helen-louise's journal

Gender Census 2019
A survey for everyone who doesn't fit into just one of the two boxes of "always, solely and completely a woman/girl" or "always, solely and completely a man/boy". Do the survey if that fits you, and pass it on to your friends.

I don't talk about my gender a lot on my journal. I've identified as bigender for - goodness - at least since September 2005, according to this old livejournal post. I explicitly came out and defined it in a footnote to a post in April 2017.

*I am bigender rather than non-binary or genderqueer, so I am female except when I'm not. I have somewhere between a few hours and a few days of raging gender dysphoria per month where my entire body is Wrong, and the (actually bi but scared of women) gay man in the back of my head comes out. And the rest of the time it's just fine and I want to be addressed as "she/her" and recognised as A Female Geek Doing Nerdy Things. The conclusion I've come to is that my social and political gender is female, but my sexual gender is male.

Lately, the raging gender dysphoria has been a lot more than "between a few hours and a few days" per month, and more like literally half the month or more. So I probably should talk about it a bit. ( Read more... )

I haven't said very much about the "Racefail" business that's been happening on various parts of the internet due to lack of coherent comment, but I thought of something interesting yesterday.

My racial identity is mixed-race, which is interesting in itself. The concept of mixed-race did not exist formally in the UK until after the 2001 census. Before that, whenever I had to fill in a form with a "Race" box, I had to tick "Other", and possibly go into slightly more detail than I wanted to. Now, there exists a box that fits my identity: "Mixed - White and Asian". I don't like to think of myself in terms of fitting ticky boxes, but having spent too many years as an unspecified Other, I like that there now is a box for me.

There remain people who deny the concept of mixed-race, or wish to change it for everyone. The former Labour MP Oona King described how she had trouble adopting a baby because she had described herself on the form as "mixed-race". She was promptly told by the social worker that the term was no longer acceptable, and she needed to start describing herself as "dual heritage" instead. That made me incredibly angry. My heritage is mixed. My four grandparents each came from a different country. Two of them were white and two of them were Asian, but are you telling me that two Asians from different countries have the same heritage? 'Cos I think that's rather disrespectful. Are you telling me that Scottish and English is the same heritage? 'Cos I'm sure I could find a dozen Scots who would argue that their culture is different in several important ways from that of the English. Besides, if you go further back a few more generations, you'll find I have French and Jewish blood as well. And I must be at least part-Irish because of my mother's maiden name and the strange tooth mutation I have, which is only ever found in people of Irish descent. I'm not dual-anything. If I want to describe myself as "Heinz 57 varieties", I mean no disrespect either to myself or to the Heinz company. I'm proud to have ancestors from all over the globe.

Anyway. As a person of mixed race, I do not identify as "white", but I'm not a "person of colour" either. My skin is light enough that, in these days of ozone holes and skin cancer, I pass for white most of the time. (Less so when I was a child and we weren't afraid of suntans). Though enough people notice my colouring in London that I regularly get chatted up because of an incorrect assumption about my race. I've been mistaken for Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Brazilian, Pacific Islander... No one ever guesses correctly. And often when I tell people of my actual heritage, they think I'm lying to them. Which makes no freaking sense at all to me. Few people have heard of the country that my father's parents left during a coup d'état when he was a child, despite its recent prevalence in the news. (For reasons which are too complicated to go into, I won't ever say which country in a public internet post, though it's easy enough to find out). And my name gives you no clue, being 100% British because my Asian grandfather changed his name.

Do you think I like having "white privilege"? Of course not. In fact, if I ever think someone is giving me special treatment because they think I'm white, I'll go out of my way to tell them that I'm not. But I don't always know that someone is treating me differently because of a racial assumption, just as I don't always know that someone is treating me differently because of my gender, presumed age (I look about 10 years younger than I really am), or disability status. Nonetheless, being able to "claim" white privilege when I'm not entitled to it feels exactly like claiming heterosexual privilege for my primary relationship when I'm bisexual. And I'm sure a lot of you know just how comfortable that one feels.

OK, so I'm not completely un-geeky. Today I finally got sick of the computer at work that's been running at the speed of treacle, and took an hour out of my life to fix it. It was absolutely infested with viruses and spyware. I deleted over 1000 of them! Computers with 1000 pieces of malware really don't run at their optimal speed.

The problem with that computer is that the students have access to it, including some quite young kids. And they'll download "games" and "screensavers" that come with 101 nasties attached. And then people find they have malware and download one of these "malware fixing" programs that is actually itself malware. Those things drive me insane. I feel like it shouldn't take any common sense to realise that they're dubious - a program that will supposedly scan your hard drive for free, but won't fix anything until you register it? "O hai, I upgraded ur hard drive. U have 1234 malwarez. Pay me $25 munniez 2 fix it." - is that not a huge red flag? But people are so scared & confused about how computers work, they don't realise the inherent contradiction. Legitimate anti-malware programs recognise that we all have a vested interest in keeping other people's systems clean because it helps to keep our systems clean. The more networked computers that are sitting there full of crap, the more crap is going to get transferred to my computer, and the more work my bug blatter has to do. Meh.

Anyway, I spent an hour of my life doing that, and got called a "genius". (I think it helped that I used Spybot - Search and Destroy, which has an easy to find language changer (so I could run the program in English then switch it to Korean for the people whose computer it is)). Though I now feel slightly guilty, because they were so, so grateful to me for cleaning up the computer - but the main reason I did it was because I'd been forced to use that computer to look at a student's coursework, and it had been driving me nuts with its extreme slowness. There must be a word for that - guiltiness due to being praised for doing something which you did primarily for selfish reasons? Hmmm.

A question for the parents out there - what is the right thing to do in these circumstances?

Today I saw a very small child wandering apparently unsupervised in Kingston Market Place. He was not only below my hip-height, but less tall than the top of my leg; which considering that I'm near the bottom end of the adult height range is really not very big at all. 80cm, perhaps? Certainly under 2 years old. He was toddling along pushing a toy pushchair.

He was exhibiting a pattern of behaviour familiar to anyone who's ever watched a small child - taking a few steps away from the parent or carer, stopping, looking round to see if the adult has noticed/is following, then taking a few more steps away. I tried to locate his adult. I saw a man who could be father-age reading a book and a woman who could be mother-age texting on her mobile, both oblivious to the existence or location of a small child. I dismissed the couple who could be grandparents as they seemed far too engrossed in their own conversation, and the three boys who could be fathers, but would have to have started at school.

In the time it took me to do that, he stepped outside the boundary where posts prevent traffic from entering, and was getting closer to the road. With no idea who his carer was, I approached the child himself, and asked "Where is your mummy or daddy?". He said "Mummy". "Oh", I replied, "WHERE is your mummy?". He just said "Mummy" again, and blinked in a confused manner. So I looked at the woman with the mobile phone again, and noticed this time that she had a child-sized pushchair with her, which was empty.

"You must GO BACK to your Mummy" I told him, pointing towards the woman. "You are TOO CLOSE to the ROAD, which is DANGEROUS. There are CARS." I don't actually know what kind of words parents use to explain things to small children, but I thought he should know some of those ones. I realised, belatedly, that he was probably too young to have any concept of danger. By this time, the woman had finished her texting, and starting to look around. I pointed at him and mouthed/gestured "Is he yours?". She started walking over with the pushchair, saying by the time I was close enough to hear "I was keeping an eye on him". (Like hell you were, I thought - but I can understand that a person might be exhausted enough to lose track of their small child for a few minutes.)

I decided to thank my deity of choice that I am short, plump and female, and therefore look entirely unthreatening to small children; as well as being grateful that no car drivers decided to turn into the market place while the small child was lost. He was too small to have been visible over a car bonnet.

Post written last night at the airport:
It's 21:57, I'm checked in and sitting at the gate, but my flight isn't until 23:35. The weather in New York today was so bad I couldn't work out how long it would take to get here, so I left at 7pm. I predict a lot of boredom in my future... Wonder if I'll be bored enough to type an entire trip report on this tiny PDA keyboard?

Signs that simply make no sense
Since I started dating an autistic person, I've started to notice signs that are confusing if taken literally. I'd like to hope that any spectrum people who were able to travel independently would recognise the implicit understanding in the standard airline security check of "Has anyone given you anything to take on this flight?", and not need to mention that the person at the check-in desk gave them a boarding pass. But I genuinely hope that airline and security staff have sufficient diversity training not to drag someone aside if they mention the boarding pass, and would know to follow up with "Has anyone given you anything else to take on this flight?".

I must admit to a few seconds of bewilderment when I saw a sign in an aeroplane toilet which said "Only toilet paper can be flushed down this lavatory." If that's taken literally, it means you're not allowed to use the toilet for its usual purpose! WTF?!

( Read more... )

I have some odd criteria for partner selection.

One of the things I notice about Richard & I is that we argue well. I know that sounds odd, especially if I say that I'm sure one of the reasons we're still happy together is because we have very compatible arguing styles. People think that's a weird criteria to use.

But real life isn't all sunshine and roses. Sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes people mess up. Sometimes people even behave badly, on purpose, because they're in a bad mood. Sometimes you get pissed off with work, where you can't throw a tantrum, and it becomes impossible not to take that bad temper home - so you end up having a stupid row with your partner about whose job it was to unload the dishwasher.

Anyway. When you have a row, what happens? Is it over quickly, or does it last hours? Does it turn into a three-hour screaming match, where every previous past transgression gets brought up and rehashed? Does it turn into several days worth of dissatisfaction that never actually gets resolved? Does one person rant and rave while the other refuses to engage, so both end up feeling unsatisfied? I had a boyfriend once who was the master of the sulk. Every time something went wrong - whether it was my fault or not - I'd be trying to argue with him about it so it could get sorted out, while he would be sulking at me and refusing to talk. The time I specifically remember was when I wanted to make pancakes. We had milk, eggs and flour, but I didn't know the right quantities. I think I looked a recipe up on the internet, but it was for American thick pancakes rather than our British thin crêpe-type, and I was too young and inexperienced to realise there was a difference. The pancakes ended up lumpy, the kitchen was a mess, and he threw a sulk over it that lasted 12 hours. I remember crying in fear and frustration that we were apparently splitting up over fecking pancakes, begging him to tell me what was wrong, and generally being made into & behaving like a clingy, paranoid, little girl.

I don't have that with Richard. When we fight about something, the anger and frustration explodes from us in a couple of heated exchanges. Before 5 minutes is up, one or both of us will be crying - and here's the key point - we will instinctively go to comfort each other. Neither of us can stand seeing the other in distress for more than a few minutes. It's as if our long-term feelings for each other override the short-term fact that we're annoyed. Having got the shouting and the crying done, we then start talking and finding ways to solve the problem together. So we argue ridiculously well. Our arguments are really ways of expressing to the other person that some issue has reached the point where it is an Issue, a breaking point. Once the other person knows it's an Issue, they of course want to try to solve it to make their partner happy again.

So we had this huge argument about the fact that cardboard packaging from bits of metal purchased on eBay [1] was half-filling the room I use for teaching students, and it was embarrassing me, and I'd asked him four or five times already to take them to the cardboard recycling place. But after we'd finished shouting, he went downstairs and started collapsing the cardboard to take it out; and after a few minutes had passed and I felt guilty for giving him that huge job to do alone, I went down to help. It took an hour for the two of us working together, and tying up all the collapsed boxes with string was a two-person job anyway. Finally, we were able to decide calmly that it would be more sensible for me to take the cardboard out, because I could put it on the back of the tricycle as one load, whereas trying to transport it in bike panniers would take several trips.

Imagine how unhealthy it would have been if I'd somehow, magically, managed to continue papering over the cracks with my sulking ex for this long. I'd have gone from yelling at him to crying with frustration to begging him to talk to me to promising I wouldn't ever bring up the issue of the cardboard again, to finally collapsing all the boxes and taking them out myself. And he'd never have to address his behaviour (that putting his boxes in my room was a problem), and I'd be going crazy. I'm sure his arguing style would work for some people, in some types of relationships, with different needs - but I now have the self-awareness to know it's not me.

[1] Richard does small-scale metalworking, so he buys other people's offcuts from eBay. So I'm used to being woken up at obnoxious o'clock by the van postman or a courier with a strangely heavy, oddly-shaped parcel that turns out to be just a couple of pieces of metal wrapped in bubble wrap and brown paper. Sometimes he buys machine tools or gauges/meters too, but they are also bits of metal as far as I'm concerned.

September appears to be the month of birthdays. Happy birthday to mjl, polyfrog, bethdeth, chrismoose, jhaelan and serenejournal belatedly, and happy birthday in advance to jenett, emperor, wispfox, lindsical and 36 for your forthcoming birthdays, for my track record suggests I won't get round to posting anything about it on the actual day unless someone else reminds me. Happy birthday to anyone else who has a September birthday but doesn't list it on livejournal, and I suppose I should probably say happy birthday to all the October people as well, because that sort of organisation's not my strong point.

Birthdays are important to me, but they tend to be more important for people that I share physical proximity with. If I don't know you well enough to send you a birthday present, then I probably don't know when your birthday is. There are people that I'm not geographically close to who I send presents to, but they tend to be "I saw this and thought of you"-type presents rather than "for specific occasion" presents. Hmmm.

In other news, I am physically exhausted right now due to ringing about 15 potential students. It's the fact that when I call them, I have to put on a fake happy telephone voice, and sell myself with my qualifications. I used to do telephone market research interviewing, so I can handle business calls perfectly well when I have a "script" to follow, but it's still tiring to have to sound upbeat and organised and someone you want to give money to. Of my 15 potentials, I've obtained 3 definites, so it was worth doing, but still...

Tomorrow I'm getting up at the crack of dawn (10am) to get the train up to Manchester with artremis. We're staying overnight in a hotel just round the corner from the BiFest venue, where we shall be on Saturday along with a whole load of other people. And cake. I am making chocolate crunch cakes with Montezuma's wonderful organic Fairtrade vegan chocolate, golden syrup & cornflakes. Hopefully there will be lots of other vegan cakes there, yes? And possibly even some low-fat vegan cakes. I might manage to do my gingerbread, if I have a bit more energy later. And, uh, I just went to link to the gingerbread recipe and found I haven't typed it in yet, so I'll do that shortly.

Still at BiCon. Still having a good time! This is unusual for me - my history with BiCons past has been, at best, "mixed" - which is why I missed the last two on purpose.

Some specific things have helped this time round. Firstly, I realised on Friday, when I was walking to the shops feeling miserable because I was on my own, that it was crazy to feel "all alone in the centre of the crowd" - because who would I be with if I was at home? On a Friday in the middle of the working day, I'd be on my own walking or cycling to the shops, wouldn't I? So why should I feel lonely because I'm doing the same thing at a convention? I also realised that - while I'm somewhat jealous of the people who "do" BiCon as a couple or triple, it wouldn't work for me with my current people. Alexa & I don't have that kind of coupley relationship (in fact, I think it would drive us both nuts if we tried), and when I dragged Richard along to the London BiFest because I was feeling insecure, we just ended up feeling like we were both alone in the crowd together - which wasn't any more preferable to being alone by myself. In fact, it felt worse, because I felt guilty for dragging him along when I knew it wasn't the sort of thing he'd really enjoy (being introverted to the point where 3 people in the house can make him over-peopled). So I've been trying to do things to make myself feel less isolated - like actually approaching other people and talking to them! and it's been working a lot better.

Secondly, the horrible sexual undercurrent that I've felt at every other BiCon has been missing from this one. I don't know whether I've changed or whether other people have changed - it could be that the stricter Code of Conduct is helping. But so far, I've just had friendly conversations with people, and exchanged a few flirtacious comments, and expressed pleasure in other people's appearances without flirting, and this has all felt fine. No one has asked me to do anything I didn't want to, let alone kept on with the suggestions after I'd already said no, and so I feel safe and happy. Right now I'm wearing the three traffic light symbols on my badge together - red, orange and green - and a few people have asked why I have "Yes, I'm available" and "No, I'm not available" together, and I explained what it means. Every relationship I've ever had that started as a romantic/sexual relationship has ended in disaster, and the relationships I've had that started as friendships have been good. So, while I am "available" for a romantic relationship, I don't want to start one except with someone I already know very, very well, so that any potential incompatibilities or different ways of doing things have been addressed. So yes - feel free to talk to me with regard to a possible relationship - but realise that we're talking months to years in the future. And that's ok.

( Some more things. )

I think part of me has always felt like I'm in the way at BiCon - that I'm taking up a space that rightfully belongs to someone else, and no one wants me to be there. I don't feel like that any more. I feel like this is a space where it's okay to be whoever you are, and it'll be accepted. It occurred to me today how different this is from mainstream Western culture, which says that women must be a size 8, tall and slim, with perfect long blonde hair, manicured fingernails, and shaved to within an inch of their lives. Here, you can be who you are - fat, thin, inbetween, tall, short, whatever, hair doing whatever you want it to, shaving if you like to or not shaving if you don't - and it doesn't matter. However you look, there is a man, woman, or person of fluid or indeterminate gender here, who will find you attractive. And that's so unlike the messages we get from the mainstream media, or even from particular alternate scenes - I stopped identifying as goth because I found the goth scene too "conform-or-die"-ist, and I know that both the gay male and the lesbian scenes have a tendency to accept people only of certain physical appearances. In the bi scene, you don't have to conform to anything, because we welcome diversity. Being yourself is okay. And that's the part of BiCon I think I've always been looking for and never quite found, and the part I want to take away into my everyday life.

I miss the friends I'd usually expect to see at BiCon - memevector, wandra & Andi, mhw, the_maenad & Simon, to name just a handful - but I understand their reasons for not being here, and I know that sometimes people need a break to enjoy the con again. Because I did.

So, there is apparently a bit of a war going on because livejournal has deemed a woman's default usericon as "inappropriate". The icon apparently showed her breastfeeding her child. It's now been removed, so I don't know what it looked like.

All of the arguments I've seen about this so far have tended to go on about "the 50 states" and "the First Amendment". But Livejournal is an international community, with many users from Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. So I don't care about First Amendment "rights", because I don't really understand what they are. Instead, I want to point out the mistake in livejournal's current reasoning.

This is what the livejournal FAQ looks like at the moment. Notice it's been updated as of 2006-05-20. ( Copy & paste )

Note the specific wording of the FAQ. In particular, icons which contain nudity or graphic violence tend to be inappropriate for default userpics. Speaking as a European, I have to say, OMG WTF? Breastfeeding is nudity now? When did that happen?

Whenever I run up against rules that involve "but everyone knows what x means"-type logic, I get made uncomfortable. If I can't understand a rule, I might break it by accident. Saying something like "well, everyone knows what nudity means" doesn't actually make sense to me, because what nudity means in my country is not the same as what it means in other countries. For example, topless sunbathing is de rigeur on beaches in the South of France - and I mean that it's not just usual, it's expected. You'll be looked at strangely if you wear a bikini top, and possibly hear a muttered comment of "ah, les anglais". Scandinavians happily strip off in mixed-gender saunas with strangers. So what does nudity mean from an international perspective? In some countries, women are expected to cover their heads, in others both men and women are expected to dress modestly and cover shoulders. How can livejournal ban "nudity" without first defining it?

I feel that if livejournal is to say icons which contain "nudity" are inappropriate for default userpics, they need to define which parts of the body count as "nude". I am presuming that naked heads and hands are allowed, simply because no one's ever complained about those. What about naked arms? Backs? Legs? Bottoms? (I'm guessing not bottoms.) If I took a picture of my naked legs, that would be nudity, wouldn't it? Especially if all of me was naked at the time, but I cropped the image to only show my legs. So is that ok? If it is ok, why is that ok, but my naked breast isn't? How about naked babies? Are they allowed? Is the issue about the breastfeeding mother nothing to do with her breast, and actually to do with her baby?

You might think I'm being deliberately stupid for the sake of making a point, but I'm not. People need to understand rules in order to obey them. This is particularly true for livejournal users who have disabilities such as autistic spectrum conditions, for whom things which are "obvious" to "everyone else" do not make sense. I have several autistic friends on my lj friends list, plus many other friends with other disabilities who love the internet as an accessible means of communication. Livejournal is a tool for keeping people in communication with each other, and rules must be understandable to all livejournal users - including those who have disabilities.

I believe that, rather than simply saying that nudity is not allowed, livejournal must define the parts of the body that must be covered in default userpics, and also specify explicitly whether this restriction applies only to photographs, or also to icons of paintings, cartoons, or screenshots from video games. If it is indeed the nipple that makes the breast indecent, then that argument must apply to men as well. (I'm reminded of the Aerosmith album "Get a Grip", which has, as the CD illustration, the nipples of the five band members.) And it must be consistent.

I would post this to livejournal Customer Service if I could find a direct link - Contact Info seems to send you round in circles to direct everything through lj support, which really doesn't seem like the right place for this. It needs to be sent to the policy makers, not the enforcers. Update.