shut up and let me see your jazz hands

Oh my God, some of these links are so old, idek. D: I think this cut down my Read It Now list from seven to four pages, though! Woohoo!

Slacktivism
Having seen so many "reblog/retweet this and I will donate $1, 5 cents, however much per reblog" stuff going around with all the flooding, etc. I actually laughed out loud when I saw this.

And now, on to the main linkspam!

We Are the Youth
Really awesome blog where queer youth tell their stories.

Let's Talk About "Tranny" - Meanings

One of the most illuminating ways of understanding the use of "tranny" is to watch how it is used as a put down for cis women. Several people have pointed out this pattern. Plenty of examples focus around fashion and the message that a tranny is someone who is incapable of doing femininity correctly, whether you're talking about the shoes that make you look like a tranny, insulting a cis woman's "tranny makeup," or the outfit that turns a cis woman into "a hot tranny mess."

To Parents
I don't entirely agree with everything in this post (for one thing, I think the term gender-non-conforming is useful), but it's a good post about how so many cis parents say they would be okay with their kid being trans, but don't really make the effort to be proactive about it. I especially like what he has to say about trans kids who are seemingly cis because they like the toys they are "supposed" to like for their assigned gender. Maybe you will suspect your child might be trans if they were assigned male at birth and love dresses, but what if they are into trucks and sports and seem just like a "typical boy"?

Should We Introduce Children to the Concept of Transgender People?
My answer: yes, duh. :p This is necessary because of the sort of stuff talked about in the post above. (And to get cis children used to the idea of trans people, too.)

Argentina: Alejandro tells his "Big Brother" housemates he is a trans man
Big Brother Argentina has a trans guy on this season.

Ok a rant about LGBTQ representation – and why hints don’t cut it
What it says on the tin. Slashiness is no substitute for actual queer characters in fiction.

Trans Queers: A Transfags Sex Journal
Really neat blog written by a couple of trans men of color, documenting their hookups with cis gay guys.

Cisgender authors writing over transgender lives
Leslie Feinberg: While a hostile relative re-writes my life: ‘Who is, and is not, my family’
Trans-themed teen fiction: Jumpstart the World
These three posts are about the book Jumpstart the World, which is a YA book with a trans character, written by a relative of Feinberg's, who is essentially claiming some sort of authenticity due to being related to hir. Basically, typical actions of a self-proclaimed "ally". The book sounds skippable, even without the controversy surrounding it.

Re-watching movies

When I first watched Priscilla at 14, it was one of those click moments that, oh yes, trans women exist, it is possible, it is liveable. I was never a queen and never part of campy gay male culture, but still it spoke to me in powerful ways. I still know the words to most of the songs on the soundtrack.

Rewatching it now though, it really is an awful portrayal in many respects.

Travis Mathews' "I Want Your Love"
This is a preview of a really neat-looking gay film. It has explicit sex (as in, "there are actually two dudes really for reals having sex on screen" level of explicit), but unlike most porn, there is a real story and it feels like the sex is there to tell the story, rather than just to get the viewer off.

"But Trans Women Are Triggering!"

Or do you actually mean people will start recoiling in transphobic disgust and fear from the trans woman quietly standing in a corner feeling uncomfortable and wishing somebody would talk to her at your (fucking awful) party? Do you mean people will feel weirded out, grossed out, and phobic? Do you mean they will feel "unsafe" because they've absorbed a cissexist idea of what a woman is and have been taught that trans women are dangerous perverts?

Say what you mean, transphobes-- and keep my fucking disability out of it.

Anti-rec: Trio of Sorcery by Mercedes Lackey
Lackey's new book is a transphobic mess. Beware of stomach-turning description within. There is also some good discussion on Tumblr about some other transphobic shit of hers. (If you're not familiar with Tumblr, you can scroll down that list of people who reblogged and click on the ones with link text and see what they wrote. Tumblr really is horrible for discussion, and yet there is so often really good discussion going on over there.)

And last, but not least, if you are on Tumblr (or even if you're not, and just want to browse, or want to subscribe through a feed reader!), there are two new fat-positive Tumblrs for trans folk: fuckyeahtransfats and fytransfat.

Eh, so, the big happiness of the day is I got my prescription!

The nurse showed me how to inject, so I actually got a "free" (I did pay for the doctor visit, so not entirely free) dose as well as the 40 doses from my prescription. It's just one tiny bottle to last me about nine months! 10 ML of 200 MG testosterone, of which I'm to take .25 ML a week, so I guess that's 50 MG a week? That is on the low side, I think, but I seem to already have a fair bit of testosterone in my system already, so hopefully it will do its job.

The price was a bit of a shock, but if I break it down by month it's actually quite affordable, and I'm well aware that even my "omg this is so expensive!" is very cheap compared to what many people are paying (but we don't have insurance and we are living well below the poverty line, so what we can afford is comparably much less than a person with insurance and/or a good-paying job). The total was $74, which comes out to about $8 a month. The T itself was only $42. The rest was for needles and a biohazard waste bin, which I have to return to the center once it's full. I may look on Amazon to see if they have needles for cheapter, too. (I don't need them for another nine months, obviously, but looking forward.)

If anyone is interested, I have started a transition blog here on tumblr. I will probably be posting quite a bit of transition-related stuff here, of course, but I'm not going to be crossposting the exact same stuff. ETA: helens78 created nowisgreater_feed for those who might want to follow along on DW and algeh created nowisgreater_s on LJ if you want to read the feed there.

I don't feel any difference yet, which is not surprising. I don't really feel excited yet, either, though. I was saying, well, I don't want to get excited yet because I don't want to get my hopes up about going to the doctor, but I still feel the same way. Maybe I will start feeling excited once I can really see some changes. Right now even though I have all the stuff here, it doesn't feel like anything.

Meanwhile, in less happy news, I have to go back to the doctor again in a month (good job it's only $30 per visit, but that's still more than we've got to spare right now, so I hope this will be the last visit for a while) to talk about cholesterol and blood pressure, both of which are high. Before I go in, she wants me to take my BP every day for two weeks to monitor it, which means either buying a blood pressure thingy or walking to a pharmacy every day. I'm going to look and see how much the monitors cost, because the thing with walking there is that then you have to sit around randomly in the pharmacy to cool down after the exercise or else it will just show as elevated all the time. (Also I have tried their machines on a lark before and the cuffs are really uncomfortably tight for fat people, so idk.) *gets on Amazon again*

Anyway! Even if I have to go on BP meds, I know from Carla's that they are pretty cheap, so that's not horrible. Cholesterol, eh. I don't know what to do. I guess google for low cholesterol diet and see what's what. The doctor said dairy and meat are bad, but I already don't eat a lot of meat, so I guess mainly it's goodbye dairy. ;_;

Daily Happysong:

Spitz - Xie Xie!
I was sorting through my Spitz stuff earlier and found so many good songs, including this one! (And despite the title, it is a Japanese song.)

1. I have a new default icon. It's made with the Scott Pilgrim Avatar Creator. :D The fullsize pic is here. (I also downloaded a wallpaper of it.)

2. So I think everything went pretty okay with the doctor yesterday. I have an appointment on September 15th to go over the results of my blood tests and hopefully get my prescription.

3. While we were walking from the bus to the center, we passed a cupcake store called Frosted. They weren't open then so we decided to come back after, and we did, and I got a red velvet cupcake filled with vanilla ice cream. *_* They also had so many delicious looking flavors of regular cupcakes. They're pricey (of course), but it's not like I'm going to go there very often seeing as they're in Hollywood, so that removes the temptation. :p (I will probably stop in every once in a while when I go to the doctor, though.) We also stopped for lunch at a Greek place and had yummy lamb gyros.

4. I mailed two books today and only had to pay 30 cents thanks to the uncancelled stamps I got from those packages the other day. Woohoo!

5. We stopped in See's while at the post office and tried their new flavor of the month, black forest truffle. It's soooo good. I love that they are introducing all these new flavors, but so sad that they are all limited edition!

Daily Happysong:

The Sounds - Living in America
So catchy!

facetofcathy: SPN-J2 Big Bang Recs/Reviews for 2010, part two. and SPN-J2 Big Bang Recs/Reviews for 2010, part three.
What it says on the tin!

marina: WHAT THE FUCK
This is a really interesting look at dubbing (and subtitling) coming from a Russian-Israeli perspective. I'm not a big fan of dubbed movies or shows, but the conventions of US dubbing are familiar to me, so it was fun to see a first-time reaction. (Similarly, I was totally baffled when I heard of the Russian convention of leaving in the original language track and dubbing over it!)

New Series "Avatar: The Legend of Korra" Premieres in 2011

The Legend of Korra takes place 70 years after the events of Avatar: The Last Airbender and follows the adventures of the Avatar after Aang – a passionate, rebellious, and fearless teenaged girl from the Southern Water Tribe named Korra. With three of the four elements under her belt (Earth, Water, and Fire), Korra seeks to master the final element, Air. Her quest leads her to the epicenter of the modern “Avatar” world, Republic City – a metropolis that is fueled by steampunk technology. It is a virtual melting pot where benders and non-benders from all nations live and thrive. However, Korra discovers that Republic City is plagued by crime as well as a growing anti-bending revolution that threatens to rip it apart. Under the tutelage of Aang’s son, Tenzin, Korra begins her airbending training while dealing with the dangers at large.

I am so excited about this! And it's come at a perfect time, when people are getting into Avatar again or for the first time (at least the horrible movie had one good effect). inkstone has a post with lots of discussion in comments and there is also a discussion post at white_lotus. Plus there's an interview with the creators about the new series as well.

*bounces!!*

FWD/Forward: Today In Journalism: Simply Overcome

The thing about terms like ‘suffers from’ and ‘victim of’ is that if someone self identifies with them, that’s fine. But when they get used as generic terms to refer to people with disabilities in general, it sets a precedent. It tells people that disability is suffering, and that people with disabilities are victims. The reason that we ask people to use neutral language when talking about disability is not because we want to tell other people how to feel about their disabilities, but because we don’t want to tell nondisabled people to think negatively about disability.

This is an important thing, when talking about language. There’s a big difference between identifying with a term and using it, and using a term in general to refer to everyone like you, or, in the case of nondisabled people, using a term you’ve heard someone use as self identification to refer to everyone like that person. If the media presented disability in neutral terms, ‘The locals known Ray Magallan, a man with cerebral palsy who…,’ it allows readers to approach the article with neutrality. But here, from the very start, the subject of the article is a victim.

The Rotund: I Love My Doctor; What Happens When You Take Weight Loss Out Of The Equation

When weight loss is the goal, instead of some actual health metric, you (and your doctor) are buying into a system that doesn’t work. You try and you try and you fail – and then though your general health is actually improved, you feel like a failure and give it all up. When weight loss is the goal, even if you say you’re doing it for your health, chances are reeeeeeeeeeeeally high you don’t actually give a shit about that cholesterol number. You’re too busy monitoring the number on the scale, the number on the tag in your pants.

Remove weight loss as a goal, and you’re more likely to actually stick to changes that you make in order to physically feel better (and the more those changes are likely to work for you as an individual with the entirety of your body and mind being taken into consideration). Remove weight loss as a goal, and you get to measure things that are actually meaningful, that actually provide valuable information about the inner workings of your body!

dingsi: [From the Archives] On My Imaginary And Totally Unsubstantiated Anger

I totally get the sentence "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention". I'm not thinking it means that you must be angry, all the time, or that we all have to be angry about the same things. What it says for me is, dude, you don't have to fucking LOOK for the fucked-up things, they're there, and also you can't unsee it, although sometimes I feel so exhausted or down that I wish I could go back to not seeing certain -isms and issues, because it would make my life easier, but then I remember it would also make me an asshole, and I tell myself that being less of an asshole to other people is fucking worth it, so there.

seishun: Never male

I look back to my youth and see a little girl who looked like a boy. A tomboy, to be sure, but no less female for that. Just not particularly feminine. I played with my toys which were stereotypical "boy" toys: action figures, Legos, Matchbox cars, plastic dinosaurs. I remember one of my favourite toys was a scale replica of the Saturn V rocket. It had stages that came apart and everything. Even a wee lunar lander. But because I was a little girl, those were also girl toys, weren't they? And I played with my sister's dolls and "little homemaker" type toys. I played with the neighbor's EasyBake oven. I played with dollhouses, including my sister's. My sister and I both LOVED Star Wars and we both had figures and a few other toys.

[...]

All of that is to say this: it doesn't matter what kind of stereotyped behaviour you engaged in as a child. What MATTERS is how you saw yourself, how YOU identified.

And I? I was never a boy. I was never male. I was only ever a girl. But what about you? Tell me your story. I am keen to know. If you now identify as female, did you identify as male before? And if you now identify as male, did you identify as female before?

I really like this post, and there's some interesting discussion in comments, too. I think it is interesting how some kids make the leap from "I feel like/want to be a boy/girl" to "I am a boy/girl". For me, I never had a conception of male and female as something other than physical, so even though my body bothered me, even though I pretended I was a boy, I never felt like I could really be a boy, because my body clearly was a girl's. (Even as a teenager, transsexual meant exclusively trans women, so I just felt...resigned.)

usullusa: Rock Bottom

As some of you already know a few months ago I came out to my parents. They told me I was not welcome under their roof while I was queer. Since then they have withdrawn a large chunk of their financial support. The last few months have been the hardest of my life. My parents, even when they messed up, where my mentors, confidants, and the only people I could rely on while I was starting out in life. I won't regale you with the details, but it's been horrible. And now I am going back to college while I still can (it is a long story, but right now is my best and last chance to finish my degree without incurring tens of thousands of dollars in loans) and I have to somehow support myself while attending school full-time.

[...]

I don't know what I can do right now to make some money. This is why I'm asking you, internet, for help. I need some sort of temp job. My resources are so limited. I can basically work from home on something, anything, or I can take odd jobs from people in New York, once I've moved, until I find a permanent job.

If you live anywhere in NYC and need something done, please think of me. Do you need your storage room cleaned? Shelves, closets or cupboards organized? I am aces at cleaning and organizing storage spaces. Do you work at an office where you have a backlog of filing, data entry, or general office work and could use a temp? I have several summers worth of experience doing just that.

Or, do you have any kind of online data entry you need done? Do you need somebody to gather information on something? Do you need cataloging of any kind?

Even ideas for what I can do are wonderful. Anything, any help you can think of, is already more than I have right now.

When is DW getting that notes feature so I can label transphobic asshats like this?

I can't even.

I am literally shaking.

ETA: dancesontrains linked me to this greasemonkey script that lets you use notes on DW! It is awesome!

Here are some things. Some are happy, some are not.

1. The author of the lgbtfest fic I talked about last night has apologised and said she is open to criticism. I plan to write something up detailing the problems eventually, but I don't feel like I can deal with it right now.

2. I did leave a short comment for another author whose fic azsapphire posted about here. The fic on its own is okay, but the header has "R for adult topics such as transgender and transsexuality" which made me D:, and the prompt is about asexuality, yet no one is asexual in the fic. I got a response back, and they have agreed to change the headers, but I don't even know what to do with the asexuality thing, because their response is basically erasing asexuals and feels like it's totally going against the spirit of the prompt. :(

3. musesfool is thinking of running a sort of reverse bang challenge with mixes. I think it sounds really neat! I doubt I would participate as a writer, but I might make a mix.

4. I forgot to post this in my happiness post last night, but I love this desi!Sam & Dean comic by glockgal.

5. pulchritude posted some neat pics of people celebrating 端午 (Duanwu).

6. I like this post from such_heights:

Why is it that when it comes to anti-oppression issues that people suddenly get grumpy about things being all over their flist? I don't complain when my reading list is full of nothing but pictures of people's cats. (Disclaimer: I love looking at pictures of people's cats, it's a hypothetical example.)

When something comes up in fandom that affects me, I am always very grateful that there are other people who can give my feelings voice where I can't. And I'm also grateful to the people who signal boost, who linkspam, who chime in their agreement that what's happening is wrong, or call out problems in the framing of the discussion. The support is directly felt and directly impacts my experience of fandom.

7. Also there were so many good posts I saw re: hc_bingo and ablism and I was going to make a links post but then felt overwhelmed and just deleted it all. D: But I really liked this post by dirty_diana and this one by kaz, especially this: "rather than the hurt for a wheelchair using character being "I'm in a wheelchair!", the hurt being the wheelchair using character realises the venue for something they really really wanted to go to isn't accessible, or a stranger treating them as if they're five, or something like that".

I also have seen several people saying in various posts and comments that what would be really awesome is more fic about people with disabilities where they aren't some problem to fix, they just are (and of course in some fandoms this is common, if there is a canonically disabled character). And as much as I love issue fic, I have felt the same re: transfic. I love fic about coming out to oneself and to others and all that jazz, but the reason I am determined to write all transfic for kink_bingo is that I want there to be more fics where it's not about the issues, where being trans is presented as normal to these people, not something that needs to be remarked upon.

8. I have shipped Ryan North/Joey Comeau for a long time and stuff like this is totally not helping! Canadian web comic creators is totally going to be one of my Yuletide nominations. :D

9. A few things about the recent racefail:

A. bridgetmckennit contacted the mods of SPN/J2 Big Bang suggesting that in the future they might want to make "Don't exploit tragedies and/or people of color's cultures for the background of a 'romantic' fic between two white guys" a rule, and they replied back saying "We're not going to across-the-board censor what people create."

I checked the rules post for the fest. Following is a list of ways the mods already "censor" what people can create:

1. Stories must have a minimum length of 20,000 words. There is no maximum length.
3. The central story element must focus on characters from Supernatural OR on Jared and/or Jensen.
3a. In Supernatural fics, at least one character must be a canon character (one seen on-screen). Any Supernatural pairing is allowed.
3b. In RPS, any pairing is allowed, as long as either Jared or Jensen is one of the central paired characters.
FOR EXAMPLE: Misha/Jared or Jensen/Genevieve is allowed, Misha/Genevieve is not.
ADDITIONAL: Yes, you can write a menage or "moresome" as long as Jared and/or Jensen is part of that grouping.
6. AU's are allowed. Crossovers are not.
8. Stories must be beta'd.

But they're not willing to ask people not to be racist.

Yes, I am totally judging them.

B. I really loved this post by furiosity about how if you really don't want to have to worry about causing other people pain with your fiction, there are plenty of places in fandom that will welcome you.

C. Similarly, this post by muccamukk is about how saying "I'm never going to write PoC!" is such a cop-out because white authors write PoC all the time and nothing happens. Whether they write them well or crappily, the vast majority of stories do not provoke this sort of reaction. Only the most egregious do, and even then many often fly under the radar. It's not that big a risk.

10. I feel like I should have a 10th something to make it even, but I appear to have run out of tabs that I had open, so.

1. Carla got an email the other day from the doctor in Portland saying they got her forms and check, so her appointment is confirmed! 11am on June 24th. And she just ran out of her anti-androgens and the pharmacy at the Center was able to give her just a third of her prescription, since it's usually 60 days worth for $30, but she obviously won't be needing it that long.

2. While she was there, she asked the pharmacist about the price of T, which was something I'd been worried about. I have heard vastly different prices from people online, anywhere from $5 a (weekly) dose to $100 for three (weekly) doses. The former is affordable; the latter is not. The Center has very low prices for people with low incomes, but it's still not free. In order to get a prescription, I have to see the doctor ($30), get blood tests (IIRC, Carla said hers were about $50), and then see the doctor again to discuss the results ($30). I really don't want to pay $110 (plus $7.50 bus fare for three trips there and back) just to find out that T is too expensive. That would already be a crushing disappointment. To have wasted all that money on top of it would be really, really bad.

The pharmacist wasn't able to tell her for sure, because it depends on what my prescription will be, but she did say ten 100mg doses is about $30. I looked that up online and it seems like 100mg a week is a fairly average dose, so that would come out to $3 a week, which is definitely affordable.

So that's a weight off my mind.

3. Also while she was out, she stopped in Little Tokyo and happened to see that there is now a Strawberry Cones pizza place down there! I heard about Strawberry Cones from someone on my flist (bossymarmalade, I think?), but at the time, their only location outside of Japan was in Canada. It seems since then they've opened one in San Gabriel, which since we don't have a car, is almost as inaccessible as Canada. XD But now they've opened one downtown as well! Still not exactly convenient, but for something special like this, I'd definitely be willing to make the trip. They have a ton of weird toppings and their crust is made with rice flour, so it's different to regular pizza crust (there's also a version with bamboo charcoal in it as well).

Maybe we can go down there sometime this week and try it out. :) (Also it's located right next to Beard Papa!)

4. In more exciting Dreamwidth news, they are talking about the memories overhaul. I never liked the memories function and stopped using it altogether when they implemented tags on LJ. Memories is horribly clunky and while tags are far from perfect, they are much easier for me to use. So I knew DW was planning an overhaul on memories, but I thought it would still not be anything interesting to me. But when they said overhaul they really meant complete overhaul. They are looking to turn it into a delicious-type social bookmarking system! I am super excited about this!

5. Carla had to have a crown removed recently because she had to get the tooth re-rootcanalled (fun!) and since it was a gold crown, they let her keep it afterwards. We took it down to the cash for gold place yesterday to see what we could get. They gave us a whopping $15 for it, but something is better for nothing. It paid for lunch for both of us at Pollo Loco and a jar of hair dye for her (she's going to dye her hair pink).

Daily Happysong:

Me First & the Gimme Gimmes - Science Fiction Double Feature
Er, it's the Gimmes covering Rocky Horror. What is there not to like? :D

1. cesare wrote a great post about why Better Off Ted is an awesome show.

2. thefourthvine posted some hilarious "overheard on the playground" conversations.

3. I really liked this post about being a "bad trans person" and the ways in which the OP doesn't fit the accepted trans narrative.

Here's some for me:

-I have never felt suicidal because of being trans (or for any other reason).

-As a kid, I never told my mom I was a boy/wanted to be a boy.

-I played with My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake and Sylvanian Family as much as I played with Matchbox cars and Transformers and Star Wars.

There are a ton more, but I'm tired and can't think very well at the moment.

4. We got our Netflix Wii disc in the mail! Now we can stream stuff on the Wii and watch it on our TV!

5. I made splitpea soup and omg it is so delicious.

6. I updated my lyrics site for the first time in a month. -_-;;

Daily Happysong:

P'unk~en~Ciel - Feeling Fine 2007
This is L'arc~en~Ciel doing a punk self-cover of Feeling Fine, which was already one of my favorite songs by them, but omg this version is even awesomer. I love it so, so, so much.

So, as some of you know, today was the day I planned on coming out to my mom. It was so, so tempting to chicken out, but I did it.

And it went really, really well.

I mean, don't get me wrong. She's not celebrating or anything, but her response was much better than I had imagined. (And really, I didn't even know what to imagine. I just had no idea at all what to expect.)

I don't even know where to start, but basically we had a really good talk. She's not happy about it, but she was surprisingly understanding. She started at first to play the "but God doesn't put people in the wrong body" kind of thing and I headed that off with "but people are born with disabilities, etc" and that stopped her. She seems very open to the idea that the "cause" could be hormone imbalance in the womb or some sort of wrong gender brain for the body, that sort of thing. In other words, not a "lifestyle choice" (words she thankfully did not use at all). (Personally I don't believe there is a single cause, maybe some of those things might be true for some people, but I think more medicalisation of transness is a bad thing in general. However, I am totally not above using that sort of thing to try and make my very conservative Christian family understand.)

She said she doesn't think she'll ever be able to call us Travis and Carla or use the right pronouns, and honestly, I don't care. Of course it would be wonderful if with time she was able to, but it's not something that is that important to me. What's important is that she didn't give me any flack about it at all. We got a letter recently from Carla's dad where he said he accepted her decision, but that this wouldn't have happened if she went to church as she should, and that he didn't approve of her lifestyle, etc. My mom didn't pull any of that, and I had totally been expecting her to.

The thing is...it wasn't totally out of the blue. It seems my friend Yash has joined the Miss Busybody Club with Carla's sister. A couple months ago she saw something Carla said on Facebook (on her old male FB page) about being trans, and that prompted Yash to call my mom (not sure how she got her number, but maybe from their ministry website) and tell her about that. So my mom and Tom have been "praying for us" for a couple months, though they had no idea about me. My mom said she was actually relieved that this was something I was going through, too, and that it was something I'd known since I was a kid, as she had been afraid I was maybe just going along with Carla because I didn't want to lose her.

I am pretty pissed off at Yash right now, but her actions are not at all surprising to me, either. The main reason I have not come out to her (she is the only one of our offline friends we're not out to) is that I fully expected her to call my mom. I hoped she wouldn't, because for fuck's sake, we are grown-ass people, how do you call someone's mom to tattle on them? But she had done the same when Alexander came out years ago (not in terms of being the one to out Alexander to his mom, but calling his mom a lot and meeting up with her to discuss "what to do" about him).

The thing that is totally ridiculous? Aside from the whole tattling thing? Is that Yash adopted a baby from Vietnam a year ago and LIED TO HER MOTHER ABOUT IT. She lives with her mom! And she lied to her about where she got this baby! Her mom is not really down with adoption to begin with, but because she adopted her other kids from the state and thus it was free and she gets money for them, she had come around to it. But no way she would approve of Yash going into huge debt (she is already in debt from grad school still) to adopt from overseas. So Yash told her mom she was going to Vietnam for work-related reasons, and then when she came home, told her the social workers had contacted her while she was on her trip and had a sister of the other girl she'd adopted and wanted her to take this new baby, so they'd met her at the airport and given her the baby already. She has been continually lying to her mom and family for over a year now. Her first daughter is half Samoan and her second daughter is Vietnamese. Is she going to continue telling these girls as they grow up that they're blood relations? I don't even know.

So she has no room to talk here. I didn't go calling her mom and telling her all this shit, so where does she get off calling my mom?

Ugh! She will be getting a very cross email soon.

Anyway! So I still am not sure what to do about the rest of my family. My aunts both live in Oregon, so I am considering emailing them, but the one has a twelve-year-old daughter, and I'm kind of concerned she and her husband might pull something like Carla's sister, where it's all "ooh, think of the children!" and they don't want us around when they're down here. In which case it would make family gatherings awkward. So I haven't made a decision there yet. I have decided I won't tell my grandparents anything for the time being.

Oh! And in contrast to Yash being a shitty friend, there was good news with the two former co-workers of Carla's who are also friends of my mom's. I helped my mom set up her Facebook profile this morning (oh, that was fun; you guys, my mom did not even know how to type a URL in the navbar) and of course she sent friend requests to both of these women. Well, they both emailed Carla and said basically, "I just got a friend request from Dottie, what do you want me to do?" Since I had just come out to her this morning, of course we told them it was okay to friend back and not worry about my mom seeing Carla through their FBs, but I was really happy that they had thought to ask.

So...I think that's it. I feel so relieved now. It's such a weight off my shoulders not to have to worry about hiding anymore. And like I said, overall it was a really good talk. And not in a "omg this is why you turned out this way" sort of way, but just a "you're confiding in me, so here's something I've wanted to say for a long time but couldn't" way, my mom actually broke down in tears and apologised for being depressed and an alcoholic when I was growing up. I told her I have never thought she was a bad mom, which is the truth. I think, if you're going to have a mom who is a depressed alcoholic (is that redundant?), I had a good personality for it. I didn't want a lot of interaction. I just wanted to be left alone to read a book or draw or line up all my toys across the floor. XD I didn't want her to play with me, so that's not something I ever missed.

1. I got stuff done yesterday!

I finished scanning my first volume of manga. It wasn't so bad! And I managed to do it without ruining the manga, too, which was a plus. I posted it on my manga site if anyone's interested. (It's vol. 2 of Kawahara Kazune's Aozora Yell.) I have quite a little pile of manga to scan here and I'm just doing like 20 pages or so a day. Aside from a couple volumes I want to scanlate, mostly these are just series I follow that I couldn't find these volumes of already online (and amazingly scans of them didn't then show up the next day after I bought them).

I also translated a couple short stories and was able to mark those off my to-do list.

2. This is a pretty good article (on Glamour of all places) about a young trans woman. While reading it, I realised how rare that is. While mainstream articles/documentaries about trans kids usually have both boys and girls, all the articles I've read about young trans people (high school/college/early twenties) are about trans guys. It's like after childhood, the next time you hear about trans women in mainstream media is when they're murdered.

This article is not perfect by any means. For one thing it's yet another mainstream presentation of trans people that is all about reinforcing gender roles (they always pick very feminine women and manly guys), and in a truly bizarre decision, they had the whole bit where they talk about Amy, who "came into the world as [name]", only they didn't use his actual former name! The point of putting the former name is generally to satisfy the audience's curiosity to what the "real" name is, so why even mention the former name if you're just going to use a fake one? It serves no purpose in the story. I mean, the actual line is "She came into the world as Brendan,* a boy, but for as long as she can remember, she's felt deeply, inherently female" so why not just make it She came into the world as a boy, but for as long as she can remember, she's felt deeply, inherently female"? (Or, you know, write the article differently altogether and stop focusing on that stuff!) Anyway, still. It's a much better article than that "I have a trans boyfriend but let's talk about me me me" one I linked the other day and nice to see this sort of article about a young trans woman for once.

Daily Happysong:

Buono! - My Boy
Hey, it's a recent Hello! Project song I actually like! I haven't really heard much by Buono!, but if this is what they're like, I really should check out some more of their stuff. This is super fast-paced and bouncy and really catchy.