November 2002

November 30th, 2002. High culture, low culture

(or, Another Weekend In Glasgow)

Gordon invited me to a poetry reading. I had time to kill, so I thought I'd go along. I was staying over at his flat again, so it didn't seem unreasonable.

The poet doing the reading was the counterculture-icon turned incredibly-rich-publisher turned poet Felix Dennis. In the past three years, he's written so many poems that he can more than fill a thick-looking book, so now he's touring the country selling copies, bribing people to come to his readings with offers of copious free wine. It seems to work.

When we arrived, there was quite a queue for the wine, and rather a lot of different wines to try. Intellectual, cultured-looking people were swirling, sniffing, and generally looking like experts. I could hear the students behind us worrying, because like me they didn't have a clue how to look like a wine expert. My carefully-planned technique was to point at a random red bottle and say: "a glass of that one, please." It worked. There was also a complex selection of canapés, but no plates to eat them from, and I didn't want to make a mess of myself.

Felix Dennis himself is rather like a slightly-widened Rolf Harris. He looks rather older in real life than on the cover of his book, and he's rich enough to ignore the No Smoking signs even when there aren't any firemen. His poems all rhyme, and are generally conservative. Some of his poems seemed to me to have rather trite endings; when I was bored I started playing "spot the next rhyme", which often wasn't too hard. Lots had "Ah! Do you see!" moments, which the audience seemed to like. He admitted to plundering nursery rhymes, which is fair enough in itself; but occasionally there would be a poem with exactly the same rhyme and metre as a well-known nursery rhyme but completely unrelated words, which jarred slightly.

He is a good public speaker, though. He has a rich, deep voice, especially when he switches from his normal conversational tone to his Special Poetry-Reading Voice. I always wonder, why do so many poets - especially perfomance poets - have Special Poetry-Reading Voices?

I shouldn't really criticise, because (as you can see) the little poetry I've written is a bit rubbish. I left the poetry reading in the interval, not because I thought it was bad (or because I was getting bored of the free wine) but to go to National Pop League for lots of hot sweaty dancing. I eventually stumbled back to Gordon's at half-two (after getting lost trying to walk through a motorway junction) and fell into confused sleep, wishing I could invent some kind of talisman that would make coincidences happen.

12:37 Comments (1)

November 29th, 2002. Brown envelope

(this entry will only make any sense if you're a Regular Reader, I imagine. If you're not, reading this entry and part of this one might make things a little clearer.)

So, I get home from work. There's a brown envelope on the doormat. A letter. It looks frightening; it says PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL in big letters. I daren't open it in case it's a bill for something.

The first thing I see when I open it is the NHS letterhead. It's from the hospital. They are giving me an appointment date. Yes, an appointment date. Three months ago, my doctor told me he was going to give me a referral. In three months time, the consultant will get around to seeing me.

I can hardly believe this is real. I've been bouncing around ever since I opened the letter.

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November 28th, 2002. Office Conversation

Today at the Interweb Tat Emporium:

ME: Why is everything we sell "beautifully hand-made by talented artists"? Why don't we sell anything that says: "this is a piece of shit thrown together by imbeciles"?

THE BOSS: It doesn't have quite the same ring to it, though.

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November 27th, 2002. Tabloid morals

As lots of people have been searching for "National Pop League" lately, I should probably say that the next one is on Friday, at the Woodside Social Club, North Woodside Road, Kelvinbridge. Plug over.

A message board that I lurk on (and post on occasionally) has been a little shaken up over the past few days, because one of its regulars has been investigated by a tabloid reporter. Her boyfriend was recently jailed (I'm not going to go into what he did), and she almost offered her story to this "newspaper" but then changed her mind. The journalist who was working on the story tracked her down, and assembled a story from the person's message board posts, finishing it off with something along the lines of: "She thought we wouldn't find her, but we know everything about her! BWHAHAHAHAHA!" In turn, this attracted at least one person to the message board who seemed to be just trying to stir up trouble, and who was probably either another journalist or someone involved with a rather nasty organisation who the convicted chap allegedly belonged to.

Sorry to be using all this language like "allegedly" and "the person, the journalist," and all that. I don't like to (and it makes things harder to read, I know), but I don't want anyone to Google and get attracted here. The rather nasty organisation concerned should not be confused with a large French bank, if that's any clue.

Anyway, it's all rather scary. When you write things on the internet, it's public (obviously) but it doesn't seem that way. It feels like you're writing for a little group of regular readers, list members or whatever, and it's a jolt to realise that anyone can read stuff. If someone wants to write a news story about you, they can just drag up quotes from your website. Or a message board. Or any mailing lists you might have posted to that have public archives. Google is your friend and your enemy.

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November 26th, 2002. Clickety-click

My world is a better place, for I have a new keyboard.

It's not really a new keyboard as such. It's got lots of coffee stains on it. I liberated it from the Interweb Tat Emporium yesterday. But it's new to me, and the best thing is that it actually works! The old keyboard had developed several keys that took a few hits before they would register anything, and the space bar had almost completely stopped working. But now - I can type anything I like! It's like magic!

Keyboards seem to go wonky at an awful rate in this house. I pulled the keys off the old one to see if there were any clues why it wasn't working, and saw a thick mat of cat hair underneath. That probably didn't help matters. I'm not sure I can put it back together again, though; part of the space bar seems to be broken.

Now, I don't have any excuse for not doing all those things I meant to. Like: writing some stories and poems for Wordshare, neatening my templates up a bit, putting more photos online, getting through the backlog of emails I haven't replied to, writing emails to people I don't owe mail to but wanted to email anyway, answering questions for the promised Ask Me Questions page, and lots of other things I've forgotten about. I should probably learn how to type, too.

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November 25th, 2002. Cats as accessories

There was an odd-looking woman on Morningside Road. She wasn't odd-looking herself. A normal person, mid-20s, wearing a big pink coat. The odd things were the cats she had tied to her. One was perched on her shoulder, the other strapped half-way up her back, clinging on with its claws.

Peter has started a new project. Inspired (I assume) by the BBC, he's accepting nominations for the list of 100 Great Gay Britons. You can nominate anyone who's British and is/was either G/L/B/T themselves or has improved the welfare of GLBT people. I've already tried nominating Peter himself. After a while, when he gets a nice long list, he's going to let us vote on them all.

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November 24th, 2002. Want to spend even more time on the internet?

Recommended Reading is a handy little tool if you want to broaden your blog-reading horizons. You give it the address of your own blog, and it scans your links then pumps out a list of blogs it thinks you'd like to read. It came up with several that I already read but haven't linked to yet, so it seems to work. Either that, or it just follows links from the sites you read already. (found via Mike.)

Bought a new woolly hat today. I might try and shove it in the scanner. I managed to fit it in the scanner, a bit at a time, so you can see what it looks like. It's even got pigtails.

I suddenly realised that both the new woolly hat and my woven purple shoulder-bag were hand-made in Nepal. Does this make me a third-world oppressor? Or am I just turning into one of those middle-class Anthropology students that always grated on my nerves?

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November 23rd, 2002. Best thing about weekends

I'd hate to live in a Mediterranean country. I'd hate to live anywhere hot. I like living in a country where it's easy to cool down if you're feeling a bit warm.

There's one thing I'd love about living in, say, southern Spain, though. The siesta. The whole idea of taking an officially-sanctioned middle-of-the-day nap.

After lunch, I always feel so tired and sleepy. But it's Saturday! So I can just curl up in bed for an hour with the cat in my arms and not feel guilty about it. Woohoo!

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November 21st, 2002. Update...

More on last Friday's Winchester Club, featuring Feline Dream.

I've already said something about it; I was reasonably nice about them too. What I didn't realise at the time was that, apparently, one of them wanted to try to set fire to my hair. Lovely.

(I do agree with their assessment of Ally, one of the Winchester Club organisers, though. He is lovely and wee. He dances like a man possessed, too.)

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November 20th, 2002. Kaboom!

Remember the idiot builders? The ones who kept putting nails through the heating pipes? The ones who nearly made the building fall down?

Well, they're back.

Of course, they'd never do anything that stupid again, is there? No, definitely not.

They put a nail through a gas pipe instead. Ooops.

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November 19th, 2002. Ethics? Morals?

This is because of something that Darren said: "I treat the Bible as a good book, but so is Lord Of The Rings."

I tried to work out to what extent I agreed, and decided that it's not a simple question. Even though I don't believe in following the laws set out in the Bible (no bacon? eek!), and do think there are some parts of it that are more literary than religious (the book of Esther, for example, or the Song of Songs), it's still a special book. There are things in it which seem like good, upstanding ways to behave (depending on interpretation, of course), just as there are bits which portray God as petty, spiteful and vindictive.

I can't help seeing the Bible as being important. I have read a lot of it, unlike the works of Tolkein. I was brought up as an Anglican, and as a child I was very devout. I was the youngest person at our church to regularly read the lesson, and fragments of the liturgy still crop up in my speech occasionally.

Some Biblical ethics are obviously a bad thing - homophobia in the name of God, for example. Others are just common sense - turning the other cheek, for example. If someone's bitching at you the only thing that makes sense is to ignore them until they get over it.

I might write more about this later. So much for not being all serious.

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November 18th, 2002. Attention! Chats sauvage!

There was a French market on Sauchiehall street. I wandered up and down it with Gordon looking at the merchandise. Sausages. Clothing. More sausages. Blue enamel plaques with French text, meaning things like "Danger! Rabbits!" and "Savage cats!" For some reason, they seemed much funnier in French. The next stall had large lumps of preserved meat, with a sign: "Lard, £10 kg".

Afterwards, we went with Matt to see Bowling For Columbine. It was interesting, and funny, but it seemed throughout as if Michael Moore wanted to find a single central target he could sink his teeth into.

The basic conclusion he came to was that it can all be blamed on a feeling of fear that lurks at the centre of American culture. That's hardly a shocking revelation - it was most famously written about in Richard Hofstadter's 1960s essay The Paranoid Style In American Politics - but it's something that rarely seems to be mentioned. Americans have always been afraid - of Freemasons, Catholics*, Satanists, immigrants, imbeciles**, Muslims, black people, Communists, the black helicopters, and things from outer space - and their news media likes to help to scare them.

* In the 19th century, "escaped nuns" wrote books and went on lecture tours describing how they'd been abused by the Catholic church, who were clearly out to destroy the honest American way of life. Their stories were remarkably similar to those of "satanic abuse survivors" more recently. Of course, the most prominant Catholic communities were those of immigrants, particularly Irish and Italian ones...

**... who were usually thought to be of lower intelligence, more likely to be mentally incapable, and generally have lower-quality DNA than good, honest, properly white citizens. Several states, therefore, passed eugenics laws enforcing the mandatory sterilisation of the mentally-handicapped. After all, if they didn't, the country's bloodstock would be diluted and the whole country would turn into a nation of imbeciles. So that worked well, then.

I hate it when I can't stop myself going all serious. I'll try and stick to the usual inanity for a while.

11:19 Comments (1)

November 16th, 2002. "This song's dedicated to Gareth Gates"

Walking past the University buildings on a Friday afternoon reminds me what I liked least about the place. All the rich, Home Counties students who see Edinburgh as just another place for a holiday. Sample overheard conversation:

"Where are you going now?"

"London."

"OK. I'm going down on the 5.30. See you at the train station?"

It could be worse, I suppose. A friend-of-a-friend had flatmates who were sent a few hundred quid a week in pocket money by Daddy, and thought nothing of popping over to Switzerland for a quick weekend's skiing.

The Feline Dream gig last night didn't go especially well, although they do get the prize for "most artistic arrangement of cabling on stage", although I did think their frontman was going to strangle himself with them at several points. When he asked the audience if they had any questions, Arik the American (the "it's not porn" chap) said: "where did you get so many red and green cables from?" "A shop, of course. What kind of stupid question is that?" It's always a bad sign at a gig when the first person to start clapping and whooping at the end of each song is the lead singer.

(written from Gordon the Architect's Cowcaddens flat)

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November 14th, 2002. Blank Space

Somehow I thought of lots of things to say, but they've all slipped my mind. Work is being annoying again, for lots of different reasons. The weather's horrible. On the other hand, I get a paycheque and an afternoon off to spend it in, so I'm going to go shopping.

I probably won't buy anything, but I'm going to go shopping anyway. I might get an outfit for tomorrow night, when (as I think I said) I'm off to Glasgow to see Feline Dream play at the Winchester Club. Woo!

(note: I have no idea if they're actually any good or not. But the Winchester Club usually put good bands on. If people are interested: it's at the Woodside Social Club, North Woodside Road, Kelvinbridge).

Incidentally, for the person who found this site by searching for how much does an archaeologist get paid, the answer is: very little. Which is partly why I'm not one. To other searchers: I'm sorry, I don't know where to buy a knitting machine in central London. And I don't have any fake porn shots of Princess Diana either.

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November 13th, 2002. Just like archaeology

At the Interweb Tat Emporium, we've finally got back the computers that an ex-director tried to nick, before he left the country. Today, I stripped them all down, replaced the bits that the said chap hadn't bothered to return, and got them running again.

The Boss wanted me to try and rescue some files he thought might be in there somewhere, so before rebuilding them I fired each one up to poke around its disk. It felt creepy, nosing round all these files that had been dormant for so long. It felt like the Mary Celeste.

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November 12th, 2002. It's that self-destruct feeling again

Still on the Places To Go theme: I like what Alan had to say on the subject.

This week is going badly so far. I know it's partly my own fault, because I'm feeling down inside so I'm reading the worst into everything. Someone invites everybody he knows in the country to a party but me, and it kind of puts me downward. People disagree with me, and I feel worse. Someone else sent me an email, which I know, on a thinking-level, is meant to be supportive, but when I read it it feels like she's saying: "none of us like you, and you'll never have friends."

Still, it's the Winchester Club on Friday. It's usually good fun; hopefully I'll be able to find somewhere in Glasgow to sleep.

It might be interesting for other reasons too. I was just now reading through my bookmarks folder - all the blogs, Livejournals and so on that I check every day - and one of them said "I'm thinking of going to Glasgow to [the Winchester Club] on Friday," to see the band that are playing. How random is that!

(Um, I hope I didn't sound like some sort of creepy stalker there. I mean, if someone comes up to you in the middle of a gig and says: "Hi, I read your blog!" I think most people would either run away and hide, or knee them in the groin *then* run away).

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November 12th, 2002. Places to go

Everyone I read seems to be talking about the BBC's list of 50 top places to visit. The Troubled Diva went as far as coming up with a list of his own, so I thought I'd do the same thing. Even though it will be limited to Britain and a couple of bits of Western Europe. In no particular order, then:

• The Dysynni valley in mid-Wales; and also the coast northwards, especially the Harlech area.
• Spurn Head. It's just so otherworldly.
• Glasgow. I've never been to America, but Glasgow always feels like I'd imagine an American city would.
• The memorial to the missing of the Somme, at Thiepval. But try and go when it's quiet, so you can think a bit.
• The London Underground.
• Cologne. Not that I saw much of it when I was there.
• And finally: Lewis and Harris. Probably the most beautiful part of the British Isles that I've been to. The view northwards from the pass linking them is amazing. As is the view south from the Stornoway-Carloway road; miles of flat bog, scattered with random lochs and with mountains on the horizon.

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November 11th, 2002. Is there anything you'd like to know?

The About page could do with sprucing up a bit, so I've had an idea. If there's anything you want to know about me, ask questions in the comments box and I'll put up an Infrequently Asked Questions page with the answers on. Assuming I get enough to make it worthwhile, of course.

(No, it's not an original idea; I got it from minor 9th. But it'll probably be more interesting than trying to work out myself what you might want to know.)

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November 9th, 2002. Saturday must be"Let's talk about what was in The Guardian" day

The Guardian's 'Weekend' section used to feature a column called "Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About", which - although they didn't say so - started off as just an ordinary website, which also ended up being plagiarised by the Daily Mail. It's now disappeared from The Guardian, although it has been fictionalised and made intoa novel.

Anyway, what would they replace it with, I wondered. Surely they wouldn't just find another website they could repackage and fit the same slot?

Actually, they didn't. But they did hire nerve.com's agony columnists to write for them instead. Without, of course, pointing out that they found these people because they write about sex for a popular dating website.

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November 9th, 2002. Fill in the blanks

This is a quote from The Guardian's book reviews section today. See if - without cheating - you can fill in the missing words.

"[The book] argues, very persuasively, that our understanding and appreciation of ____ has passed through a number of distinct and significant phases. These phases one might summarise as the age of the supernatural or religious ____, the age of the scientific ____, the imperial and racist ____, the psychological ____, the ideological ____, and our current phase or age, what we might call the age of the leisure or entertainment ____."

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November 8th, 2002. Digital cameras: one argument for

This article in the local paper set me thinking slightly. If you can't be bothered to read it: someone took a camera film to their local branch of Boots to be developed. The staff there spotted cannabis plants in the background of one shot, and called the police. The police then went and arrested three teenagers who were responsible (they'd told the chemists their address, of course), and, reading between the lines, persuaded them to hand over the address of their favourite dealer. They then popped round to *his* house and found large amounts of illegality.

I seem to remember that Boots have a reputation for doing this sort of thing - I don't mean here, but whenever stories like this crop up it always seems to be them involved. It's a bit worrying to think that they go through everyone's photos "looking for technical faults" and with a sharp eye for illegal stuff going on. Why do they need to look for technical problems? If it's just to put those little stickers on saying "oops, you really messed this one up" - maybe the photo was supposed to look that way. Conversely, if you have illegal plants lying around your house, why the hell do you give them your real name and address?

I've never taken any photos of illegal things. I've never taken pornographic pictures. Even so, I still don't want random people flicking through my pictures before I get to see them; just as I don't want my postman reading my mail before me.

(incidentally, another gripe is that my university has sold its alumni mailing list to a credit card company, so we can all buy credit cards with the university crest on. Um, right. Go away, you spamming idiots. I'm definitely not going to send in any donations now.)

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November 7th, 2002. Feedback: airing dirty laundry

For some reason, my phone rang at 4am this morning. One ring after I woke up, it stopped. Grr. I was too sleepy to move; and when I finally did, it wouldn't tell me anyway. Double grr.

Apparently, the entry I wrote yesterday upset some people. They assumed that the people I was writing about were people they knew, and they said I was being nasty about them. Other people managed to identify them with different people that they, in turn, knew. Because of that, I'm going to say a few more things:

• I didn't name the people involved for several reasons. I didn't want to embarrass them or upset their friends. More importantly, this wasn't a name-and-shame entry. The identities of the people involved are irrelevant in the context of the post.
• Apart from me, and possibly them, none of the rest of you know who I was talking about. You might believe you know who I meant, but you don't. And I'm not going to say who it was, because who it was isn't important.
• What I wrote, happened. I didn't invent it. There's nothing nasty about posting something truthful.
• If you think I was talking about X and Y, but you don't think X and Y would act like that, maybe that's a sign that you might be wrong. Alternatively, maybe you just don't know them as well as you think you do.
• Why are you upset at me because a friend of yours has been nasty towards me? Aren't you just shooting the messenger?

This might not cheer anyone up or change anyone's mind, but I hope it gives people something to think about.

11:21 Comments (1)

November 6th, 2002. Miaow!

Laura's latest entry includes an incredibly cute kitten picture! And she says she's not a cat person. I don't think I believe her.

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November 6th, 2002. ... could cause offence just by the way I look

(for those of you who think they can spot a pattern in my entry titles: I promise I'll think of something different next time)

This post is inspired by a couple of things Sarah has written recently about discrimination and racism. I was always brought up to believe that everyone was the same, and equal; one thing that sticks in my mind is a rather confused conversation with my grandmother, trying to use different types of chocolate as a metaphor for different skin colours. I was always taught that Yorkshiremen were stupid, but they should be pitied more than hated.

As part of all the stuff I've been talking about recently (scroll down if you can't guess), I've been trying to cope with the idea that people are going to discriminate against me, just because of who I am. Although if they have trouble with what I am it's their problem, it's me who's going to have to cope with the effects.

So far it hasn't happened much, apart from homeless drunks shouting things at me in the street. One event sticks out in my mind, though, because it happened somewhere that I wasn't expecting it.

I was going to a big meetup of people from a mailing list I'm on; about 60 people were there, and we all had a picnic in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow. I'd not met most of them before, but I'd talked to most of them online and I knew a lot of them were lovely people. As expected, most of them were completely friendly.

There were two men there, though, who didn't look friendly at all. When I met them, one made a nasty comment about the way I looked; the other didn't say a word. All the rest of the day, they just sneered at me. It disconcerted me, because I was expecting to be friendly and relaxed, but all of a sudden this put me back on edge, nervous. I hope I never have to meet either of them in the future.

One of them is now seeing someone I vaguely know; I hope for her sake that she quickly realises what a bigot he is. The other has just moved to York; it seems strangely appropriate.

Before anyone complains: I have known many people from Yorkshire who were both lovely and intelligent. So there. The two nasty men were both from the Home Counties, I think.

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November 5th, 2002. And the moment will come when composure returns

Or: trying to get my mind back to normal.

I'm sitting back and reflecting on my options. Thank you, everybody, so much; I really appreciate the stuff you've been saying over the last few days. I'll keep you updated when the situation changes.

The Interweb Tat Emporium feels a bit strange at the moment, too. The Boss is designing a new site and getting it to work just how he wants it, so he's all happy. Mrs Boss had a couple of phonecalls today that made her very excited; her plans of inventing a new career for herself seem to be working, and other people in her chosen industry are actually phoning up to ask her for help with things.

On the other hand, I don't have anything to do save run traffic-analysis scripts and pretend to be working. I'm really worried that The Boss is about to say: "look, maybe we should put you on a part-time contract." I want to have some programming or design job I can get my teeth into, but everything seems to be waiting on clients getting back to us and telling us what they want. I'm at a loose end.

Life isn't like a soap opera, with one drama and cliff-hanger after another. Life has occasional rushes of excitement, with long stretches of drudge or nothing-to-do in between. At least, that's how it feels. I want to go on a long quest to find the Tuning Knob; the miraculous Reality Fine-Tuning Control of legend. When twisted, the tone of the world changes; you can make everything sharper, the colours brighter, everything more tuned in. Finding it is one of those dreams of mine. Does any of this paragraph make sense, or should I just delete it?

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November 4th, 2002. Update

I didn't tell them on the phone. By the time they got home, I was tired and wanted to sleep, and they sounded the same.

In any case, I really wanted to tell them face-to-face. The problem is, I hardly ever get to see them; the next chance I get will be Christmas, which is potentially awkward given that I'll be staying at their house. I'm writing letters to them in my head at the moment.

I suppose I shouldn't have made such a big deal in my head over telling them about myself this weekend. I'm getting annoyed with myself that I didn't manage to do it. Maybe I should try not to see it as being such a big milestone.

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November 2nd, 2002. Scaredy-cat

Or, me and my homophobic mother.

It seemed like the first thing she said when she got off the train was: "Are you gay?" She looked at my clothes, my hair, my handbag. "I was worried you were turning into [our South African transvestite next-door neighbour]," she said. She said it with a smile, but even so it took the wind out of me.

My dad was just my dad. He looked older, and greyer, and balder. He seemed happy, but still; I couldn't tell what he was thinking. I never can. That's what makes it so hard.

We went to Favorit for lunch, and I tried to wait for the right moment. It didn't come. We wandered round the Royal Museum, then went to another cafe for tea and cake. I tried to think of ways to steer the conversation, but I still couldn't do it.

I would have to do it on the station platform, I decided. On the station platform, as they were waiting for their train. I brought up the topic of my clothes again. My mother said my hair looks nice in a plait. My father said nothing at all, of course. She was worried my clothes were too feminine, but I don't know if she noticed they were all women's clothes. I wanted to say: "there's a reason for it." I couldn't.

When they got on the train, I waved at them through the window, thinking: why couldn't I do it? It's something I have to tell them sooner or later. I can't keep putting it off. It was raining as I walked home, so nobody could see I was sobbing slightly.

Tonight, they will phone me; when they get back home. I am trying to prime myself up to say: "there's something I wanted to tell you." I'm really going to try this time.

20:09 Comments (6)

November 1st, 2002. Coming out; coming clean

This is where I explain what I said on Wednesday.

I don't really talk about myself much here. I talk about what I do, but I don't talk about myself. I worry, though, that when you all find out more about me, you'll think I'm trying to mislead you in some way. That's why I want to explain everything. Also, after I do, I'll be able to post more openly about myself, and especially post about what happens with The Parents this weekend. Yeah, I know, self-interest.

Some of you already know all the stuff about me that I'm going to say. Some of you, also, might have guessed about all this from the hint on the About page, or from the fact that there are no pictures of me on the Pictures page, only a drawing.

The truth is: I am, I believe, transsexual. I have a male body and XY chromosomes. In my mind, I feel I should be female.

For years I repressed this. When I was little, and prayed every night, I would pray that the next morning when I woke I would be a girl. When I grew up, I pretended to myself that it was something I could keep locked inside me. Over the past 18 months, I've realised that I can't, and by the time I started writing this website I realised that ... well ... there is a way forward.

I'm shy, though. I'm still waiting to see an NHS doctor. I'm too embarrassed to go outside much in public dressed as ... well, as myself. There are things I need to learn. Despite all this, though, I'm sure of who I am, and I'm sure I'm not meant to be male.

So, The Parents are going to visit tomorrow. And, if the time feels right, I want to tell them that I want to be their daughter.

I hope none of you mind me saying all this. I owe you all some honesty.

love,
xx,
caitlin.

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