Why I’m Worried About My Future

This evening, my mom and I were enjoying a car-ride through the city, when the subject turned (as it inevitably must and shall) to my employment; more particularly, to my present lack thereof.

“When you go to this summer school in France,” my mom asked, “will you being going as James or as Jaime?”

“Jaime,” I replied. This was the name that I had put on my applications and correspondence; I even told them outright that I was a trans woman*.

My mom sighed. “And you hope to network while you’re there; make business contacts?”

“That’s the plan.”

“You’re going to make it very difficult on yourself. People in my generation…we think of transgenders as being ill, because that’s all that we see on TV. Before you, the only transgender people I knew were homeless. I know that someone in my generation would preferentially hire a non-transgender person, and I have never met a transgender person with a professional career.”

She went on to suggest that I apply for jobs as male, ingratiate myself to local community, and then, only after getting a lock on job security, come out as trans. This I cannot do; submerging my identity for months or years at a time would not be possible (and if any of you cis readers have difficulty understanding why, I invite you to try pretending to be someone else for every public moment of the next year); even after a few days, my life starts to lose meaning.

But I’m not going to lie; these comments did cut me deeply for one very simple reason: the premise behind them–the claim that society is biased against people like me–is objectively true. And I don’t even feel that I can talk to my trans friends for advice, because all of them pass so well–something that I will never be able to do.

I know that the fault is not with me; that it is the world that is flawed. But how can I ever hope to change the world if I can’t even make enough money to live.

I feel like I am trapped.

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*My mom is somewhat more accepting of my transition than is my father, but she is not comfortable with it. I suspect that, at some level, she actually thinks that it makes sense, but will not admit it. As for my father, we’ve reached an uneasy truce based on the understanding that I know that he doesn’t approve and he knows that I’m not going to change my mind anyways, so there’s little point discussing it further.

Farewell to the Life I Have Built

On Tuesday, I was presented with a diploma which certified my status as a Master of Science. From this day forward, I can truthfully tell people that I hold an advanced degree in theoretical physics*.

Convocation itself was a dreadfully boring affair, consisting mainly of standing around in lines and listening to unmemorable speeches. The name on my diploma is, of course, my legal one (although, by a bit of last-minute opportunity-seizing, I was able to ensure that my preferred name was the one that was actually read aloud**). What matters though, is not the ceremony itself, but what it represented:

The conclusion of a chapter in my life.

I arrived in this city three years ago, having little life experience, no knowledge of living on my own, and only the most cursory understanding of who I was as a person. During the intervening time, I made new friends (and some enemies), experienced disappointments (and triumphs***) and realized what I wanted out of life. I rented apartments, sat around talking with friends into the wee hours of the morning, had my heart broken, experienced months of frustration and nights of panic; I experimented, did some things right, royally screwed-up on others; I learned some new things and failed to learn others; I brewed-up a black hole in my bath tub like a hillbilly making moonshine**** and I switched sexes. In short, I lived.

Now, I have moved away from that city. Off to spend the next week at my parents’ house and then on to France for a nine-week long summer school, and from there…somewhere else.

I worry about my future. I worry that the life I have built is falling in on itself. But I want to keep on living.

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*And consequently, a great many of them (in spite of all evidence to the contrary) will automatically assume that I’m some kind of super-genius.

**Essentially, they gave us all slips of paper, bearing our names for the orator to read. We had the option to write in phonetic spellings if our names were especially difficult to pronounce. The name on my slip was “James,” but, using a felt-tipped marker which I found literally seconds before my turn was up, I claimed that it was pronounced “Jaime.”

***I suffer from this bizarre belief that a single moment of victory can justify years of hardship.

****Not really; I derived some equations for acoustic black holes in a fluid medium, but this just sounds way cooler (and also, far less likely to make people’s eyes glaze over)

Corruption Versus Incompetence

I always find it interesting to note which scandals stick to governments and which ones slide easily off of their backs. In the Canadian context, at any rate, it seems that governments can get away with an arbitrary amount of incompetent or terrible policy, but outright corruption is what ultimately brings them down. Case in point, our Mr. Harper has over the past seven years been given free passes by the electorate on gutting science, trashing the environment, doing away with oversight, making a mockery of parliament, shredding indigenous rights, waging a pointless and bloody campaign in Afghanistan and centralizing power in the PMO (amongst many, many other things). However, the Tories are now falling behind in public opinion. Why? Because of the Senate Expenses scandal.

It would seem that the population at large is remarkably forgiving of anything that doesn’t specifically involve members of the government directly stealing from them. Going back a decade or so, you could see the exact same pattern play-out with the Liberals. And with the PCs a decade before that (although the fact that the economy was shitty also didn’t help them).

Now, of course, this is not to minimize the significance of the recent Tory corruption*; however, if I were forced to choose between a government which had good, effective policies but tended to skim a little off the top** and a government which was terrible but clean as a whistle, I would without hesitation select the former.

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*although insofar as this is concerned, I think that the recent court-confirmation of widespread electoral fraud is a much more heinous abuse than the loss(?) of $90 000.)

**And somehow the name “Jean Chretien” just lept unbidden to my mind.

What You’ve Done For Me

I must reacquaint myself with silence

Now that I can’t depend

Upon the noisome, anti-tranquil violence

Of you, my dearest friend.

And in those years of sheer frustration

When your din brought such vexation

Never once did I imagine I’d be sad to hear its end.

I was but a ghost on the day we met,

A shell or something less;

A shadow of one who could not be, yet

Lingered nonetheless.

But you saw me and set to freeing

My poor, unliving, malformed being,

Broke in my dungeon, found me sleeping and roused me with a kiss.

But this is the hour of my departure

Though love I do not spurn

I know not when or indeed whether

I ever shall return.

But your gem of generosity,

The life that you bequeathed to me

The truth of my identity, I vow never to unlearn.

[This is probably single most emotive poem I have ever written. My ex-girlfriend-cum-friend Nominatissima is finally moving out today, and I will soon be going to Europe with no real notion of when or if I will come back to this part of the country; we had both long ago accepted that our relationship was fundamentally untenable, but even so, this is hard for me. It is difficult to express the sheer extent to which I was withdrawn from society prior to meeting her. She made me feel like a person, and helped me understand who and what I really was, and for that I will always love her.]

Some Thoughts on Star Trek

[Some Spoilers Follow]

I have a confession to make, dear readers: I am a theoretical physicist today pretty much exclusively because I grew-up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. The overwhelming likelihood is that the show probably also exerted a significant influence upon my political leanings as well, but this causation is less direct. I have been watching the show literally since before I can consciously remember doing so, I have seen every episode at least once, and I have an encyclopedic knowledge of all aspects of the franchise.

Now then: this past evening, I went to see the latest offering entitled Star Trek Into Darkness in theatres. The truth is that I enjoyed it. It was a good, solid action film, which was perhaps even somewhat more intelligent than most films of the genre. It was not, however, Star Trek.

Now, I’m not going to dwell on the controversy surrounding the blatant whitewashing unusual casting of Khan Noonien Singh (as Nominatissima has already addressed this in detail)*; rather, I am going to ask one simple question to those who have seen this film.

Can you imagine this movie inspiring a child to pursue an entire career path? Other than maybe “special effects technician,” I mean?

Because I can not.

JJ Abrams set out to make the Star Trek franchise palatable to ‘mainstream’ filmgoers. While he has successfully done this, he has, in the process, cored the living heart (and about half of the brain) out of the series.

There is no high-concept science in this one; no incidences of Humanity rising above itself; Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the improved Humanity of the future is reduced to a bunch of boorish nobs who would not be out of place in any 21st-century bar. The film makes half-hearted feints towards the sociological and philosophical analysis for which the series was so famous, but its insights never extend beyond the banal points of mainstream modern American political discourse.

It was an entertaining romp; but it will never inspire the way that the original did. It will no doubt go down as yet another forgettable summer action movie to be filed somewhere between Iron Man 3 and World War Z.

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*Although I will add that this is the series for which Martin Luther King Jr. himself begged Nichelle Nichols to remain on the cast back in 1967

Some More Thoughts on Gatekeeping

The truth is, whether you call it “Gender Dysphoria” or “Gender Idenitity Disorder,” I find the fact that my identity is considered to be a psychiatric condition somewhat degrading. However, I’m not sure whether it’s possible, in practice, to ever completely de-pathologize.

Of course, the comparison is always made to homosexuality; same-sex attraction is no longer a diagnosis, why then should transgenderism be? The problem, though, is that in many (probably most) cases, transgender individuals seek-out specific medical procedures as a direct result of their transgenderism–procedures without which quality of life would be severely impaired by depression or suicidal tendencies. Simply put then, transgender identification is at least partially a medical condition in that it sometimes requires medical intervention. Moreover, some of these interventions can be dangerous (and here I am referring to hormone replacement therapy) without supervision by a specialist.  And when it comes to surgical intervention (sexual reassignment, in particular), how would you go about accessing such a medically-necessary procedure (and more to the point, having it covered by health insurance) without having a mechanism in place to show that in your case it is, indeed, medically necessary?

Don’t get me wrong; I am not especially enamoured of the diagnostic criteria. But with the medical establishment being structured the way that it is, I’m not honestly clear how you could ever get around it entirely.

Of Laser Hair Removal and Medical Gatekeeping

As I am presently unemployed, by budget has been rather tight of late. As such, I was initially going to forgo my latest round of laser hair removal, until a fat rebate cheque from the provincial government convinced me otherwise. I now have my next appointment scheduled for Tuesday.

But it got me thinking: so far in my transition, the only absolutely irreversible change that I have made to my body was has been burning all of my facial hair follicles out with a laser beam. In order to get on hormones, I needed to convince a psychiatrist, a GP and an endocrinologist that I was dysphoric enough to proceed*; in order to get laser hair removal, however, I only needed to walk into a clinic and pay for it

The excuse that we transgender folk usually hear for medical gate-keeping is that we are making irreversible changes to our body. But laser hair removal puts the lie to this claim, since, when I’m seeking treatment which is not specifically related to transgenderism, I suffer no medical gatekeeping whatsoever. The point of medical gatekeeping, then, is not to prevent us from making decisions we’ll regret, but in order to make it difficult for people to escape the boxes they were assigned at birth.

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*Mercifully, I had good doctors, who never demanded that I fit their preconceived narratives of what transgenderism, and femininity, is supposed to look like, or the process would have been even more difficult. Others are not so lucky.