Me, Robin

I can feel the fever setting in, but, because I’m broken inside, I’m currently baking bread pudding with my left-over panettone (from Christmas Day), and I’m prepping a carrot soup because I don’t feel like cooking. So obviously I’m not entirely all right. But I’m a lot better than I’ve been lately.

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A few months ago, we were victim to a burglary. The second one in two months. It was in our storage booth, but it feels invasive no matter how you slice it, and we did lose some important things. As I went to inform my neighbours of the burglary, I spotted some of our stolen items in someone else’s storage unit. It made a lot of sense. The thieves had had the key to the basement (where the main storage booths are), both times, and they knew where to look. The police had no advice other than to provide harder evidence – which is difficult – and I went to bed shaking and crying. At about this time, my upstairs neighbours also ended up getting into noisier and noisier habits, involving sawing, drilling, hammering, vacuuming and partying at any time of day. And I do mean any time. Almost every night I would wake up to a new exciting loud noise above my bed.

A few days after the burglary, I also learned that whoever did this must have found a document with personal information on it, and had promptly used that to try and take out a bunch of loans in my name. None of these went through (as I obviously didn’t actually sign for them), but it was stressful and a dumb waste of time. The apartment we’d lived in for three years started feeling unsafe. Two burglaries in two months is a lot. Identity theft is a pain in the ass. Sleep reduction topped it all off. We were looking to move out.

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For the past week, we’ve been turning our new apartment into our new home. But I’ll be honest: the first night that I slept in the new place, it was already my home. I’ve slept a lot this Christmas. I’ve been trying to sleep off three months of sustained anxiety and fear. I’m still adjusting, writing this from a kitchen that is only half moved-into, but at least it smells amazing. And if I do get this fever I’m feeling, it’ll be my only problem. It sounds absurd, but I’ve really looked forward to having only one problem.

Every story has the seed for something new. Whether you’re looking to be inspired, seeking for relief, or escaping something, a story can grow in you. We listen, read, watch and play stories – they can be told in many ways. But what you take away from it invariably ends up being the thing you consider important. Sometimes that’s the strange settings, sometimes it’s the implausible but still squee-inducing romance. When we consider stories in this way, we can also see very clearly that different soils sprout different seeds.

Consider the date – the romantic idea, not the fruit, for now. Some people meet and share stories. They share viewpoints, anecdotes, grievances and passions. They usually meet in a way that all parties in some way find appealing: on a beach, in a bar, over some food. There we already learn about each other. We already understand something of another person’s story when they say, ‘let’s meet in the book store’, or ‘how about the food truck at eleven’. With the setting established, the next chapter of the story can define if this story is a novella, a life work, or maybe just a poem on a bathroom wall.

There’s a wonderful and scary optimism involved in dates – like romantic dating, again, not the fruit. You find the boundaries of your shared language, and if the words click and the feelings jibe, you might just write a story.

Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? In this season of looking forward, meeting family and friends, or simply taking some time off during the darkest days of the year, I want to propose to look back a little.

I made my first consciously queer friend about ten years ago. She was the first person I ever came out to, and the first to celebrate it with me. We cycled across small towns, like lesbians do. We went to concerts and invented new soups. We kvetched and shopped and danced to Gaga. Basically, we were besties.

Even best friends have reasons to break up, but that’s not what we’re going to talk about. I was learning to deal with my anxiety and I lost friends that way. We both moved to other countries. It happens. What’s more important is to remember the friendship. She may be gone from my life, but I think about her now and then. I think about how she made me.

She taught me to articulate and embrace my queerness after years of fear, internalised hatred and ignorance. She was there for me when I needed to learn who I was.

Now, ten years on, I still fondly think of my old friend. I think of her, somehow, still as a friend. A friend who happens not to know my name. But I think that, if we were to meet again, that we could talk. And I hope that she would be proud of me.

For the season, indulge me, and think back on your old friends. Remember the ones that were good to you. It’s okay to lose touch. But remember, privately if you must, that every step along the way lead you here, and be thankful they allowed you to move on.

Thank you so much for the kindness you have shown me over the past few weeks. You’ve made me feel welcome and appreciated. But I wish you’d know me better.

You know my name. You laugh at my jokes and you listen to my feedback. I feel like you understand me. You ask for help, and you are unafraid to ask me for work. You’re talking to me every day, but I wish you knew how to address me.

The first time you heard of me was in an e-mail that said she’s coming over to show us her work. The first time you saw me, I proudly showed off my career as a woman in type. After I started, you seem to have forgotten all about it. So much for first impressions.

You’re good people. I know you care. You’ve welcomed me! How could you be bad people? But in every meeting, I am afraid to be introduced. Every time you talk about my work to a client, I hope you leave me out of it. Every day, I brace myself for the scattershot boy, man and dude, for the casual he and him.

And every day I kind of blame myself. I should just tell you that you’re supposed to refer to me by the only obvious — I’d think! — pronouns. I should just interrupt you. I should just stop you in the middle of your sentence and correct you. But you might see how that’s not so easy. And I wish I could tell you this.

It’s a logical start of the new season to try to perform and express the idea of a witch. Witches have been around forever, and I feel a strong kinship with their historic presentation.

First of all, witches have always been the centre of their community. The women with the wisdom, skill with herbs and healing, with a connection to everyone in the area. The first doulas were probably witches. The women who delivered the new humans into the community. The doctors who served their people all their lives. And finally the person to be there and bury the dead. Witches have always been at the fringe of the village that needs them — witches have likely been everything from sex workers to doctors, from advisors to the ones holding the dangerous truths.

Let’s repeat that. Witches have the dangerous truth. Shakespeare knew it. The Romans who campaigned across England and Germany knew it and wrote about it. Witches were the women with the dangerous knowledge, and you either made an enemy for life or, and this works out best for all of us, you learned your damn lesson. They can see the future — probably because they’re the only ones who learned from the past.

Witches have been a threat to Good White Christian Men for centuries, and that’s good too.

Witches have secret, special bonds. They have seen birth, death, healing and falling ill. Their association with these things has made them suspect to many people, but if witches have existed since the beginning of humanity, then surely there’s more to it than just death and misery. Gay men were ostracised in the eighties for their association with the AIDS pandemic, and we know better than to conclude that gayness is sickness. Witches, like other gay people, have a sense of dress style that comes with an undertone of the struggle to either show or hide the capital T Truth.

This year, we’re starting with witches because witches are everywhere and everything. I was born a witch and I’m proud of it. I live in an overgrown home with a bubbling pot and a devil dog. I curse men, regularly, and I look good in hats.

All trans women are witches. All trans people, for that matter, are magic. With or without the k. I’m not picky. All queer people have access to magic. We hold dangerous truths in our mere existence. We have the wisdom, and we have the skill. We’re powerful pinnacles of our communities. We’re the sex workers and the doulas, the doctors and the demons of our society, and without us there would be nobody else to teach people about the past. We’ve learned from our past — that’s how we became who we are.

Oslo Fusion, the queer film festival in town, is always a treasure trove of engaging material. Last year I was incredibly energised, and it came at a great time, right before the first Queer Church. This year I’ve been having a harder time, so it was probably a good distraction to watch some queer shit.

The first thing I caught was a silver screen showing of Her Story, the web series that has promise of so much more. I don’t have a lot to say about it, because you can see it for yourself. All six episodes are available to watch online, and they offer a neat, digestible storyline that is incredibly relatable, while being performed in a wholly unique way. Jen Richards and Laura Zak have written and performed two honest, beautiful characters that I crave to see so much more of.

I can’t push this hard enough: Her Story is a perfect encapsulation of romance, recognition, respect and intersectional feminism as it applies directly to trans people. If you need any specific reason to watch, watch it because these things happen to me. From the site:

‘Her Story’ depicts the unique, complicated, and very human women we see in queer communities, and explores how these women navigate the intersections of label identity and love.

Sneaking in a heading about other feelings

Last week I sat down with a friend who was visiting from out of town and I told her that I was so tired and upset about my friends misgendering me, and sometimes not even using my name. I can’t begin to describe the weirdness of the feeling that I call these people my friends. Is that a friend? Someone who considers you a friend but doesn’t know your name?

When strangers do it — and I invariably struggle to correct them when they do — I wonder how they feel when they find me on Facebook and read my posts. When they see my trans activism. If they realise. I can’t even remember the many ways in which I tried to subtly work into a conversation that perhaps I wish to be addressed properly at literally every social event I attended in the past two weeks. At least they’re strangers. If they want to become friends, they can start with the right name and pronouns.

More Than T

On Saturday, I attended a screening of More Than T, the documentary about interesting people who also happen to be trans. It’s directed and produced by trans people, and like Her Story it shows. There is nothing inherently different about trans people other than their transness, and that transness is so personal and specific that it isn’t worth generalising it. The documentary shows beautiful complex people who in their own way have become like bedrock to their communities.

While transness is different for every trans person, some common traits are always there. Anohni says that trans women are all born with a natural religion, and I’d only change that to say that it’s not just trans women but also everyone else on the trans spectrum. Whether non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, or of a more fixed gender expression, we’ve all considered gender and recognised it as both essentially unimportant and yet personally significant. Perhaps that internalised paradox helps guide us to see others in their own right as well.

For what it’s worth, that’s what I consider to be my witchcraft. Visit me in my hovel. I bake bread and will curse your enemies.

Jen Richards was in attendance and I had only one burning feeling that I decided not to articulate in the audience. But now that I’ve spent more time with it, I come away with one sad gut feeling that I can’t shake: so many trans people end up becoming carers. It’s survivor bias in its truest sense.

The word of law is imagined, written and protected by people. In general, these laws are good. They not only have a clear function, but they also serve to protect as many people as possible, and do so with as little prejudice as possible. But some of these laws have been on the books for a long time, and the world changes. The people who imagined and wrote them may not be around any longer either.

Laws are ideas, prejudices, projections and ambitions set in stone. What many people see is only the fact that they are set in stone. They fail to recognise that someone carved them there. What we can do about it is to change those who get to decide what is written down. We get our vote.

With our vote, we can put people that we trust into positions of influence. And we get to do this, by law. It wasn’t always like that, but the old people died and new laws were made to fit the changing world.

Politicians seek the power to carve new laws. They will promise a wide range of possibilities, in exchange for your vote. We have to hold their feet to the fire, so that they fulfill their promises. It is our right and duty to make sure the laws change along with the world.

By their nature, rules, laws and rights are a reflection of our lifetime. They delineate the things we can and cannot do, and in some cases they decide who we can and cannot be, love or marry. This is what we have. The vote we get is the chance to make that better.

Yesterday, I went to the doctor for the first time in eight years. There have been lots of times over several years where I have acknowledged to myself that it’s overdue, but now I finally did something about it.

I started fresh with a new doctor, on the other side of town. Getting to their offices gives me time to read a little bit on the bus, create some distance so that I make room for my feelings. It’s not the most pleasant area – lots of faceless office blocks and a highway overpass. Perhaps the change of place makes me feel accomplished as well.

Luckily, my doctor was unfazed by my shameful history of avoiding doctors. We talked, made some new appointments, and I had to give some blood for tests. That was, honestly, the funny part. I have no problem with needles or blood, but combining the two seems to cause trouble for my body. There must be something deeply physiological about the sensation. I’ve lost more blood in a casual nosebleed, but have a nurse take it from me consensually and I get starry vision and a buzz in my ears.

For years I’ve been ashamed of not having been to the doctor. I know that I’ve needed to go for some time. Now, I’ve made a start, and I feel that a weight is off my shoulders. Stupid, stupid girl. I should have done this years ago.

Traditionally, family is the first social system you grow up in. It’s where you learn about hierarchy, sharing, patience, love, talking about your feelings, listening to other people’s feelings – it’s essentially where you learn how to treat people right.

That’s the ideal family. Ideally, you’re born into it, and you’re raised in it, and when you leave it, you come back every now and then to make sure it is still strong. Ideally, you’re loved, trusted, supported, listened to, shared with – ideally, you’re treated like a full person.

We all go into the world with a right to these connections. We deserve to be listened to, trusted, and loved. This is where we begin – and ideally, this is how we are raised.

But no family is ideal. For some, family is no more than a series of internalised expectations. You are supposed to live up to a name, or to a societal standard, or to a career path. For some, it’s something you have to grow out of, where family reflects your childhood, not your adulthood. For some of us, it is what we leave behind. Some leave behind the social norm of what love and togetherness stands for. Your family might not believe you, not trust you, not love you. And it might make you doubt the supposed inherent goodness of family.

It is then important to realise that families are made. You may be born into them; you may also be adopted into them. You may bear the same name, but you may not. These things are unimportant to a real bond. Family is a system of trust, love, sharing and caring. And, more importantly, you make your own family. Ultimately, family is what you make of it.