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some updates
1) Today I filed for a legal name change, which I've been meaning to do since, oh, late 2019. Covid restrictions messed up the plan for a while, but after that it was just my own indecisiveness and procrastination. But now the thing is done. Sort of--I have to have a hearing before a judge to grant it, but that's just pro forma. So pro forma that when they gave me the forms to fill out, they specifically said that under "Reason" I could just put "personal." Which I did.
In the end, I took the cautious/cowardly way out regarding my new name: I picked names readable as gender-neutral rather than clearly masculine. I'm not worried about problems with my job or my health care, but I am worried about housing, since protection from housing discrimination for trans people doesn't exist on a federal level as far as I know, and anyway Trump + his Supreme Court lackeys will try to roll back such anti-discrimination measures as exist. (I'm morbidly curious to see what will happen with Bostock, which protects LGBTQ+ people from employment discrimination, and which was just decided in 2020. One of the judges in the majority was Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, not because he cares about queer people but because his legal thinking is heavily focused on the text of the law, in contrast to Kavanaugh and Barrett whose legal thinking focuses on what goals Trump and/or the Federalist Society are trying to achieve. Not that Gorsuch has gone against the pack much lately.)
2) I need to change the gender marker on my driver's license, but I'm not sure whether to go with M or X. In some ways I prefer X, because in principle I think putting people's gender on identity documents is almost as weird and gross as putting race on them was. On the other hand, X will quite literally mark a person as gender-noncomforming in some way. On the third hand, I kind of feel like, well, some of us have to take some risks. I neither like nor am good at taking risks, but I'm also in a relatively safe position, and An Old to boot, and thus in a better position to take some minor risks for the sake of not rolling over and playing dead.
3) In other news, I saw Conclave today. IMO it's a very well-acted and mostly well-made film with a naive and ridiculous premise.
4) I recently read Dragon's Winter and Dragon's Treasure by Elizabeth A. Lynn, who's probably best known (at least in these fannish parts) for The Dancers of Arun. Didn't love the dragon books, didn't hate them. The story feels deeply unfinished (as in, was supposed to be a trilogy but the last bit never got written) and surprisingly conventional in all kinds of ways. Not least, sadly, the handling of queerness and queer relationships. It's a bit weird and depressing that Lynn was bolder about this in the late 1970s than she was 20 years later.
There is probably a tale to be told about how a (relative) plethora of queer sff in the 1970s/1980s just kind of faded away from the 1990s until relatively recently. I get the sense that a lot of the Kids These Days think there was no queer sff until, like, Gideon the Ninth or something.
5) Tomorrow begins a long workweek that will not end until Thanksgiving. Wish me luck.
In the end, I took the cautious/cowardly way out regarding my new name: I picked names readable as gender-neutral rather than clearly masculine. I'm not worried about problems with my job or my health care, but I am worried about housing, since protection from housing discrimination for trans people doesn't exist on a federal level as far as I know, and anyway Trump + his Supreme Court lackeys will try to roll back such anti-discrimination measures as exist. (I'm morbidly curious to see what will happen with Bostock, which protects LGBTQ+ people from employment discrimination, and which was just decided in 2020. One of the judges in the majority was Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, not because he cares about queer people but because his legal thinking is heavily focused on the text of the law, in contrast to Kavanaugh and Barrett whose legal thinking focuses on what goals Trump and/or the Federalist Society are trying to achieve. Not that Gorsuch has gone against the pack much lately.)
2) I need to change the gender marker on my driver's license, but I'm not sure whether to go with M or X. In some ways I prefer X, because in principle I think putting people's gender on identity documents is almost as weird and gross as putting race on them was. On the other hand, X will quite literally mark a person as gender-noncomforming in some way. On the third hand, I kind of feel like, well, some of us have to take some risks. I neither like nor am good at taking risks, but I'm also in a relatively safe position, and An Old to boot, and thus in a better position to take some minor risks for the sake of not rolling over and playing dead.
3) In other news, I saw Conclave today. IMO it's a very well-acted and mostly well-made film with a naive and ridiculous premise.
4) I recently read Dragon's Winter and Dragon's Treasure by Elizabeth A. Lynn, who's probably best known (at least in these fannish parts) for The Dancers of Arun. Didn't love the dragon books, didn't hate them. The story feels deeply unfinished (as in, was supposed to be a trilogy but the last bit never got written) and surprisingly conventional in all kinds of ways. Not least, sadly, the handling of queerness and queer relationships. It's a bit weird and depressing that Lynn was bolder about this in the late 1970s than she was 20 years later.
There is probably a tale to be told about how a (relative) plethora of queer sff in the 1970s/1980s just kind of faded away from the 1990s until relatively recently. I get the sense that a lot of the Kids These Days think there was no queer sff until, like, Gideon the Ninth or something.
5) Tomorrow begins a long workweek that will not end until Thanksgiving. Wish me luck.
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Mazel tov! May the rest of the bureaucracy be unimpeded and boring.
Best of luck with your work week.
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With our system, you just fill out the form and pay them the money [that's the important bit]. You're only allowed to do it three times in your lifetime now. I guess there were some folk who were doing it more often, for some bizarre reason.
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I'm pretty sure I have those dragon Lynns somewhere, and they have faded from memory, unlike her earlier works.
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i'm so angry and sad for them and for everyone.
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Good luck with the choices re. gender marker! They do suck in principle.
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I've just taught a optional seminar on 20th century queer lit and *everything* from Radclyffe Hall to James Baldwin to Derek Jarman was new to students who were by definition self-selecting as interested in that kind of stuff, so I think you might be right about sff as well!