something queer going on

1) I am legally in possession of a new name!

The process was more awkward than it should have been, because I foolishly relied on information from a co-worker who had just changed his name, rather than calling the court to check. Co-worker told me that (a) all the hearings are over Google Meet only, and when I checked the form I was sent, it did say in small print on the bottom "All hearings are on Google Meet," and (b) the judge wouldn't ask me any detailed reasons for the change, and "personal reasons" was sufficient, which was also what the clerk told me when I was filling out the form.

I'm sure nobody deliberately misled me (my guess is that my co-worker saw a different judge with different procedures), but neither thing turned out to be quite true.

( Click for more )

2) Not much else is going on. My life is dull, apart from looking at the news in ever-mounting horror.

I want to stop getting my news from Twitter, in part because I'm in the process of leaving Twitter altogether. I'd like to support actual journalism by subscribing to an actual newspaper, but my god, the options are grim. ( Click for more )

3) I'm not even reading much. I buy a zillion books (on sale, on Kindle, yes I know), but the general state of everything everywhere is making me hugely risk-averse when I can be. So I re-read, or look at YouTube videos of Dylan Hollis baking or the chocolate guy making fully-functional superconducting supercolliders filled with raspberry ganache, or I watch low-stakes British comedy panel shows.

However, I am reading one thing I've never read before: The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's translation. Recently Twitter had another round of ignorant right-wing douchebros giving her shit about how bad and woke her translations of Homer are, so I bought one.

( Click for more )

3) A bit late to mention this, but I wrote a thing for Yuletide.

Puppets (2312 words) by kindkit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Astreiant Series - Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Philip Eslingen/Nicolas Rathe
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding
Summary: It's only an old story.


This is a story idea I may revisit at some point; there are things I'd like to explore about Astreiant's matriarchy without having a deadline at the most exhausting time of the year for me, and also not needing to keep the result suitable for gift-giving. (Basically: what if Astreiant had a men's rights movement? But even in the very different context of an actual matriarchy where men actually do have fewer rights than women, I realize that "men's rights movement" is not a phrase to necessarily spark joy.)

I don't know if it's perverse of me to want to focus on that (maybe? I tend to have the urge to pick a canon up and shake it). And I don't think Scott presents Astreiant as a utopia at all; I do however think some fans see it as one. Which requires a certain effort of will--while men in Astreiant have a lot more rights than European women did at the period the Points series is based on, the inequalities are still clear. (To be fair to utopian readers, though, the canon of the Points books is shall we say variable, so some picking and choosing is inevitable.)

If I ever actually wrote all the fics I intend to write someday . . . I'd have a lot more fics.

I've been in a bit of a reading lull since finishing Simon Jimenez's The Vanished Birds. I have his latest novel The Spear Cuts Through Water and I'm looking forward to reading it, but . . . not right now.

Yesterday I bought Katie Daysh's Leeward and have just barely started it. It's an age-of-sail m/m romance, with both men being British Navy officers, so I could hardly not buy it once I knew it existed. The author has clearly done her research, or at least attentively read the Hornblower and Aubrey & Maturin novels, which is good. And yet . . . I don't think I'm going to love it.

Some possibly spoilery stuff under the cut, much of which is hearsay based on a review I read; mostly we learn that I am not the ideal audience for genre romance

The very first scene happens at the Battle of the Nile; we get the explosion of L'Orient, near enough to our hero Captain Hiram Nightingale's ship to kill his lover (? . . . clearly something was between them, but as of right now its exact nature is unstated) and give Nightingale A Trauma. It is a truth universally acknowledged that every protagonist of a male/male romance novel must have A Trauma. I am very tired of it.

The Trauma is the first annoying thing. Second is that goddamn name, which just feels off for an English gentleman in this time period. (I could be wrong and will accept correction. Nevertheless, I would believe Hiram Nightingale as a Union officer in the American civil war more readily.)

Third is something I only know from the review. Nightingale is married to a woman, but Daysh takes pains to assure the reader that this is a mariage blanc and that Nightingale's wife has no interest in a sexual or romantic relationship with him.

Fourth, again from the review: Nightingale's eventual new love interest is his first lieutenant. Apparently Daysh manages to arrange events so that it's absolutely 100% clear to the reader that the power imbalance doesn't mean there are any ethical issues around consent, or practical issues around naval discipline. How she does this, I don't yet know.

Points 3 and 4 annoy me because I am every bit as tired of mandatorily morally pure queer romances as I am of the hero's defining, sympathy-inducing, dickishness-exempting trauma. I recognize that romance is meant to be a fun genre, and people don't necessarily want moral ambiguity or discomfort. But . . . I do. Especially in a historical romance, I don't want to gloss over the reality that many, many queer men and women acceded to the (Western) cultural expectation that they would marry and have children. In a lot of cases, they saw absolutely nothing wrong with that expectation, and no particular conflict between getting married and fulfilling their own desires on the side. (Obviously this was easier for men than for women.) Also, even now, some gay and lesbian folks get heterosexually married for a variety of reasons--from "my religion demands it" to "trying to be ex-gay" to "thinking about that political career" to "didn't really know they were queer"--and end up either having affairs or getting divorced, or both. And they hurt, and their partners hurt, and it sucks, but it doesn't make them irredeemably immoral people who are unworthy to be part of a love story.

Homophobia makes queer lives messy sometimes. Also, queer people are people, and people are messy sometimes. I would like us to be allowed to be messy in our* stories. (*"Our" is a bit complicated here. I don't know if the author is queer, but she's not a man, so it's not ownvoices. A term I hate but we need, I think.) Messy queer characters should get to have happy endings, too.

As for point 4: we're in a cultural place right now where a lot of folks are hyper-aware of every potential sexual abuse of power. Mostly I think this is a good thing! (Though I could do without the nonsense of "a 30 year old dating a 23 year old is abuse!!" and similar.) And I think there are ways of avoiding abuse-of-power situations in historical stories without giving the characters anachronistically modern concerns. But a writer making her hero's love interest his direct military subordinate, and then saying "but it's okay because of x, y, and z" is trying to have the tasty, tasty power-imbalance cake and eat it too. Maybe Daysh handles it well; I don't know yet. But I am skeptical in advance. (Full, and perhaps unnecessary if you remember the kind of fic I've written, disclosure: I like power-imbalance relationships. I've written 57 varieties of master/servant and teacher-ish/student-ish fic. I'm interested in how people navigate around that, how they create balance in the relationship despite it, or don't, and in what ways that matters. I'm not really interested in making the power difference vanish in a puff of exceptional circumstances.)

Yeah, that was a lot of complaining about a book I've barely started. I'm still going to try to approach it with an open mind, and I'll report back what I think once I've finished it.


On other cultural fronts, I've similarly been in full Bartleby "I would prefer not to" mode. The 50 New Things in 2023 project has stalled because it was starting to feel like a chore, and I don't want to add more chores to my life. I haven't been writing, though I am probably going to sign up for a Rare Pair exchange (delphi, this is your fault) and perhaps get an unrelated bingo card as well, so that may change.

What I have done is start watching Taskmaster, because Thingswithwings kept talking about it on Twitter. This is a British comedy show where a group of comedians compete to see who can accomplish ridiculous tasks the best (the definition of "best" is often fastest, but may include with the most panache, the most effective rules-lawyering, the most stylish cheating, and the most pleasing flattery of Greg Davies, the host and sole judge whose word is law).

The same group of comedians sticks around for the entire 5-6 episode season, so much depends on the chemistry of the group. I loved S1, but I'm now on S2 and not liking anyone very much. Also, the show is leaning hard into the kinky dom/sub energy of the premise; I had thought from the tweets that it was accidental, but it's clearly scripted and thus not as much fun. Still, for the moment I plan to keep watching. My brain continues not to want TV or film fiction apart from Our Flag Means Death (speaking of messy queer characters, and also, new season when?), but I can handle this deeply silly, pointless romp.


And finally, with Pride month upon us in the US, I have acquired this shirt in purple, bringing my total of queer t-shirts to 2. The other is this one, whose message is, I realize, contradicted by the new shirt. But I would absolutely have bought the new shirt in black if it had been available in black. I guess they're taking that "visibility" thing literally. By the way, purchase of any of the Point of Pride shirts at the first link benefits their work providing gender-affirming clothing and other help; the shirt at the second link was designed by a trans person and benefits him, but only if you buy from Teepublic; at any other site it's a copycat.

1) This will be the first weekend* in three months when I'm not working on the fic. (*Sunday-Monday is my weekend.)

It feels weird. I kind of wish I had a new fic to work on. I don't have any ideas yet, though, apart from maybe a short and massively depressing fic about Ed's mother, because when I was writing the big story I acquired head-canon about her life. Or, alternatively, I've found myself strongly tempted to take certain tropes I see a lot in the fandom and write something better than what I've seen elsewhere. But what I really want is another huge, hugely absorbing monster of a story, because while it was enormously hard work, it was so much fun!!

. . . Izzy? Izzy Hands, and how he got that way, and what happened next? He's the character who interests me most after Ed and Stede, and I definitely have ideas/thoughts about him. But, damn, my Ed fic is plenty dark already. An Izzy story would be like "yeah, let's wander down to the pit of despair and STAY THERE FOREVER, tormented and tormenting others. 'This is hell, nor am I out of it.'"

Stuff to contemplate, I guess. Meanwhile, my plans for the weekend involve further re-reading of the Aubrey & Maturin novels, and reading Alison Bechdel's Fun Home which I picked up a couple of weeks ago, and maybe re-watching OFMD again, and maybe trying out the Sandman series. I'm a bit nervous about that, because I think the comics were mostly great, sometimes transcendent, and I worry that the show will be less wild and weird, all tamed down a bit to be comprehensible to a mainstream TV audience.


2) I've rewarded myself for finishing the story with stuff. This ring, and some teas from Tea Source, whose shop I used to frequent when I lived in Minneapolis/St. Paul. (I got gyokuro, genmaicha, and some otsuka saemidori, which I've never had but which sounds intriguing--I love the brothy quality of some Japanese green teas.)


3) Still on the subject of buying myself treats, I've been wanting to try scents again. I thought about buying more BPAL stuff, and actually had a virtual cart full of samples (including some I've tried before that I wanted to see what they were like fresh--a lot of my old BPAL stuff came secondhand from other people--and how they would work on me now that my body chemistry has changed due to testosterone). But I couldn't get past the fact that I feel like BPAL is over-rated. The company's aesthetic, their general fan-friendliness in several senses, tends to overwhelm what I feel is the mediocrity of their fragrances. (By "mediocrity" I don't mean in any objective sense--I have no knowledge of perfumery whatsoever. I just mean that I've tried 30-50 of their scents, and while I liked some of them quite a bit, not one has ever made me go "wow." I've never loved a BPAL scent as much as, say, I loved Chanel No. 19 back in the long-ago day. Actually I've thought about re-trying Chanel No. 19, which is widely considered a unisex scent, but apparently it's been reformulated a lot since ca. 1988 when I wore it.) Also, my experience with BPAL has been that almost all their stuff skews very sweet and feminine, even when the promo text claims it's masculine/fresh/herbal/whatever.

Anyway, I ended up checking out Luckyscent and discovered that a lot of their samples of serious high-end fragrances are about the same price as BPAL imps. So yesterday I ordered some stuff, despite the fact that the 10% off coupon code I was promised in exchange for giving them my email address never arrived. When my samples arrive and I start trying them out, I'll post about it.


4) In vastly less self-indulgent news, I've been called for jury duty. It starts at the end of this month and could potentially last until mid-November. I am not delighted. It won't cause any financial hardship--my job actually makes up the pay differential for any normal working hours you spent on jury duty--but I will have to use my legal name, which I haven't used voluntarily in years. I don't want to out myself at trans to the whole goddamn court, so I'll have to go "girl mode," which will be interesting considering I don't own any women's clothes, my haircut is very masc, etc. I tend to be seen, correctly, as male these days at least until I speak, so the bathroom situation is likely to be interesting.

Plus, if I actually get placed on a jury, it'll likely mean working 6 days a week, since court days are M-F and Saturday is a working day for me.

No love for this. I guess it's a kick in the pants to finally get my legal name change?

Medical billing is an obscure and arcane branch of sorcery, y/y? Certainly it involves trafficking with the eldritch horrors that are insurance companies.

This post brought to you by the fact that I got my prescriptions delivered just now, and it looked to me like I had been billed $508.87 for the testosterone prescription that last month cost me about $22. This change was due, apparently, to the fact that my insurance company has finally started covering this prescription. Naturally, this should lead to my paying $500, right? I guess that's how insurance works?

One angry phone call to my pharmacy later, it turns out that I have not been billed $500. It . . . has to do with co-pays, and how my insurance covers prescriptions, and apparently my insurance company wants me to pay $500, but the pharmacy is waiving all but $22 of that but this will still cause a credit of $500 to go towards my deductible . . . ? I guess . . . ? Anyway, I don't owe anybody $500 for one month's worth of testosterone. I guess.

I feel shaky and tearful, and also guilty for being so angry on the phone before I understood. The folks at the pharmacy have always done their best for me, which is part of the reason why it was such a shock.


Explanatory thingy for those blessed people not in the US who don't have to deal with this shit: so, we lucky, free Americans who have health insurance pay towards it every month. I am lucky in having generally extremely good insurance* through my job, so I pay less than $100 per month; others pay hundreds or even thousands monthly, if they can afford it at all. [*Generally really good except that they want to discriminate against trans people even though that's illegal in my state.]

So, having paid your monthly bill, all your medical expenses are covered, right? Not so fast. Nope. First, health insurance has a deductible, which is the amount you have to pay before insurance will cover anything*. In my case, because I have insurance that I've literally heard an insurance broker express envy of, my deductible is $500. For those with less enviable, but still normal, insurance, it's $5000 or more. [*Except certain kinds of routine visits, and some prescriptions, and . . . it's all really fucking confusing, okay?]

So, once you've paid the deductible, you're good, right? Nope. After the deductible, the insurance will pay a certain percentage of the bill, but you keep paying the rest, until you've reached your out-of-pocket limit. This and the deductible are annual, and reset every year. My out of pocket limit is $1500, +$500 deductible = $2000 yearly. That's the most I will ever have to pay.

Except for the co-pays, of course. Insured people still have to pay a fee, typically around $20 to $30 but sometimes more, to see a health care provider. There's also a co-pay on prescription medicines. Mine is supposed to be $10, or $20 for certain less common drugs, but in practice it seems to vary widely. Sometimes it's $0, sometimes apparently it's $500.

Gibbering in cosmic terror yet? I haven't even mentioned the whole "in network vs. out of network providers" thing (basically, you pay a fuckton more if you make the mistake of going to a provider who doesn't have a contract with your specific insurance company). There are horror stories of people getting hit with huge bills after surgery because the anaesthesiologist, who is generally assigned by rota that individual patients have no say in, turns out not to be in their network. I also haven't mentioned separate deductibles and co-pays. My insurance, which let me reiterate is really good, has a completely separate system of deductibles and co-pays for physical therapy, and also I believe a separate one for MRIs. Both of these things have deterred me from seeking treatment for what's probably a rotator cuff injury in my left shoulder.

Some insurance plans also have coverage maximums. If you hit that maximum, well, good luck to you! They won't pay any more towards your cancer treatment or your catastrophic brain injury that year.

And this is the system that many Americans, not all of them right-wing politicians, insist is the best in the world.

In honor of being called "creepy" by a transphobe on Twitter, I'm putting some purple streaks in my hair. (Manic Panic Ultra Violet.)

This is a thing I've wanted to do for ages. But first I was trying to be taken seriously as An Actual Professional Scholar, and then I was unemployed, and then I was in a job that wouldn't allow it, and then I was trying to be taken seriously as a Trans Man.

And then I said, "fuck it."

I blame Rusty Quill for this, as for many of my decisions lately. Anil's painted nails, and Jonny's occasionally painted nails, and Mike's rainbow hair (now blue), and . . . it was all a reminder of something I've always believed but that hasn't always come through in my behaviour. Namely, conventional masculinity is stupid and constricting, and nobody should have to do it.

Painted nails may be next (they might have been first, but pre-pandemic, part of my job involved preparing food, and painted nails aren't really allowed). I want to go to an actual store, though, and see the colors. Something blue or purple or silver.

Besides Rusty Quill, the other factor is that I'm finally starting to get some facial hair. Shaving has become something I do every few days to avoid looking scruffy, rather than every two weeks out of wishful thinking. (Eventually there will be a beard, I hope. But I'm a long way from having enough facial hair for that yet!) Now that my body is cooperating with my gender a bit, I feel more free. Which is good.

Recent events: ( under the cut )

Today is the Trans Day of Remembrance, and it seems to have brought all the TERFs* out on social media. Because apparently it's less important to remember murdered trans people and call attention to the problem of anti-trans violence than it is to remind everybody that those dead people had ideologically incorrect gender identities.

Even if the TERFs were right about trans people (and they're not, and they know it because they keep telling lies) it would still be a disgusting thing to do.

I guess I should be happy that the Guardian didn't have the gall to print anything by one of its many TERFs today?


*(It's not only the TERFs, it's other transphobic assholes as well. But it's the TERFs who depress me particularly, in part because they keep getting published in the Guardian as though their hateful opinions represent some kind of progressivism.)

Some years ago, on another National Coming Out Day, I came out as trans to all my online friends. Today I just came out to everyone I know on Facebook, including some members of my family. (I don't really have any close family left--nobody I felt I needed to tell in person.)

It was time, but I am really nervous. I have almost no experience of coming out to people who know me in person, plus I have a friend who's said TERF-y things and I have no idea how my extended family are going to react.

Well, anyway, it's done now. I may never dare to look at my Facebook page again.

The announcement of the Twelfth Doctor's casting has again led to dismay for people who would like the next Doctor to be a woman.

I have to confess that I've always been a little uncomfortable with the assertion that if the Doctor regenerated as female it would be no big deal to the Doctor. On a Watsonian and also a personal level, I have doubts. These doubts have nothing to do with the solid Doyleist real-world reasons (feminism, basically) why a female Doctor would be a good thing. I acknowledge and agree with those reasons.

My qualms, as I said, are Watsonian and personal. They're to do with the Doctor as a character, which is to say as a fictional person for whom we assume a fictional subjectivity, and with my own experience of gender.

( Click here to read more. )

Well, today for the first time I had a transphobic (or at least gender-policing) insult directed at me.

I should preface this by saying that although I'm not out at work, I'm not exactly not out either. I wear men's clothes and my short hair is styled in a male way.

So. Customer rather imperiously beckons me from about thirty feet away. (Seriously, she made a little "come here" gesture.) "Ma'am," she calls out. I start heading over to her, then she says, "Sir. Whatever you are." The last sentence was in a slightly less carrying voice, but I think it was a deliberate stage-whisper effect, as I heard her very clearly from a good twenty feet away. And her tone was definitely hostile.

*sigh* Now, I get double-takes all the time, or people correcting themselves from "sir," to "ma'am." It's understandable and I'm used to it; those folks don't mean any harm. This is the first time I've experienced hostility.

I'm perfectly all right, just dismayed and, frankly, kind of amazed at how little gender-nonconformity it takes to piss some folks off. (Although I may be underestimating my own gender-nonconformity. For some years I haven't been performing femininity--wearing makeup, skirts, feminine shoes--but it's only in the last year and a half that I've started performing masculinity instead. As I've come to be unselfconscious about it, perhaps I've lost sight of how much others are conscious of it.)

Do any of you other trans*, genderqueer, or gender-nonconforming folks have advice about how to deal with this kind of thing? Unfortunately, "fuck off, you bigot" isn't an option at work. And since I'm not out at work, maybe there's nothing I can actually do right now, but coping advice would be useful.