Jenny with the Axe

There have been some things happening in my life lately that I don't yet feel up to talking about. So instead I'll talk about the video being posted around facebook and other places, where a pediatrician claims that letting trans children receive puberty blockers is tantamount to child abuse.

I have very strong opinions about this. Namely, that those claims are a crock of bullshit. So when a net friend posted and asked about it, I ended up writing a fairly long screed about it. Here it is, somewhat amended to work as a blog post instead of a facebook comment.

TL;DR: puberty blockers aren't a drastic change, taking them doesn't do harm but withholding them does.

Long version (and it turned out to be really long!)
I want to look at this from a practical point of view, and try to figure out what does the least harm to an adolescent/pubescent child and to their future adulthood. This is what I see, and it's informed by what I have learned of how these drugs work, as well as the information I've got from my transgender friends who've talked about it:

• First, puberty blockers do not change the body. What they do is to stop changes that would otherwise happen. They delay onset of puberty as long as the blocker is taken, but they do not in themselves cause any other change to the sexual characteristics of the person taking them. Therefore, giving puberty blockers does not cause any long-term danger (and indeed is indicated for children with extremely precocious puberty!) And it does not cause anybody to transition, either - they still have the same pre-pubertal body.
• Second, if an adult person transitions, the process will be a lot more complicated and difficult if the person has fully gone through puberty - their voice will have changed, they will have beard or breasts, and so on. Therefore, making a trans child go through puberty may cause long-term damage, whereas letting a non-trans child delay onset of puberty doesn't.

So from the principle of least harm, I see far less harm in postponing puberty than in forcing a person to grow up with increasing body dysmorphia and then have a lot more medical intervention be necessary once they are allowed to transition. I also see less harm in allowing a person to postpone puberty even if they then choose to not transition. The two risks and harms are by no means equal even from a purely medical standpoint and looking merely at the direct effects of the puberty blockers.

But the direct medical effects aren't the only basis to use when deciding this. Trans children are at a far greater risk of suicide in their teens. Part of this is because society isn't accepting - there are a number of homeless kids in the world, who have literally been kicked out of their homes by their parents! - but another part is because of increased body dysmorphia as the body develops its secondary sexual characteristics during puberty. Eating disorders are also more prevalent among trans kids, because if you don't eat you won't develop as much, you won't get periods and your breasts won't grow, you won't grow as tall and you won't get as broad shoulders, etc. And an eating disorder or self-harm or suicide attempts are way more dangerous to a teenager than puberty blockers are!

I know trans people who've always known their bodies were wrong and they suffered very much during puberty. I have never met anyone who was convinced of being trans during their childhood and adolescence and who later changed their minds. I won't say that they don't exist, but if they do, still they would not suffer any harm from getting puberty blockers, while the first group do suffer harm from having them denied.

(I also know trans people who endeavored to accept their body during adolescence and only transitioned when they were well into adulthood, as well as non-binary, genderqueer and any other non-cis persons you can think of, but they are not really relevant to this particular discussion.)

I've been writing a lot during the past few months. It started when I was laid up with a hairline fracture on my hip (I wrote about that at my horse DW, and being bored, I went and read everything by Astolat that I hadn't previously read due to them not being in any of my fandoms. That included a lot of Witcher fic, and that combined with the morphine I was on to trigger a crossover with Discworld. Because really, if Emhyr wants to have a pen pal, who else but Vetinari could keep up with him, and vice versa?

And then I couldn't stop thinking about it, and started writing a follow-up, and now I'm 17.800 words into the story and on chapter 12. I do know where it's heading, but it's a bit harder to get time to write now I'm back at work, with a new client, and also well enough to go riding again. But the train rides to and from work are prime writing time.

So that's the kind of fun I'm having right now - thinking up jokes for Nanny Ogg to tell Our Heroes. It's a lot of fun, actually.

Last night was the first full night with the moon cup. It did not turn out as well as I'd hoped. (Again, here's the place you should stop reading if you don't like talk about periods...)

When I use a tampon on a heavy night, what happens is that it gets full and then the blood sort of trickles out along the threads. The clots still get caught in the tampon. But when I use the cup and it gets full, it trickles out through the little holes, and it doesn't get concentrated along any threads so it runs a bit more. That's what happened last night. I did use a pad, too, but unfortunately not the big night-time pads. So when the cup got full, I some of the blood ended up on my panties rather than in the pad. Fortunately I woke up around 4.30 am and discovered this before it had spread to the bed. So this was the second night of getting up and washing panties (and also the floor towel), and then fixing the cup, and getting clean panties, and putting in a larger pad just in case...

So, after last night, I have to say that I would prefer using a tampon at night. The max size tampons do last almost a full night, and the cup just doesn't, not during the first three or four days of my period. Tonight I'll have to set an alarm to get up about five hours after I empty the cup before bed.

Another downside is that with the tampon I usually feel when it starts to get full. With the cup, I just don't feel it. Of course the upside is that I don't feel it much at all, which is way nicer than the pain I get from the tampons, and it'll be very handy when I go to the gym or if I want to go swimming when on my period. I think it'll be good when I go riding too, though I won't get to try that until next month. But since I don't feel any difference from a full cup or a half-empty one, I tend to go check on it quite often. And taking it out is painful still, though I've gotten better at finding the nub. It's just the final pull when the vacuum lets go that is quite unpleasant. The pain does go away after a few minutes, but it's significant during that time.

Oh, another thing. A friend of mine said that she'd heard that it's bad to use the cup if you have endometriosis, like I have. I checked on that, and as far as I've been able to find, it's based on old science that has since been disproved but that unfortunately some doctors still believe in. There used to be a theory that endometriosis was caused by menstrual blood flowing "backwards" instead of running out through the vagina, and the particles of endometrium that came along with the blood would get stuck and become endometriosis nodes. However, this has been disproved, for two reasons - firstly, that a lot of women have retrograde menstruation without having endometriosis, and second, that people who have never had periods can still get endometriosis (e.g. infants and some men who've gotten it after hormone treatments for other diseases). So that's not an issue.

So my experience of the moon cup so far: It's comfortable, but not quite reliable, especially not when you've got a heavy flow. It's a bit tricky to handle at the start but you learn quickly. It's more of a hassle to change it than to change tampons, so with a heavy flow it might not be useful when you're working or just out and about and maybe can't get into a good place to change and wash it. I'm not going to stop using it, but it can't be my only option.

I have this fascination with advice sites - there's something about reading about what questions people ask total strangers to help them with that just draws me in. A lot of the advice given (and questions accepted) is horrible, but the few I've found that are good are really good. Pride of place here is of course given to Captain Awkward, whose compassion and thoughtfulness and lovely commenters are simply brilliant.

Today I got another glimpse of brilliance, this time from Carolyn Hax. A young woman asks how to handle her relationship with her boyfriend, who is apparently perfect in every way except that he uses her past sexual relationships to bludgeon her into doing things she's not comfortable with. In the midst of advice (which is a more sensitively phrased version of "run, fast and far, and hope never to see him again"), there was this paragraph:

When I read “he loves to throw things in my face” exactly one sentence after, “I’ve never had a better friend in the world,” I just want to cry for how low you’ve set your friendship bar.

I wish I'd understood this when I was much younger. I had friends as well as "lovers" who hurt me so badly, and I couldn't untangle my desire for them to be good from the fact that they actually weren't any good.

I often like Carolyn Hax. This time I love her a little. And the woman who asked - I love her a lot, and wish I could just download all the stuff I've had 20 more years than her to learn, so she wouldn't have to go at it the hard way. Which, when at their best, Captain Awkward and Carolyn Hax are trying to do, and that is why I go back and read their stuff.

A friend of mine got worried the other day - she received an email from her own address, with no subject. She thought somebody had gotten into her email account and sent the message from there, possibly using it to spam or otherwise attack her friends, too.

This is almost certainly not the case. Here's a short explanation of how it works:

Anybody can use any email address at all as the sender address when sending an email, just like anybody can write any return address they like on a piece of paper mail.

Here's the far longer explanation of how it works:

There are two places to specify the sender (and recipient) of an email. One is used by the mail server handling the mail, the other is what you see when you look at the mail in your mail client.

The one used by the mail server is called the "envelope sender" (and "envelope recipient"). If you compare it to a paper mail, it's what it sounds like - it's the sender/return address (and recipient address) that is written on the outside of the envelope. They are usually, but not always, the same address that you will see in when you look at the actual piece of mail. Again, compare to a paper mail - it's entirely possible to send a paper with somebody else's address, but then put it in an envelope with your address on it. Then the paper will be delivered to you, but when you open the envelope and look at the actual piece of mail, you see that it's not your name on the paper. The difference is that with email, you usually don't see the envelope unless you tell your email client to show it to you. (How you do that will of course depend on what email client you're using.)

Today, as usual, I was playing WoW while having my breakfast. I was doing dungeons and got in a good group for Deadmines. We did an achievement, which went well, and managed to get in some conversation between the fights. The tank and healer were both very good and the other dps were about my level, so it worked out nicely.

Now, in Deadmines, once you've killed the actual Deadmines boss, the daughter of the previous Deadmines boss shows up. She's not in a good mood; she poisons the group, sending them off somewhere. As soon as she came up, the healer said:

Here comes the rape.
Get back in the kitchen, bitch!

At which point I said "sigh", and dropped group. I just don't have the energy for another one of those conversations - the ones where you spend at least half an hour explaining that no, rape isn't a "traditional gaming term", and yes, it does actually hurt to read that in a random conversation, and yes, throwing gendered insults around is really hurtful and no, "just a joke" isn't a defense unless you're four years old, in which case you shouldn't be playing WoW anyway.

It wears me down.

I have had such a wonderful day today!

My riding club had arranged a Pay&Jump. That's essentially a non-competition jumping meet - there is no placement list or winner, you don't get any rosettes or anything, but you do get to jump a proper set of fences in a new environment, so for many people it's good training before the season begins. The rules are a bit more lax too, in a regular competition you aren't allowed to continue if the horse has refused a fence more than three times but at the P&J it's up to the judge how long they can be allowed to try. Also you can get help to get the horse across (e.g. by someone leading the horse or egging it on), or get a fence lowered a little. Since quite a few horses have learned to count to three, knowing that after the third stop they get to go out and won't have to jump anymore, it's very useful to let them continue on. Some of them looked very surprised indeed...

There was one incident with a horse that kept baulking at the fences, where the rider got frustrated and started using her whip too much. You're allowed to use the whip as an aid; that is, to indicate with a light touch that the horse should do something. This rider got frustrated and unhappy when her horse refused fence after fence and gave him a sharp touch with the whip after he'd refused. I told her to use the whip only as an aid and not as a punishment, and she got over the fence on the fourth try. When she rode up to the next fence she started whipping the horse on the way up to the fence, and as she did it without switching the reins to one hand, she was also pulling on the rein on the side where she held the whip. The horse, unsurprisingly, refused, and she used the whip again. At that point I had to tell her that since she kept using the whip in the wrong way I was excluding her. I let her jump one more fence - without using the whip - so they wouldn't end with a refusal, since that is a bad memory to leave the horse. She was of course very unhappy, but I feel very sure that I ddi the right thing. After all, she will want to go to actual competitions later, and that sort of thing will get her thrown out of those, too - better to learn early and in a non-competitive environment!

When it was all finished, I got a ride back to our own stables (the event was held in an arena several kms off). I got to meet my darling Diamond again. I wasn't sure he'd remember me, after all he's still young and it's been five months since I saw him. When I came to his stall and opened the door, he walked up and put his head against me and demanded to be skritched behind the ears and on the throat, just as I've been doing since he was a few days old. He kept bumping me with his nose and wanting more skritches and seemed very happy to see me again. So was Skutt, by the way. He was at the P&J, and while he and gnapp were in the collecting ring he heard my voice, and immediately turned towards me. That was nice.

The horse I fell off of five months ago also remembered me. When I went to her stall, at first she came up and was all "oh, there you are, cuddles now plz!" After a few minutes of that she decided that no, she didn't like me because I'd abandoned her, and went off to the other corner of the stall to sulk. I do look forward to being able to work with her again - so, I suspect, do most other people in the stables as she's been getting to be difficult to handle due to her being bored from not getting to work. Her owners have started working her a little, but they really don't have enough time to give her the attention she wants, so it'll be nice for everyone when I get back.

After that, I went with gnapp and her husband to have dinner at one of our favourite hamburger places. One of the staff also rides and she came over to talk about horses and accidents. Then they drove me home and I got back shortly after 8 pm, having been gone for twelve hours.

In all, it was a lovely, lovely day!

There's this thing called "Geek Women Unite". It's something I'd very much want to be a part of, given that I'm a geek woman. And the Stockholm group has planned a meet-up tomorrow.

The event is booked into a restaurant. I asked at the facebook discussion thingy whether anyone knew if the place is wheelchair accessible. Got the reply (not from the organiser) that "there are stairs, I suppose there are elevators but you'd better call and ask them." I check the web page of the restaurant; they have pretty pictures of the different rooms and they keep mentioning staircases.

Go down the stairs to this room. Go up the stairs to that one.

There is no mention of elevators. There isn't the slightest note aobut how accessible the place is.

I've written to the restaurant, asking them about accessibility and suggesting that they put some information about it on their web site - that is, if they are at all interested in welcoming those guests.

I can't say I feel very welcome at the Stockholm GWU either, considering how and where this meeting was arranged.

True, if I wait a couple of months I'll probably be able to negotiate any stairs using crutches, or maybe even just the cane - but I won't be comfortable in an environment that excludes other geek women because the organisers can't be bothered to consider accessibility when choosing a venue.

I am so, so tired.

This time it's Torchwood. You'll need to have seen 1x10, "Out of Time", for it to make sense.

I've just been watching ep 6x07. If you've not seen it, this drabble isn't going to make much sense.