Bits and Pieces

Another wet beginning to a bank holiday weekend - although hopefully that sun that was splitting the streets last weekend will reappear by Monday.

The election?  I found it fascinating, although also slightly demoralising as well.  I still cannot understand the lunacy of a system which penalises a party that has its percentage of vote go up have the number of seats go down.  I also found it difficult to believe that the Lib Dems that seemed to go into polling day with 29% of the vote ended up with only 23% - what on earth happened.  But I profess myself satisfied with the coalition that has ended up - although I do wonder whether it will last, especially with the ferocity of our press that seems to hate any kind of success and struggle with anything that cannot be neatly put into boxes.

Let me state an example.  The media has pounced on every distinction between the Lib Dems and the Tories - Europe, nuclear energy, cuts - you name the difference, there has been media coverage of it.  But each political party is, itself, made up of component people, all of which have different views.  You get Lib Dems who are pro-nuclear energy and anti-Europe, and Tories who are anti-nuclear energy and pro-Europe.  Yet, where is the media saying "actually there are substantive differences within the parties on all of these issues".  Paradoxically I suspect that it might be the Tories who start ripping themselves to shreds, as the right-wing element loses the stomach for the more liberal policies.

I also suspect we'll get a complete firestorm in the media against electoral reform.  People conflate all sorts of issues.  I got a post on Facebook saying that if voting reform meant that parliament required a 55% vote to dissolve it then...  The dissolution of Parliament has nothing whatsoever to do with electoral reform.  In my view the argument is simple.  Single Transferable Vote allows people to distinguish between candidates of the same parties while being able to express a difference, and each multi-member constituency (and we are talking about 3, 4 or 5 MPs per constituency here, not 80) will return MPs that broadly reflect the diversity of opinions expressed in the election.  How can that be a bad thing?  The arguments about leading to weak governments and repeated elections is actually an argument against our regimented party system that doesn't allow people within a party to actually vote according to their conscience on issues, not our electoral system.

The downside of the election is that work has taken a bit of a battering.  The last two months have been the quietest consecutive two months that the company has had since 2006, as people defer orders until the dust has settled.  There is a shedload of decisions stacking up, and the deadlines for all of these people loom closer and closer, to the point where there's a risk that we won't actually be able to deliver all of the installations.  I'm beginning to wonder whether declaring minimal profit for this financial year and starting July with a storm of income might be useful - except that it would be a dip in our growth graph which might not look too good.

Z did her first bit of proper drama filming earlier this week.  She was one of 6 child extras for a series of fair scenes in the main ITV costume drama due to be shown this autumn.  She loved it - and I suspect the seeds sown by sending her to Redroofs have taken good root now.

18 years ago today, my Mum died very suddenly.  I've found that I miss her far more after transition than I did before - although it is a pain I can live with.  She would have been in her late 70s by now.  MS did suck most of the life out of the vibrant woman I remember from when I was very young, leaving her by 1980 a shadow of herself, and struggling on for another 12 years.  It's actually that earlier version of Mum I miss - although it would have been good to know her understanding and acceptance - although I'm sure she would have been shocked and concerned as well.

Painful Goodbyes

Having just deposited a friend and her companion at Terminal 3 for her to fly off for some surgery, walking back through the terminal to the car park I found myself close to tears, and wondered why that was?

Sure, friend was nervous - and I remember very clearly the feelings as I flew off to Thailand.  The lack of estrogen doesn't help.  You're placing immense trust in a surgeon who you've never met (although she, at least, has talked to her surgeon).  There is a large amount of money involved.  And you know it will change your life - but you don't actually know that it will be for the better.  You're actually using "faith" - in that you hope things will be better and you have to trust that those around you will make it so.  So I'm sure part of the teary feeling was the recollection of all those strange emotions.

Then there are other memories - saying goodbye to other family and friends as they either set up home abroad or go back home.  Remembering the good times you've had and not knowing with any certainty that there will be any more together.

Thirdly you see other people also saying goodbye - not that there were that many at 9 o'clock on a Sunday morning.  There is an emotion by association.

But I came to the conclusion that airports in general and Heathrow in particular is dehumanising.  The whole building is around control - you can go here or you can't go there; you have to walk down this particular corridor or wait in this particular room; you have to let other people root through your stuff; you have to do things to other people's timetables.  Even when you leave, the route you take in your car is heavily restricted.  Your very freedom to make decisions is removed except for decisions the authorities allow you to take, which are typically about what you can buy.  But Heathrow Terminal 3 is just drab - the colour is provided by the huge variety of people from all sorts of cultures who use it.  Walking through corridors hundreds of yards long where the ceiling is only a few inches above my head - signs everywhere telling you do not do this and do not do that - a perpetual whiteness smeared by the grubbiness of work, work and more work.  Surely the architects could do more to alleviate the gloom?

Questions

I came across an interesting quote the other day:

"... Christians ... live in the strangest and most alien of worlds – a world where everything makes sense. Oddly, the lure is not that they have all the answers. Instead it is that they have dispensed with the need for questions. Their moral universe is stable. For them, it all works."

 

Deborah Orr, Independent, 13 December 2008

The more I thought about it, the more it resonated.  In the early days of questioning my faith, my older cousin asked why I'd never asked those questions before.  He found it particularly puzzling given my academic strengths.  But the questions I started asking in my early 40s had never seriously surfaced in my mind before then.  I don't know why.  Maybe I was simply afraid of losing something precious, so I just shoved the questions away.

But then when I compare it with my trans-ness, I seem to have come to a contrary point - in that I just know I am trans even though there is no proof beyond that of my own recollections and experiences.  There is no observable proof, no test that I can have, no physical indicator that I am what I say I am.  Yet I fully accept it.  Have I just switched one set of "don't asks" for another?

I must see if I can get an introductory philosophy text book some day.

Let it snow

It's interesting, this sudden onslaught of winter.  In the south of England I think we must somehow have become immune to the possibility that, as the nights lengthen and the cooler winds blow, it sometimes snows!

Yesterday it took me around 2 hours to drive from Sindlesham to home - a journey of between 3 and 4 miles.  It started snowing on my way back from Winchester at 12:30, and by 4:30 there was absolute chaos.  There was so much traffic that any grit that had been laid down was rendered next to useless (not that I saw any evidence of grit at all), and the traffic was so slow that every time you moved off, ice had formed under the car and you were moving through the snow that had settled on the road since the last time.  Nothing for it but to know that I could easily walk home if absolutely required, and no-one else was going anywhere either!

But the "something must be done" brigade is out in force again.  The snow was heavy.  Nowhere copes with prolonged heavy snow.  Continental Europe is knee-deep in the stuff, and they have all the airport closures, road problems and hassles that we do - even down in the south of France and around Barcelona.  But somehow we seem, in this country, to have got it into our heads that we simply cannot be inconvenienced by mere nature - we're too important to have our lives disrupted by anything as trivial as snow - and then, when we're left impotent, our pomposity is punctured.

Sure, there was a hell of a lot of inconvenience - I was OK because I was the only one of my family out and about, and even then I was really close to home with no demands on my time - but surely a prepared society is one that has fallbacks.  Rather than forcing everyone to drive round shopping and racing to pick kids up at the end of the working day, wouldn't a more localised and less traffic-intensive world be better?  I write this more as an aide-memoire, as my business gets busier and busier and I start recruiting people all over the country - rather than huff and puff about the inconvenience that this planet sometimes throws my way, take the time to look out of the window and admire the beauty of this amazing ball of rock.

Messiah

Last night I sang Messiah with our town's Choral Society - a sell out concert at Reading University - and shed-loads of applause after.  The soloists were superb, the tenor especially so (but then I'm biased!)

The whole thing was emotionally interesting.  OK, I didn't get all the notes right, but that didn't cause me much shame - you can hide in a choir of 100, well, unless you're something odd like a lady tenor :o).  But there were a few folk from the Baptist Church that I tried attending for a while there.  It brought to mind how I would have been thinking even three years ago whilst singing this "magnum opus" - and, indeed, it was very long - we didn't finish until about 10:15!  In a strange way I felt it would have been easier to sing had I not lost my faith.  It was like I had to draw on emotional memories rather than actually feeling the moment.  And there is still a little part of me that wanted to simply scream out "the whole thing is just a story, a fable, something to inspire or, at worst, create fear".

But it's done, and the choir moves on to the next religious festival with lots of songs about how unworthy all humanity is.  I do wonder whether I ought to try to find a more secular music group.

Remembrance

Todd (see earlier posts) has asked for reflections of how the church treats homosexual people.  On Remembrance Sunday, I've spent a bit of time composing the following:

When you’re young and confused and being told that what you are is what you are not, any group that proclaims it has real answers is very attractive. Except, being "born again" at the age of 13, very quickly I realised that I had to conform even more – because I was a “young Christian”, I couldn’t possibly know enough, so I was content to learn. And stayed that way for 25 years until the internal struggle got too much, but by then I was in church leadership (in a small way), had married, a successful job and young children. Saying “actually, I think I’ve always been female” caused shock amongst many, but only real fear amongst the church. Counselling was arranged, but the drive was to “fix” me, not to listen or learn. Because I was “unrepentant”, taking the advice of qualified medics rather than unqualified pastors, I was “cast out”. After 18 months, my wife joined another church. I tried to follow, but was told that I was welcome but not fully accepted, or was that acceptable? Branded “not a person but an issue” was very hard to take – again.

I have lost lots of my Christian friends. They simply cannot consider the option that they might be wrong, so I am rejected, placed on the shelf to consider later. As a friend once said, some people have very long shelves. I wondered why Christians, when they say that what’s inside is important, paid so much attention to the outside that they ignored what was inside. Slowly I came to the conclusion that I just didn’t believe it any more. My wife and children have largely followed me down that path. While it’s important not to generalise, I’m going to do so, knowing that there are exceptions. There are differences between Christians and the “secular world”, but they aren’t what Christians want to believe they are. Instead Christians seem to be driven by fear, not love; by arrogance, not humility. I was saddened by the hypocrisy I saw amongst those who I had followed – some of them wrestling with the very same issue as me, and those usually reacting the strongest. Stepping away from the church, and ultimately from Christianity, has led me to the peace and fulfilment I had been seeking since I was 5. I’m slowly getting over the anger that has made me want to pull the whole Christian edifice down, but I don’t know whether I will ever get over the pain of rejection by those who told me repeatedly that they loved me.

The pain of loss is always hard, and harder when it seems so meaningless.  This morning I think of the general futility of war, the immense sacrifice that we place on those who we charge to fight on our behalf, the games politicians play.  I want to say "enough" - actually I want to shout it out as loud as I possibly can.  November 1918 was supposed to see the end of the war to end all wars - yet in 2009 we're still fighting, sending young British men and women thousands of miles away to an inhospitable land to try to wrest control in the futile attempt to prevent people placing bombs on our streets, little thinking that those who place those bombs are trying to do the same to us.  Madness - to snuff out all of that young energy and potential for what is an unachievable aim.

Pie in the Sky

Occasionally, when I get time to think, I start pondering deep and meaningful questions.

I read Victoria Cohen's rant on the Times website today.  She made reference to being greeted by name in her bank, and then refused permission to take out money she'd arranged to take out because she didn't have suitable proof of identity.  "Oh yes", we chortle along, "how absurd."

It was this that got me thinking.  We appear to have bred a society where trust is now wrong.  It's underpinned by the rationale that any risk must be eliminated.  The bank's thought processes would probably have gone something like - we get people impersonating others and illegally extracting money, so we must insist on ID for large withdrawals, and this must become policy with no exceptions so that we, the bank, cannot be blamed for fraudulent withdrawals as, at some point in the past, people have complained that we, the bank, should have recognised the withdrawer as fraudulent.  And that thought process appears sound - until we mock it for the absurdity that is created as outlined by Victoria Cohen.

I subscribe to a financial computer systems news feed, and there's a guy who posts on there quite regularly about the dangers of identity theft.  Each successive posting seems to scream out that no-one is doing enough yet, there are still loopholes.  The subtext is "we cannot trust anybody".

I see the same when dealing with children.  Yes, I am put off being a school governor by the thought that I have to fill in some kind of police check when all I have to my name are a couple of minor driving convictions going back, gosh, 20 years or more.  If I wasn't trans then I suspect I would have less of an issue, but the feeling that this outs me once again is powerful - and the person handling the CRB checks insists on having the forms for her to submit herself - we cannot do it for her.  We've had the outrage that people who look after others kids on an informal but regular basis now also need to be "vetted" by the government.  We must prove ourselves to be right and proper citizens.  And all the while the official stats indicate that 90% of sexual abuse on children is done within the family and 85% done before the child even starts school.  The logical conclusion - we must vet potential parents and families before the child is even born.  That would be political suicide for any party that proposes it - but somehow I get the feeling that we're not too far away.  After all, it does appear, as a parent, that I'm merely caring for two children at the state's convenience, and already have to abide by strict rules about when I can take family holidays and so on, with the concommitant cost implications.

The issue is the same - this underlying message that individuals cannot be trusted - misplaced trust is a risk that has to be eliminated.  And I find it sad.  Of course, I also think that a large part of this drive to eliminate risk has come from the media over the last 20 or 30 years.  Whenever a tragedy hits, there the media are outlining the calls that "something must be done".  Risk assessment is not a simple business, but the media, in their own relentless way, continue to frame the debate in black and white - and if you say "well, nothing could be done", suddenly you're painted black, evil and dangerous to know.  The answer, "well, shit sometimes happens", doesn't seem to cut the mustard, and is actually not a pleasant one for people who have been directly affected by the tragedy to hear.

Let me come back to the trans thing.  Why is disclosure of my past such a big thing?  After all, I know that all but one of the 8 or so folk who work with me know my past, and I don't know whether the eighth knows or not.  The trans lobbies have worked tirelessly over the last decade or so to ensure that the past shouldn't be something that is public knowledge - yet whenever something happens to a trans person, the previous gender and name is usually reported, as if that was in any way relevant.  No, I must steer away from the media.

But isn't a lot of that fear over disclosure to do with trust again?  Why do trans people feel we cannot trust anyone with that knowledge?  Certainly my own recent dealings with HMRC indicate that they cannot be trusted to hold correct information - somewhat worrying when they are responsible for collecting taxation and have swingeing powers to enforce things that they determine are right.  I certainly grew up in a culture whereby anything different, like homosexuality or trans-ness, was derided and needed to be hidden.  The fear of disclosure was real, tangible and terrible.  It was only when the suffocation threatened to kill me that I felt empowered to do anything about it.

I would love to live in a society which can accept difference and doesn't prejudice anyone by virtue of their background.  I would love to live in a society where we can go about our lawful business without having to prove our essential essence of being or goodwill.  It seems to me that those two liberties are actually what we should be fighting for.  It's just that I don't know how to do it.