today
Since today is the day we “fall back” the clocks, and I had a morning zoom call with my sisters scheduled for 06:00, I changed the dawnlight’s clocktbefore going to sleep so that the dawnlight would wake me in good time.
As it turned out, I woke before the dawnlight started, with leg cramps, so I decided to get up, to some pilates to make my legs stop hurting, before joining my sisters’ call.
But first I replied to a question about my pronouns etc. , which I copied below, having gone to the effort to type it.
I then had just enough time to do my pliaties before joining the zoom session with my sisters.
The call was good, and short, as Beth never showed up at all, and we already knew Amber wouldn’t make it, so it was just Kirsty in Australia and I, and she needed to leave to pick up her son at work at 17:09, so I went back to bed a bit after 07:00, and slept till nearly 10:00.
As we were eating breakfast the housekeeper arrived, so Keldor went upstairs to work on the Create an attic bedroom, and I went outside to do the things that should be done before winter, including taking in the hoses, moving furniture,and taking out the bushes on each side of the garage door, in preparation for the Deck, door, ramp, and hot tub project we want to do in the spring.
I also baked a fruit crumble and, after Keldor was done upstairs (he finished putting in the second layer of plywood in the closet and hallway leading to the cold half of the hallway), I went up and cleaned up the accumulated sawdust from his last few days of sawing things, so now the floor is less slippery, so I will be able to spackel the walls the week, and test Alfr’s good sander on the walls that have already been spackeled and have dried.
Keldor will need to go buy another few sheets of plywood to finish the remaining wall in the longer closet on the other side of the room.
In the evening Alfr dropped by, and I made some progress on my New winter coat as we chatted. But I was tored, so I went to bed at 21:00, and they stayed up later.
my non-genderness
A friend asked this morning if my pronouns were correct in a paragraph about me, which had “she” in the text, and I replied
“I prefer they to she”.
To which I got the reply:
“Apologies, will do better at remembering that!”
To which I replied:
“No worries, I didn’t change pronouns till sometime in the middle of the last gap in hanging out with you”
(There having elapsed som years since last we had been in contact). This morning I woke up to a new question:
“So at one point you were non binary but went with she/her?”
And typed this reply:
No, I have bern nonbinairy all my life, I just didn’t know it was a thing, and only used she because I was told when I was little that I was a girl, and that she was the word used for girls.
In the 80’s, when Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus came out (which I never read), people started quoting it, ir talking about gender differences, and, often, I would say “that isn’t true, if it were, I would be a man”. But, as I hadn’t heard of non binary as a concept applied to Human gender, I thought no mare about it.
But from the first day a hint of breast started growing, I hated them with a passion, and wished them gone. From the first time I started menstruating, I hated it with a passion, and wanted it gone.
Part of the reason I entered my second childhood was never wanting to be a woman. Everthing I had ever heard about being a woman sounded terrible (they have kids, they are the one who does the nurturing, they are supposed to be timid and no sense of adventure, their rights have been traditionally limited by gender , etc, etc, etc.)
But I deeply and truly didn’t want to be a man and was so grateful I had no penius or testicles, as everthing I had heard about that sounded horrid (ok, other than easier to pee in the mountains, when wearing a climbing harness).
But I still hadn’t heard of nin binary, nor of trans men. I had tead World According to Garp in high school,, so I knew it was possible for a man to remove his penis and become a woman, but I had no understanding of why anyone would wver want to be a woman, if they could be anything else, and was decades before I ever heard of a trans woman in another context, and far longer before I heard of the concept of trans men, and, again, I had zero understanding of why one would choose to be a man, of one could be anything else.
But I thought for years that the only other option was child, so that is, and always has been, how I identify.
It was well into the 2000’s that I first heard non-binary, and then the context was more on the “both” end of the spectrum than the “neither”, and I didn’t pay much attention, as I didn’t want to be either a man or a woman.
When I first heard “they/them” used as a preferred pronoun, my thought was “I always wanted to be twins (of the sort in fiction woth a telepathic connection, so it is more one person with two bodies), and using “they” would rub my nose into the part where there i only one of me”, so I didn’t go there.
So I didn’t choose any pronouns in the early days of adding pronouns to one’s name, and let folk go with the default.
Then, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to disassociate myself from the concept of woman, but I still didn’t want they because I still was sad that I have only one body, I should have another. So I started saying that all pronouns are ok, even it (which I secretly preferred, but enough people find offensive when used with people, I didn’t suggest it).
It was only when politics started getting weird in the states and other places that there was much anti trans stuff in the news tgat I switched from any/all to they/them, and now that is what shows on all socisal media i have remembered to update, and it is also on my work profile. (though getting a PhD was partially motivated by rhe fact that I could use Dr. Instead of Ms, Mrs, or Miss)
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