that got me thinking: what lesson are we supposed to learn from any given mistake anyway? For any given decision, there's a whole range of lessons from the extremely specific right up to the extremely general. Should we learn them all? Pick one and learn it hard? Take the fire, for instance. On one level, the lesson to be learned was "If you're trying to ritually burn someone's telephone number and it won't catch, make sure it's completely extinguished before you put it in the bin". And that's a fine lesson that I've completely learned, but let's face it, what's the likelihood of me ever being in that position again? So maybe I should take it up a level and say "If you're pissed in both the English and the American sense, don't perform any rituals involving fire". It's another good lesson, and I'm pretty sure the memory of the fire will encourage me to calm down and sober up before I reach for the matches in future, but again, it's maybe a bit too specific. The next level up might be "Don't be pissed in the English and American senses simultaneously", which is a nice idea but not practical. That night, I was English-pissed before I was American-pissed, due to having drunk the beer before the jerk deigned to return my call. Yes, I could try swearing off Timmy's for evermore, but how well is that going to work really? Where are we up to? "Don't get involved with jerks"? I tried that one already, and it doesn't work. Jerks don't go around with flashing neon signs above their heads, and isolating myself from the universe to prevent accidental contact with an unmarked jerk ends up with me being a) very depressed and b) all the more likely to get involved with the next jerk to cross my path. And this is why I keep coming back to the fire. People assure me I've learned my lesson and won't ever do "it" again, but we're applying different values of "it". They mean I won't throw a still-smouldering scrap of paper in the bin; I mean I haven't stopped getting involved with jerks, nor have I stopped getting pissed in the English and American sense simultaneously. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
10:56 pm	Taxpayers' money It all started with a line from a book about John Barnes's wages being "a waste of taxpayers' money." My dad and I came up with a justification for why Barnes's wages were indeed paid from taxpayers' money: his wages were paid by Liverpool FC, whose revenue came from gate receipts, which came from the disposable income of Scousers, whose main source of income is state benefits, ie taxpayers' money. Some time later, I tried to figure out where my wages were coming from. At the time, I was working for Payplan, whose revenue comes from creditors who sign up to the Paylink scheme. The creditors in turn get their money from customers, many of whom are taxpayers1. In other words, my wages could also be called taxpayers' money. What fascinated me was that, whatever job I considered, if I traced enough steps I ended up with the same result. All money is taxpayers' money. Or to put it another way, money doesn't come from anywhere: it just goes round and round the loop. This is good for the government, especially seeing as they take a cut just about every time money changes hands. They want to see that money keep going round and round, so they encourage us to keep it moving. It's clearly in their interests if I get a job and spend the improvement in my disposable income paying people to do the things I'm too busy working to do for myself. I remain supremely unconvinced that it's in my interests - I can actually think of a couple of ways it works against my interests. 1In my first year in Liverpool, I got into an argument with a porter who considered students to be non-taxpayers. I pointed out that we spent whatever money we could obtain on alcohol (heavily taxed) and consumer goods (subject to VAT) and therefore ought to be considered taxpayers like all the rest. By this logic, you'd be hard-pressed to find a customer who wasn't a taxpayer. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 31st, 2008
10:17 pm	Parental love I read about Ren's awkward conversations with her parents right after a day of my mum's own special brand of parental love, and it got me thinking about what parents want for their kids. I think we all want our kids to be happy, but our values of "happy" vary enormously. I want Andrea to be happy, but I don't trust her to effectively pursue happiness on her own. Leaping up and down on the settee makes her happy, to take one example, but I can see the potential for extreme unhappiness looming in the future if she should miss the settee and go crashing down onto the floor. So, even though it annoys her, I lift her down off the settee and suggest that maybe she'd rather play something with less potential for a dangerous fall. The thing is, by the time Andrea gets to my age, she'll be able to decide for herself whether the potential benefits of any given activity outweigh the potential risks. She'll be too big to manhandle and supremely unimpressed by a statement that I'm the grown-up and I make the rules. Coming down on her when she does something I think is too dangerous won't keep her safe; it'll just make her resent me. From where I'm sitting now, that's a very scary thought. When I think of Andrea, I think of her as she is now, and when I imagine letting her take her own risks it's always stuff like jumping on the settee where I can see very clearly the dangers she's oblivious to. So I've got a lot of sympathy for my mum and the way she tries to manage my life. She's just overlooking the fact that I have done some growing up and I am capable of working out the risks for myself. I hope I don't make the same mistake with Andrea, but there's no way to be sure. It hurts me when Andrea's not happy, and I'm guessing it hurts my mum when I'm not happy. She deals with it by laying down the law and telling me I ought to do xyz and then I'll be happier; I've tried to handle it differently by telling Andrea I want to make it better and can't she please stop crying long enough to tell me what's hurting her. But when she's crying too hard to tell me what's wrong, I do understand the temptation to fix everything by fiat. If only it worked. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 29th, 2008
10:12 pm	I'm sure there's a philosophical name for this question Which is more important: hope or dignity? (Comment on this)
Friday, March 21st, 2008
11:12 pm	More on those privileged transfolk Another matter arising from this whole thing is a bunch of radfems insisting that they are neither cissexual nor cisgender and certainly do not possess cissexual privilege. In fact, teh trannies have all the privilege because they're so gender normative. There is a certain amount of confusion about what cisgender and cissexual actually mean and why they're necessary. The definition of cisgender is a horrible fuzzy mess, but cissexual basically means "not transsexual". The theory behind having a separate word is that saying "not trans" suggests a distinction between normal people and freaks, whereas cis/trans suggests a distinction between two different populations, neither of which is any better than the other. The problem is that it's not easy to coin a quibble-proof definition of cissexual that says what cis folk are - the workable definitions all revolve around "not trans" or "having no desire to transition". And just as we'd like a word that isn't "non-trans", we'd like that word to have a definition that isn't "not trans", so we come up with things like "having an internal sense of gender that matches the sex assigned at birth", whereupon radfems declare that they have no internal sense of gender at all because that would be essentialist and an assortment of trans and trans-friendly heads meet desks. Having got all that out of the way, I'm going to use "cis" to mean "having no desire to transition" and try to discuss this whole "gender normative privilege" thing. No-one's denying that behaving in a gender normative kind of way (that is to say, men acting masculine and women acting feminine) gets some measure of privilege. But so does not transitioning (see my previous post). And the thing about privilege is that you can't easily compare privileges in different directions to work out who's got it worse. If you compare a masculine-acting cis woman to a feminine-acting trans woman, you're going to see various ways in which each comes out ahead, with no real way to weight the different effects. Compare a masculine acting cis woman to a feminine-acting cis woman and lo! it is indeed true that gender normative behaviour is privileged. Compare a masculine-acting cis woman to a masculine-acting trans woman, and it's pretty obvious that being cis is privileged. Nobody is trying to claim that being a cis woman is Easy Street, as some outraged radfems seem to be saying. One of them claimed that the very notion of cis privilege is a crock of shit unless it meant being the target of a statistically higher chance of sexual abuse and rape. But cis women don't have a statistically higher chance of sexual abuse than trans women. What cis women get, trans women get and worse, which is the whole point of cis privilege. And the thing to remember about the feminine-acting trans woman is that her gender normative privilege can disappear in an instant if her medical history becomes public knowledge. She loses her womanhood in many people's eyes, while remaining a target for any kind of abuse anyone feels like throwing at her. And because she "lied" and hid her "true sex", the world will happily line up to excuse her attackers and suggest she had it coming. Yeah, that doesn't sound much like privilege to me. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
9:09 pm	Cunning plans Nigel Adkins has a cunning plan to avoid relegation. If we win all four of our remaining home games and one of our remaining three away games - the game at Leicester would be especially useful here - we stand a good chance of staying up. Now, that doesn't sound like a bad plan. It's not as obviously doomed as, say, Laurence Weidberg's scheme to get free heating by living above a gas showroom or the "insider secrets of publishing" that scammers keep pushing to naive writers. If we win five of our remaining seven games, we do indeed stand a very good chance of staying up. The flaw in the plan is that if we were capable of winning five out of seven games, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. It's not so much a plan as a restatement of the task before us, and it's a nearly impossible task however you state it. Adkins isn't the only person that falls for this kind of plan. People keep telling me I should get a job, get up at seven every morning, give up all the various procrastinational activities I keep indulging in, spend every waking moment on completely goal-oriented pursuits; if I pull all this off I can become magnificently successful. A nice plan in theory, it fails in practice because I can't pull all that off. I procrastinate because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm afraid of making a mistake. I sleep late, partly because I stay up all night trying to finish what I've put off until the last minute, but also because getting up and facing the world isn't much fun, especially if we lost the previous night. I can't get over that by willpower: I tried, and it screwed me up worse than ever. I'm not immune to the plans myself. Last summer, when I was getting a steady stream of that sort of advice, I applied for a job in school. If I could reliably take a packed lunch and spend my lunch time at the computer, there was no reason I couldn't keep up with my writing goals with a nearly full-time job. But even as I made the plan, a little voice in the back of my head whispered warnings. What if I ran out of bread or left myself no time to pack lunch? What if I packed my lunch and then forgot to take it with me? What if I had to work through lunch? If the plan couldn't hold up against the quite likely imperfections of everyday life, what kind of plan was it? I know why I made that plan. The same reason I made all my other cunning plans, from going on estrogen to stop my periods to working as a pro-domme so I didn't have to give up kink, and quite probably the same reason Adkins made his cunning plan. It's less painful than facing whatever the plan is supposed to avoid. It's a way to pretend, just for a little while, that all is not lost. Except that all is most likely lost, and the cunning plans just end up looking stupid. (Comment on this)